What does the metaverse mean for brands?
When Meta rebranded from Facebook in October 2021, it sparked one of the most polarising debates in brand strategy: should businesses stake their future on virtual worlds?
By 2026, we have a clearer answer — and it's more nuanced than either the early hype or the subsequent backlash suggested. Meta's Reality Labs division lost over $60 billion between 2021 and 2025. The fully-immersive shared metaverse hasn't arrived as a single destination. But the underlying shift — brands needing coherent identities across digital and interactive spaces — is more relevant than ever.
We've been watching this play out with clients across law, finance, and property. The brands asking 'should we be in the metaverse?' were often asking the wrong question. The right question is: is our brand identity strong enough to translate consistently across every space where our audience encounters us — including gaming platforms, AR activations, and virtual events?
What is the Metaverse — and what's actually happened to it?
Put as simplistically as possible, the metaverse is a simulated digital environment which uses a combination of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), blockchain and social media style concepts to create a virtual space for user interaction that imitates the real world.
The original vision was that consumers would visit brand virtual stores, try on virtual outfits, and carry purchases into a shared virtual world through VR headsets. That version hasn't fully materialised as promised.
What has materialised is significant: over 3 billion people now play video games globally (Newzoo, 2025), and brand activations inside gaming environments have become a mainstream marketing channel. Roblox hosts over 85 million daily active users. The Fortnite platform has hosted concerts by Travis Scott (27 million simultaneous viewers). These aren't novelty experiments — they're where audiences spend real time.
The Animal Crossing and H&M collaboration was an early proof of concept. Nintendo and H&M teamed up with Game of Thrones star Maisie Smith to launch a clothes recycling island in the Animal Crossing virtual world, blurring the lines between virtual play and real-world sustainability. In the years since, the model has matured considerably.
Okay, but how will this affect my brand?
The truth is, the metaverse is going to affect every brand because the metaverse is going to become an innovation curve which brands either need to adopt to, or get left behind by.
Think back a decade ago to the rise of social media marketing. Despite clear popularity and rapid consumer adoption to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram happening, some brands still thought that advertising or existing on the spaces was a gimmick and wasted marketing budget.
Today, we know differently. Some brands owe their entire popularity to the start they made on Instagram. Hugely popular makeup brand Glossier is just one of these, as is nation's favourite Joe Wicks who grew his Body Coach brand by initially posting quick 15 minute recipes on Instagram every day.
The same pattern is unfolding with digital-immersive spaces. Not every brand needs a Fortnite activation. But every brand needs to ask whether its identity is robust enough to show up consistently wherever its audience is — including spaces that didn't exist five years ago.
How does adapting to a virtual reality benefit brands?
The obvious benefit is consumer retainment, willing to innovate, and an obvious show of agility in order to adapt to the latest digital and technological advancements - all things the modern consumer seeks out in an ever-changing world.
But on a deeper branding level, there are huge benefits to businesses embracing their own metaverse identity. Here are just three.
Gives the brand a deeper human persona
Though the metaverse may be mostly made up of pixels and blockchain technology, it's wise to suspend all that and consider it a fully functioning universe. And what that means is that a brand who can exist in that fully functioning universe has more flexibility and freedom to be able to connect with its consumers.
Just like how brands can engage consumers and show off their human side on social media, the metaverse will give them the exact same opportunity to do so — but this time in 3D.
Brands may be able to engage in popular days, like Earth Day, or even National Dog Day, all by incorporating elements of those days into their virtual reality. Or, if their brand values are focused around something specific — for example, sustainability — the brand may be able to create a virtual experience which reflects these values and explains why the brand gives these attributes such credence.
This extra level of humanisation fosters deeper connection between brand and consumer, and could be the key to customer retainment in vibrant virtual worlds. Consumers will be offered a unique chance to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with their favourite brands in their virtual spaces.
The lesson is simple: the digital-immersive space amplifies whatever identity a brand already has. Brands with clear personality translate naturally into new formats. Brands that are vague in the physical world become even more forgettable in virtual ones.
Allows it to exist outside a physical world
Existing in a digital world has always made a brand more accessible and reachable for wider audiences. The metaverse is no different, and this time brings an entire brand experience live to consumers in the comfort of their own preferred spaces.
It's entirely plausible that in the metaverse, your consumers will be able to walk into your virtual store and not only interact with your virtual shop employees, but also have an entirely unique virtual brand experience.
Take a business like Bizspace, who we've been lucky enough to work with. Bizspace sells office space to businesses, ensuring those commercial spaces are vibrantly decorated, innovative, and adaptable. For a business like Bizspace, a virtual tour experience lets potential business owners explore available offices remotely — something which they might otherwise be unable to find time to do physically. The virtual element extends the brand rather than replacing it.
