Editorial: Is South Asia ready for the next universe – metaverse? Arguments and suggestions for further research

Citation

Rana, S., Udunuwara, M., Dewasiri, N.J., Kashif, M. and Rathnasiri, M.S.H. (2022), "Editorial: Is South Asia ready for the next universe – metaverse? Arguments and suggestions for further research", South Asian Journal of Marketing, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 77-81. https://doi.org/10.1108/SAJM-10-2022-141

A transformation indicates a complete cultural change regarding delivering value to the customers and stakeholders (Tabrizi et al., 2019). We are in a dynamic world where businesses and consumers change almost daily. Organizations, irrespective of the size and sector, embrace these transformations via infrastructure development, adopting suitable strategies and trying their best to capitalize upon these moves. One of the most significant transformations in the last two decades is digitalization. Many organizations have transformed themselves through digital, phygital or physical ways of doing business. Not only this, but digital transformation has also brought many opportunities and challenges to both business scholars and practitioners. Digital transformation can be explained as digitalization or innovation applied over time to significantly change business operations in organizations or an entire industry (Osmundsen et al., 2018). Many scholarly discussions are directed toward digital transformation (Reis et al., 2018; Tabrizi et al., 2019; Vial, 2021; Westerman et al., 2014). The importance placed on the digital adoption for successful customer experience is a considerable discussion in the recent literature (Kumbhojkar and Menon, 2022; Schoeman et al., 2021; Sahu et al., 2018). The scholarly world believes that the Internet is one of the galaxies of many galaxies and has limitations in serving human expectations. Many transformations from OTT, education, transportation, telecom, advertising, retailing and renting have brought forward a welcoming response from South Asian businesses and consumers. These two decades (2000–2020) brought a progressive picture of South Asia. At the same time, there have been a lot of controversial debates and challenges in handling the informal economy, underprivileged population and low-income segments in the region.

We like to raise the following question through this editorial: are South Asian firms and consumers ready for this next move? What do we need to have or think about before we are a part of the next universe – metaverse? What lessons have we learned in the last two decades from the digital transformation experience, and how can we have inclusive growth together?

We want to motivate marketing scholars to reflect upon some of these questions.

Some lessons from digital transformation

Digital transformation has redefined customer experience delivery, particularly in the service domain (Shrivastava, 2017). Today's environment settings, such as tech-savvy customers, wide/convenient access to digital technologies and globalization, have resulted in digital transformation. It is embraced as a necessity than an option. In addition to digital natives such as Amazon, Facebook, Uber or Air BnB, other service organizations have also incorporated information technology (IT) solutions and transformed how the service experience is provided. The technologies such as analytics are implemented to understand customer needs better and customize marketing campaigns or numerous other stimuli to capture the customer and retain them for a lifetime.

Successful implementation of digital transformation is extensively discussed (Vial, 2021; Matt et al., 2015). Digital business transformation is seen as a set of seven elements: business model, organizational structure, digital skills of employees, digitization of business processes, IT infrastructure, digitization of products/services and digital channels for interaction with clients (Kane et al., 2015). Importantly, Tabrizi et al. (2019) point to numerous factors beyond the technology for the success of digital transformation, particularly organizational culture and process and leadership, along with a broad business strategy.

Are we ready? The issues we faced during digital transformation

The generalizability of digital implementations in an organization can be context-specific. For example, it can be on the industry, the customer, the company or even the country. Alongside the positive connotations of digital technologies, not all customers embrace digital services. Digital proficiency determines the target audience for digital services, the extent of offering services digitally and the level of awareness and training required for both employees and customers. There are four types of digital generations – digitally disengaged, digitally holdouts, digitally voyeurs, digital immigrants and digital natives. Digitally disengaged are those who avoid digital engagement despite their awareness, whereas digital holdouts resist digital change and tend to ignore the impacts of digital adaptation. Digital voyeurs are aware of the digital shift but are not ready to be active. Digital immigrants are forced into digital engagements due to their interests, and digital natives are comfortable using digital technology (Shrivastava, 2017). Thus, obtaining value and delivering value through digital transformation is a customer-specific decision that needs to be engaged by the service organizations. It may be determined mainly by the customer experience provided at each touch point, considering the customer's digital proficiency. For example, a study conducted by Niraula and Kautish (2019) in Nepal's insurance sector revealed that the information and communications technology (ICT) adoption in Nepal's insurance sector is significantly low. The obstacles are found as rules and regulations of the regulatory bodies, rigid organizational charts, security reservations, product complexity and specific customer interest in adoption. A recent study conducted in the Sri Lankan finance sector on the usage of mobile banking applications revealed low adoption of mobile banking applications; more than the customer-side factors, the organization-side factors have contributed to less user adoption. For example, the study revealed banks had not taken the initiative to educate the customer on mobile banking applications and the benefits of shifting to tech-based services and communicated privacy concerns of the customer not communicated (Piumali, 2020). As evident from this study, other than the customer inclination for technology-based service adoption, the technology readiness created by the organizations on both customers and employees plays a vital role in harnessing the success of digital implementations. The hospitality industry is a dominant service sector harnessing robot technology for service delivery. A study by Wu et al. (2022) investigated human-prominent and robot-prominent service encounters in hotels. They found the requirement of an extra human touch when robots are programmed as the prominent service provider for interactive tasks. In contrast, human communication has no impact when robotics is programmed to deliver noninteractive service tasks.

