Build Your Own Brand Identity in the Metaverse

A brand needs to be unique rather than to be the same, to be cool rather than to be the boring. That means a strong brand identity needs to be built with it and visions and strategies must be complied with it.

Brand identity is how a brand portrays itself to the customers. It is the set of all the branding activities a company indulges in order to be perceived in a particular way to the target audience

Brand identity is how a brand identifies itself.

Apple try to be different and creative with their famous slogan “Think Different” and they do believe “people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”, Google intend to be innovative with YouTube, Gmail and so many products made in that way, Microsoft still under the way to make them look younger with their famous Windows system came to the 11th generation.

All the brands in the world are moving toward being unique and cool. But the reality is we may not see the trend of emerging cool brands like Apple, Tesla, or Starbucks, as we do see a trend of being the same from the Web2 tech companies-they are appearing to be all the same without a unique style to tell.

As Notion’s producer, Molly Mielke wrote in an article said, “From the sans-serif fonts to the muted pastel color palette, the stark white backgrounds to the curvy shape and hue of the buttons, most modern software blurs together into a familiar, squint-and-you’ll-confuse-it aesthetic.”

But style does matter. As technology keeps innovating, we do see a brand interpret more than just a product/service behind it, it goes far more than that. A brand with a unique style conveys the company’s culture, personality, or the soul of the people who worked in that company.

And how about the people who worked in that company or all of us soon to be in the metaverse?

Companies like Facebook (renamed as Meta) and Microsoft have set their foot on the metaverse, the Next Big Thing that has gained all attention in the world even though some of the critics thought it’s just one of the tech bubbles that we have seen in the past decades and could soon burst. However, nobody can escape from the trending metaverse.

As web2 tech-company will continue to build a brand identity even though it looks all the same. The answer to the question “Do you need to build your own brand identity”? is absolutely “YES”. But what kind of identity should one build in the metaverse? With a unique style to show a person’s identity, manner, or soul.

Maybe the trend of recent NFT avatars in the crypto world can give us a hint about that.

Steph Curry, the NBA star bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for $180,000 USD Worth of ETH, while the Tonight Show host, Jimmy Fallon revealed his purchase: Bored Ape #599. It was purchased for about $224,000 worth of ETH in early November this year.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection has an increasing number of celebrity owners from across the entertainment and sports worlds. And it has surpassed the popularity of another well-known NFT item-CryptoPunks.

Every NFT has a unique identifying address that is stored in a holder’s wallet. This identifying address allows users to prove that they have sole ownership of an NFT. What’s more does a NFT can do is it represent anything that is digital, and work is being done for NFTs to verify ownership of real-world items.

What’s better a NFT avatar can do is its unique style/rarity and the personality that can be owned/shown by it.

You may consider these NFT holders as a social group of people who have a unique style of avatar to show in their NFT world. Together with more open standards that support interoperability between different virtual worlds will speed up this process. It’s like with one avatar you can come across a different virtual world or metaverse.

And for the people with the NFT avatars, it means you gained your brand identity in the metaverse.

But we need more than a NFT avatar to build our own brand identity in the metaverse. It shows your style, manner, or soul, a unique thing that has been lost in the web2 tech world, but we still do need something like the value, principle, and integrations to be in a social group while each of us are treated equal.

Maybe together with DAO and NFT avatar and the web3 wallet can build you a strong brand identity.

What Elon Musk mocked recently on his twitter about “Web3 people” tend to ask anyone they meet to join their DAO group, a decentralized autonomous organization.

This actually has revealed a certain way about an organization that is not controlled by a single institution like a company or central bank, but instead is divided among a variety of computers, networks, and nodes.

That should be mocked about the people who are using the DAO or crypto as a concept to attract people for some kind of investment rather than creating a real DAO that focuses on showing people’s unique brand identity and coming together for a better world or metaverse.

There’s still a long journey to build a personal brand identity in the crypto/metaverse world. With the trend of NFT avatar and the popularity of DAO, together with universal values and principles, we can find a way to build the personal brand identity which is valuable and unique in the metaverse.