2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

LEVERAGING NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR MARKETING EDUCATION: STRATEGIES
FOR USING VIRTUAL WORLDS FOR REAL-LIFE EDUCATION
Wendy Bryce Wilhelm, Western Washington University, College of Business and Economics,
Bellingham, WA 98225; wendy.wilhelm@wwu.edu
OVERVIEW
Online 3D virtual worlds provide new ways to create,
socialize, and collaborate, as well as new ways to
teach and learn online. Second Life is a virtual world
and developing economy that has its own currency,
residents, businesses, media, and educational
institutions. Created in 2003 by Linden Labs, it has
grown rapidly to as many as 6.7 million or more
unique residents. Many real-world companies (e.g.,
Toyota, Reebok) and universities (e.g., Harvard,
INSEAD) have established a presence in SL. The
purpose of this presentation is to provide marketing
educators with a better understanding of what virtual
worlds like Second Life are and how marketing
educators can use them as a platform for business
simulations, new media studies, and student/faculty
collaboration.
RELEVANCE TO MARKETING EDUCATION
Many mainstream real-world marketers and IMC
agencies have a presence in SL, engaging in
traditional marketing activities such as test marketing
new products prior to introducing them real-world
(Starwood hotels), advertising (on SL television
networks or newspapers), holding events to generate
product buzz (Sears), and even introducing new
products on SL prior to their real-world release. The
Electric Sheep Company, a content development firm
that builds SL homes, resorts, malls, etc., recently
sponsored a business-plan contest whose winner
was a plan for an SL marketing research company
that would help real-world companies decide whether
to invest in an in-world presence.
Virtual worlds such as Second Life offer unique
qualities for educators: immersion, shared presence,
and shared experience. They are engaging for the
Net Gen students who have grown up online and with
video games and are accustomed to interacting via
avatars in online 3D immersive environments. Net
Gen students have become accustomed to, and will
expect to be involved in, the creation of their own
media content, thanks to the Web 2.0 revolution.
ABSTRACT
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While many universities have established virtual
campuses in SL, very few business schools or
marketing courses currently have an in-world
location. As might be expected, disciplines such as
computer science, engineering, and internet/new
media studies dominate SL.
SL provides a unique and flexible platform for
marketing educators because students can move out
into the world-at-large and engage in authentic
projects in contexts that have relevance for them.
For example, in SL students can:
• build a retail space where they can design and
sell clothes, furniture, real estate;
• learn how to organize and run events;
• design and test market new products/services;
• do social and ethnographic research with any of
the communities and subcultures within the
virtual world;
• study a new language and culture in an environ-
ment that reflects the culture, interacting with
native speakers; and
• create integrated marketing communications
(IMC) plans using in-world media, including SEM,
billboards, television, and blogs.
CHALLENGES
Challenges associated with incorporating SL into
marketing pedagogy include: high-end technical
requirements, cost, accessibility issues, steep
learning curves, closed proprietary systems, legal
grey areas (e.g., intellectual property, virtual
economies, avatar rights), and student validation and
control (virtual worlds have a reputation for being
addictive).
Assuming these challenges can be overcome, now is
the time for marketing educators to be “pioneers,” to
actively incorporate virtual worlds into marketing
pedagogy. Marketing practitioners are rapidly moving
into this space, and to remain competitive, our
marketing students need to learn how to apply their
real-world skills in a virtual world such as Second
Life.