It is important to note that interpersonal touch (vs impersonal technology) services would delight customers due to the employee's ability to provide an emotional, caring personalization beyond the technology's capability (Fan and Mattila, 2021). While some may debate the power of technological implementations such as robotics, its suitability in providing some services and its appeal in the South Asian region is essential to be researched.

However, we cannot deny that every transformation comes with its challenges and benefits. And so, it has been for the digital transformation. South Asian countries need a bit more deep diving because these countries are resource constraint. Most of the population is at Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP); hence, inclusive growth and managing aspirations are essential. The best part is service industries in the South Asian region are progressing along with the digitalization of other practices such as analytics, strategic execution, customer collaboration and capacity integration, which is also in the thoughts of business organizations in the South Asian region (Sahu et al., 2018).

Conclusively, South Asian businesses and consumers both have burned their hands on learning how they should build the business architecture to remain relevant and dynamic. Yet, it is essential for business practitioners and scholars not to forget the lessons learned during the first wave of transformation. Therefore, considering the facts and lessons, we recommend the following scope to the scholars working on South Asian contexts:

1. Solving definitional inconsistencies and puzzles

There is no generally accepted definition for a virtual world, with many complimentary terms and acronyms implying a virtual world (Nevelsteen, 2018). In general, metaverse is an intersection of augmented and virtual reality. Facebook changed its name to Meta in October 2021, announcing a new era of social networking enabled by metaverse technology. However, it must clarify whether the change is as radical as communicated or represents an incremental transformation of the current business model (Kraus et al., 2022). The potential impact on how we conduct business, interact with brands and others, and develop shared experiences is likely to be transformational as the distinct lines between physical and digital are likely to be somewhat blurred from current perceptions (Dwivedi et al., 2022).

1. Proposing new scales and revising existing scales

As in the new world of metaverse, consumers and businesses will face new experiences, investments and outcomes. Hence, the first need for marketing scholars is to develop scales specific to rebranding with metaverse, advertising in the metaverse, and scales that will measure the effects and performances of metaverse. These scales should be able to differentiate the metaverse and other business models. Over time, there will be a need to revise the scales related to service experiences, customer behavior, consumption patterns, marketing practices and indices, new policies will be required and a unique ecosystem will be required. One more exciting aspect is to look into the emotional elements and see to what extent the new universe will be able to replace and facilitate humans. Therefore, we motivate market area colleagues to focus on developing and revisiting scales for metaverse practices.

1. Some emerging themes for marketing scholars working on metaverse

The metaverse is expected to be the new marketing universe. It will expand quickly when development hits the massive layer of regional and local brands below the big global brands (Hollensen et al., 2022). A series of fundamental changes are expected to arrive in practicing metaverse. Therefore, the scope of exploring various issues related to marketing (consumer safety and security, scalability and business development of metaverse business models, sustainability, and consumer-centric metaverse architecture) is to make a human-centric metaverse (Wang et al., 2022). A call on “Advertising in metaverse” by Kim (2021) from the Journal of Interactive Marketing and the tensions highlighted by Golf-Papez et al. (2022) on creating a synthetic customer experience direct a set of relevant themes to be explored. Other than these, many different themes, such as metaverse retailing (Bourlakis et al., 2009), and service experiences will also be valuable for marketing scholars to explore.

Finally, we believe that this editorial will foster marketing colleagues to explore the new marketing universe and bring more value evaluations and additions. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to any editors related to this issue.