Abstract
The metaverse has been heralded as a next frontier for fuelling strategic business opportunities. At the same time, recent months have witnessed explosive volatility in the market potential of proposed metaverse offerings. As a result, businesses are struggling to set a meaningful strategic course through an unchartered landscape of fast-paced change. We argue that the success of developing and scaling the metaverse as a vibrant new business ecosystem is largely dependent on the understanding that it is a unified and immersive reality where the physical and synthetic customer experiences seamlessly converge. In turn, crucial to this understanding is the notion that businesses and their customers need to be able to suspend their disbelief that synthetic elements are inherently false. We, thus, advance the metaverse as a differentiated experience by exploring the promise and perils of falsity. We discuss how businesses can strategically embrace falsity by harnessing its intended, as well as mitigating unintended, consequences, while manoeuvring through major technological challenges in capturing customer value. We offer a diverse set of examples that illustrate how these strategies translate into managerial actions to competitively succeed in this new reality.
| Original language | English |
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| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | BUSINESS HORIZONS |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 7 Jun 2022 |