Enter the Chinese metaverse: Marketing in the virtual world

Jenny Chan

2021 was widely dubbed the “First Year of Metaverse” in China with more than 500 companies naming themselves after the metaverse, according to Chinese company registry data.

The metaverse concept is not new.

It's a concept that was established a long time ago, a promise of a fully integrated community where physical and digital worlds are combined into a new reality. The ‘metaverse’ term itself was first coined in the book “Snow Crash” in 1992 by author Neal Stephenson. Consider the internet in the late 90s when the introduction of Flash opened up a more robust user experience, enabling websites to be much more interactive with elliptical avatars created with isometric pixels.

Since then, all the aspects of a ‘metaverse’ have been evolving globally, and within China....

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