By having a plethora of touchpoints, from the physical, to the social, to the virtual, a brand can spread its brand identity far and wide and trigger brand awareness across as many potential customers as possible. This flexibility could also prove crucial when going up against competitors, especially if a main competitor fails to adopt a necessary space.
Creates immersive experiences for audiences
A brand is not just its branding, or its products: It's also its experience, and this is something which is commonly overlooked.
When you really think about it, every market is saturated, but it's a brand's experience which covets customers. Customers who have a positive brand experience, or an experience that aligns with their needs or subconscious values are more likely to buy from that brand over an identical competitor.
In the metaverse, the brand experience is intensified and there's already a real life example of this happening. Epic Games, the company behind video game megalith Fortnite recently introduced concerts into the Fortnite-universe. Players can stop battling and instead experience a virtual concert held by their favourite artists. This immersive experience not only excites an artist's existing customers, but it also attracts new ones and nurtures brand awareness by the user having heard said artist in their favourite video game.
Brands who get their metaverse immersive experiences right could take huge swathes of the market, just by providing memorable experiences to their consumers.
How can brands prepare for the metaverse?
We've told you that it's coming, and we've told you what's good about it. But what's the good of that if you don't know how to prepare your own brand, right?
Here are four practical approaches for brands in 2026.
Think about metaverse marketing
The metaverse will blur the lines between traditional marketing, digital marketing, and virtual marketing. If we take the example of H&M earlier, its recycling island subconsciously markets its sustainability promise to customers, which they then buy into and which could influence their real-life shopping behaviours.
In the digital era, your brand should align with an experience that is relevant to your mission in order to make your products and services more desirable and meaningful. You'll need to connect all threads of your marketing to make sure you're presenting one cohesive message across all of your platforms.
For most B2B professional services firms, the immediate opportunity isn't Roblox — it's brand consistency across LinkedIn, virtual events, webinars, and interactive digital content. The disciplines are the same; the platforms differ.
Get specific about audience targeting
In case you hadn't noticed yet, the metaverse is going to blur a lot of lines. From virtual and reality, from traditional and digital marketing, and now even to consumer targeting.
And why? Because the metaverse will serve as a place to both work and play. Consumers might be able to buy your product or service, and then two minutes later catch up with their friends. Or their friends might take them to your virtual product or service, and just like that, you've acquired a new customer.
What that means for traditional audience targeting is that B2B and B2C aren't going to become so disparate anymore. Your audience targeting will need to talk, on some level, to everyone.
Aiming too closely to B2B will tip too heavily in the favour of work and ruin the fun, turning away B2C customers, and likewise, going too heavily on fun may turn away more serious B2B prospects. It's time to strike a balance that allows your brand messaging to still target who you need it to, but that doesn't end up talking to one group over the other.
The metaverse will mean you need to dig deep into audience targeting, and that means spending particular focus on learning and knowing your demographics and user personas, before positioning your brand accordingly.
Know when to enter
Before entering the metaverse you'll need to work with a creative agency to develop a view on exactly when your brand should enter and how. Just like anything, the metaverse works in trends and entering either ahead of the curve or too far behind the curve could have consequences in terms of brand awareness.
As a general rule of thumb brands should always be in a test and learn stage, and this is no different. Ask an agency to put tests in place so that you can determine exactly when you should comfortably, and correctly, expose your brand to the metaverse.
Take Coca-Cola's "The Coke Side of Life" campaign for inspiration. The advert took advantage of the virtual worlds of video game, Second Life, by launching a competition to create a virtual Coke machine which would then be available in the game. The advert ended up being so successful that it even spawned its own documentary.
What experience has shown by 2026 is this: the brands that entered digital-immersive spaces successfully weren't necessarily first. They were ready. Their brand identity was defined clearly enough that it could extend into new formats without losing coherence. That readiness starts with brand strategy — not tech investment.
Get your balance right
Any new space is unpredictable, so it's important to handle the metaverse as carefully as any other new platform and be aware that it could be both unpredictable and lacking in conventional guidelines. The good news is that the 2020 pandemic made brands and consumers far more agile than ever before, which means there's greater scope for a brand to be flexible with how it positions itself, who it targets, and how its messaging comes through.
Remember that at its core, the metaverse prioritises people over brands, which means the way you market your product or service, and your brand itself must adapt in this space. It's a place characterised by playfulness, collaboration, user generated content, and value creation — which also means greater freedom to be creative with your visual identity.
Ensure that your brand identity is still coherent and cohesive across all your platforms. If your brand communicates and looks one way in the metaverse, and communicates and looks a completely different way online, you'll risk damaging your brand equity. Make sure that you keep the balance between being agile, but remaining authentic and genuine at your heart so that consumers from all platforms and locations know who you are, no matter where you appear.
How you present and position yourself across digital and immersive spaces matters — even if you're not in them yet. Start with your brand foundations. Our Blandscape™ audit scores your brand across ten dimensions and gives you a clear picture of where your identity holds up and where it doesn't.