SHIFTing brand experiences of NGOs brands in the Metaverse

The United Nations (UN) Food Agriculture Organization outlines that almost 31% of the food produced is lost or wasted. 14% of the food is lost between production and distribution, while 17% is wasted at the consumer point level(United Nations, 2022). Goal 12 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sets as its main objective to reduce loss and waste by half by 2030. Food waste is a complex problem because of a significant discrepancy between attitudes and behaviors (Brennan et al., 2021). As for numerous environmental themes, avoiding food waste is associated with supportive attitudes by consumers because of the negative impact on both the environment and personal finance. However, sustainable behaviors do not follow because radical changes are required in planning, consuming, and disposing of food (Auger & Devinney, 2007; Young et al., 2010). This discrepancy poses a major challenge for Non-Profit Organizations’ (NPOs) and Social Enterprises’ (SEs) brands employing strategies aimed at reducing food waste. NPOs and SEs brands must maximize the efficacy of their communication efforts in order to maximize their brand experiences. Brand experience is defined as “sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments” (Brakus et al., 2009 pp. 52). A successful brand experience in this instance can correspond to the maximization of sustainable behaviors for the reduction of food waste. Many NPOs and SEs brands employ social media to improve the efficacy of their brand experience. Social media have a favorable impact on awareness of social campaign themes (Chung, 2016; Jenkins et al., 2022; Smolak Lozano et al., 2020). Consumers are particularly sensitive to appealing storytelling with the use of testimonials (Smolak Lozano et al., 2020) and organizational competence, but they appear to be less interested in the legal status of the organization and its accountability (Zhou & Ye, 2019). Some authors show skepticism about the capability of social media in changing social behavior (Thaler & Helmig, 2013; Young et al., 2017), nevertheless, there is a major consensus in the literature that social media play a favorable role in reaching meaningful brand experiences (Freeman et al., 2015), particularly when influencing recipients that use social media regularly. Social media can improve in terms of behavioral change but cannot be the only tool in a complex brand experience strategy (Jenkins et al., 2022). The application of Metaverse for brand strategies received significant interest in recent literature in different fields, for example, education (Chen, 2022), hospitality and tourism (Gursoy et al., 2022), retailing experience (Chen et al., 2022), health and beauty (J. Lee & Kwon, 2022), but no paper has been published at the time of writing for NPOs and SEs brands in relation to strategies in the Metaverse. As a result, this research explores how NGOs and SEs brands can benefit from using the Metaverse to create meaningful brand experiences aimed at reducing food waste. Food loss is excluded from this research because it primarily concerns corporate organizational issues. Brand strategies will only include Virtual Reality (VR) experiences in the Metaverse. VR can be defined as a “near-reality” experience for the campaign receivers through a computer-generated virtual environment (Bojic, 2022).