Virtual marketing failures: Apathy or hubris?

Marketing in virtual worlds, particularly the collaborative virtual environments like Second Life, have been widely considered to have been failures among marketers -- particularly among those marketers who actually attempted it.

Meanwhile, on the education side of things, Ignatius Onomatopoeia has done exactly those things that seem to have escaped almost every Second Life marketing strategy we've seen. Faced with a lack of direction and engagement in his students in the virtual environment, he tested, trialled, adapted and used what actually worked.

Right now, you're probably thinking "Well, thanks a lot, Captain Obvious," and you'd be right. Because it is really, really obvious. It is also something that not many of these marketers actually tried. In fact, they all had a few things in common in their virtual marketing efforts.

Virtually every campaign and marketing department to deploy in Second Life did all four of these things. Most managed at least three:

1. They failed to understand their market. In many cases, they didn't even check to see if their target demographic was actually even present.

2. They showed no understanding of the platform. Campaigns often involved weaknesses of the platform, rather than strengths.

3. Little or no idea about what result was to be achieved, and how to measure it.

4. Instead of any attempt to adapt the campaign or run a modified follow-up campaign to improve results, the projects were abandoned.

Each one of these things alone can cause a marketing strategy to fail in the atomic world, so why commit all four at once in the virtual environment?

We can only pin it down to either apathy, or hubris.

Either the marketers were so confident in their success that they failed to follow the basics that they learned in college, or they simply didn't bother. There are successes. Coca-Cola comes immediately to mind. They're working on a followup campaign, after the success of their first effort.

While educators like Ignatius Onomatopoeia are doing all of these things to develop and expand learning outcomes for students, marketers behave as if they're throwing bags of marketing money at a brick wall, then slinking disconsolately away when not enough of it sticks, and then blaming the wall for being insufficiently sticky. It's unsubtle, unskilled, and ultimately it is unsuccessful.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.