Next Generation Rewards – Metaverse

Building exclusivity into community based strategies remains key to engage luxury consumers. Meeting young luxurians in the metaverse, with digital-first experiences and rewards, is an opportunity for brands to leverage social capital and connect with new-gen collectors.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 25% of consumers will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse. It is imperative retailers meet consumers in the new virtual playground, yet embedding exclusivity into the democratic world of Web3 will be a challenge for luxury brands. Metaverse leaders are finding creative ways of connecting with their online community while creating prestige experiences that reinstate luxury status.

Drop culture meets the metaverse in adidas and Prada’s third collaborative project, re:source, which sees the brands come together to leverage the creativity of their collective communities. The NFT project was realised by inviting 3,000 online fans to contribute to a creator-owned artwork, in collaboration with digital artist Zach Lieberman. Contributors were selected from adidas’s database of NFT collectors, based on its previous collab with Bored Ape Yacht Club. Each contributor created their own digital artwork to be fed into Lieberman’s final piece, which was minted as an NFT. This one-off piece is now available for auction via the Superrare platform. The project taps into a micro-community of online fans, navigating the decentralised discourse of the metaverse while embedding exclusivity into the process.