Snoop Dogg Sells $200K+ in Virtual Items, Demonstrating Value of Branded Goods

Thanks to virtual goods, Snoop Dogg can throw an extra pool party or two: Since 2008, he’s been offering a line of Snoop-branded avatar clothing, pets, and virtual gifts on virtual worlds like WeeWorld, Gaia Online, and Zwinky. And while each of those items typically cost consumers mere pocket change, to date Snoop Dogg branded virtual items have grossed over $200,000 in sales. That’s according to a new branded virtual goods market report from Viximo and Virtual Greats (the company which collaborated with the hip hop star on moving his virtual merch.) As Snoop’s success suggests, associating a real world brand with virtual goods often equals much more sales:

Sales rates for the Snoop Dogg branded items, the report notes, were 2.5 times higher than the highest selling non-branded item of a similar price and category. On WeeMee, sales for virtual pets dubbed “Snoop Double Doggs” were five times higher than those for non-branded pets, even though they didn’t come with any special qualities besides their association with the king of fo shizzle.

This report should particularly interest developers of social games, who’ve only recently started experimenting with real world branded virtual goods, like FarmVille’s Cascadian organic products. As the report notes, 95% of social game/virtual world users don’t buy any virtual goods, on average. Associating these items with recognizable real world personalities and brands can increase the chance more consumers will get out their wallets.

However, the report also finds that consumers are more likely to buy branded goods in synchronous virtual worlds: “This is due to the fact that the rich environments, structured game rules, and moveable avatars of virtual worlds and MMOs provide a more compelling buying experience than the static profile pages of social networks.” For instance, when a Los Angeles Lakers-branded jersey was sold on a social network and a virtual world, it sold 10 times more in the world.

In the future, the report argues virtual items will be increasingly linked to real world locations via mobile/GPS applications like Foursquare and Gowalla, and that we’ll see more major brands following the lead of Disney and Nike into this space. (This fits with Piper Jaffray’s forecast that virtual goods will be a $7.9 billion market by 2015.) As competition increases, however, branded virtual goods will need to evolve from being mere vanity decorations, and add extra game value to players who buy them. When players bought Nike-branded sneakers in Gaia Online, they not only looked special, but helped their avatars run faster. Maybe future iterations of Snoop Double Doggs will help you keep punks off your virtual lawn.

Disclosure: Virtual Greats was a spinoff company of Millions of Us, a former business/advertising partner of my virtual world blog.

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