Brand storytelling, gamification and social media marketing in the “Metaverse”: A case study of The Ralph Lauren Winter Escape

Abstract

Since Facebook’s rebrand to “Meta” in 2021, and the rise on collaborations between brands and consumers via User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms, brands are willing to win their own space in the “metaverse”. This brings new challenges for fashion brands as social media marketers need to up their game and learn new skills such as world-building, collaboration and how to design playful experiences. This chapter provides an overview of the current debates about challenges in social media marketing in different UGC and social media platforms, through the lens of brand storytelling and media convergence. We start this chapter by reviewing the literature about brand storytelling and online communities, in order to identify storytelling elements that can be used by fashion brands across different types of social media. As a result, we have developed a conceptual framework to understand how fashion brands can sustain a coherent story across different channels (including the metaverse). We have utilised this framework to undertake an analysis of The Ralph Lauren Winter Escape, which was hosted in the UGC platform Roblox, from 8th December 2021 to 3rd January 2022. Our findings show that the overarching story is sustained by the festive thematic and it is brand-centred; however, there was little connection with other social media platforms. Other insights show that rewarding mechanisms (e.g., gamification) and avatar customisation were used frequently to keep consumers engaged in the experience. Implications for both practice and theory are discussed, including the need for a more effective alignment of gamification strategies with emergent consumer narratives and the rules of the online community.

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ORCID for Vanissa Wanick: orcid.org/0000-0002-6367-1202

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