Customer Experience in the Magic World of Metaverse: Conceptual Framework of Customer Adoption of Metaverse

Technological disruptions like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, etc. pave the way for a deeply immersive hyperconnected customer-brand interaction platform, Metaverse. Metaverse attracts enormous interest and investments from global tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. McKinsey & Company projects the economic value of metaverse to reach USD 5 trillion by 2030. Leading researchers have provided broad research agendas for marketing research in academia; customer experience, customer engagement, and customer-brand interactions are critical aspects of the academic discussion. This research presents a customer adoption framework by integrating the facets of technology adoption, customer experience, customer engagement, and customer-related moderators. This research will streamline the academic conversation of metaverse marketing by presenting relationships among the expected motivational and inhibiting factors, customer experience and engagement factors, and the response factors from the customer adoption perspective. The framework will provide precise research directions for academia to extend the academic conversation of metaverse from conceptual to empirical research. Future researchers from academia and industry can utilize the framework for developing research models to study customer adoption of a metaverse in various domains like gaming, entertainment, retail, healthcare, education, etc.