Virtual online worlds - Enabling technologies to establish interwoven relationships to network constituents in an emerging virtual marketspace (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1st, University of Lincoln (Faculty of Business & Law), course: International Marketing Strategy, language: English, abstract: Purpose
This dissertation analyses whether Second Life, as an emerging interactive
online environment, provides marketers with the scope to establish
interwoven relationships to network constituents, and highlights the
importance and benefits arising from enabling technologies to business
marketing operations.

Design / Methodology / Approach
The correlation to previous work was critically addressed with a focal point
set on relationship, and e-marketing approaches and strategies, whilst
highlighting the potential of an utilisation of virtual worlds / communities.
The methodological approach was of an inductive philosophy by
gathering information about Second Life from a corporate and an
individual point of view. This took the form of a self-administered Internetmediated questionnaire, a semi-structured telephone interview and a
participant observation.

Findings
Through a conceptual analysis of the virtual community of Second Life in
terms of exploring reasons for participation and benefits received from an
immersion into Second Life, the research study indicated that corporate
involvement in this innovative environment can offer marketers with
opportunities to establish relationships to existing and potential network
constituents.

Research Limitations / Implications
This marketing research study identified limitations due to its topical nature,
as the number of research publications is limited with regards to the
momentum of Second Life's innovative virtual 3-D environment and hence,
research in this arena is only just emerging and has not been empirically
tested. The evolving virtual world environment along with the possible
necessity for marketers to both establish a presence and demonstrate
innovative marketing approaches to capture a tech-savvy audience,
identify the implications for this dissertation.