Brandname luxury goods in second life- would you pay for the 'real deal'

Dear all Second life users,
I am a university student who is carrying out a study for one of my modules and would appreciate your help. We are researching into possibly becoming an online shop on secondlife and selling real brand named items eg gucci bags, rolex watches, mercedes cars. We are getting in touch with these companies to see if we are able to get their support but in the mean time we need to know if YOU the users would be interested in this idea and would actually buy them if we could guarantee the official goods.
Any feedback would be great!!!

simple answer, nope

Name recognition is one thing. Product quality is another.

Products made for virtual worlds like SL are vastly different than an analogous Real Life product. An SL Gucci bag would have to have high quality textures and detailing, an attractive "holding" animation, or maybe two or three, and maybe other features scripted in software. Just the "Gucci" name is worth little in SL, unless the quality associated with the name is translated into the virtual product.

There are already makers of quality products specifically for SL...and their products have the same kind of name recognition that Gucci, Rolex, and Mercedes Benz have in the real world.

Real world companies will have to compete with these makers, and earn their reputation for upscale products all over again.

No. Anything I might want can be made just as well by a resident owned business, and pretty much has been already. I wouldn't set foot in a shop from a RL company in SL, much less spend any money there.

well couple things

unless you have somebody in class who is an expert builder i drought many companies will sell out there name to Joe Shmoo, they would want the same level of excellence there name means.
and most companys that have stuff that would be able to copyeasy have already cracked down on SL designers and getting them on the wagon would be a challange so your back to needing an expert builder

i have bought name brand shoes from the company that made them they did not have a sl builder working with them so they looked a little rough around the eadges and shorty after scrapped that plan

There have already been some real world 'names' in SL...so far though, they just don't seem to get it. Some of the car companies have done decently but, in terms of fashion, the attempts I've seen at creating a niche have been uniformly lame.

So, whether I'd be interested or not would really be dependent on the approach.

If the products are good people will buy them. However you have to bear in mind that the brands you list are not big brands within Second life. Big brands have tried and failed here, largely because they don't intergrate.

You're competing with established, known quality inworld brands who have a proven history of delivering the goods.

I'm assuming you're talking virtual goods, if you're talking RL goods that's a whole different kettle of fish and I don't think this platform is ready for anything that grandoise.

Real World Products & Brand names mean nothing in SL.

I think that most Real World products would start off at a disadvantage.

nope

nope

besides the point, most companies are clueless and brilliantly dumb
they think they can open a store and sell copies of their RL stuff that people don`t want to spend * time over priced over some one that does it for fun and drop the ball calling it a failure and that SL is dead

SL is more of an information platform, i`ve had some ideas how those companies could actually succeed in here with a totally different approach then just "open a shop and sell nothing" but would take 10 years of my life to build such a system with my knowladge lol

your also saying that YOU want to open a store and sell their products, so where exactly is this "guarantee the official goods" as you make it and not the brand company?

all vehicles are a joke in sl, they are fun to use but that`s it, take a mercedes out for a spin vs the RL version is comparing an 386 with imb`s super computers hooked together, there is no realism

Right: because of past failures, established residents would be extremely skeptical of anything with a RL brand name, so those goods would have to be priced less than "no-name" products. That is to say, a license to use such a brand has negative market value.

But that's among established residents. New folks? Difficult to tell, but generally newer residents are less willing to part with their L$s, so it's not exactly a premium market--and that could be its own problem: how happy will the PPR marketing department be when they learn that only newbies wear Gucci?

It depends.

If the brand-name product was given the same kind of attention that the same company would give real life products, was advertised effectively as having the same quality as that brand's real life products, translated into SL terms, perhaps contracting with the best creators IN SL, so that they were in fact "the real deal"... rather than a cardboard cutout of one... yes.

If they were simply giving official permission for someone to use their logo for a product that was otherwise unexceptional... no.

There is definitely room for something like this, but it would have to be something more than just having a brand name on a kids meal prize to get people's attention.

If a product was excellent quality and priced competitively I certainly would not hold the fact that it is a RL well known brand against buying one however once the RL branding is used to sell sub-par goods and/or used to hike the prices above simillar in world brands then my answer would be an emphatic...

Nope!

As an interesting note the OP refers to "luxury goods" and "the real deal", and those are not good indicators to me. That usually means that the RL brand thinks its works are superior just because they are famous IRL.
Here is a big hint to RL famous brands - All SL goods are luxury items. Some are just better quality than others. It is the quality and utility that sells, nothing else.

explain me this, what has an university has do with RL firms. Seems a bit odd, since those firms can do it themselfs, having full control on how they think they should market it in SL.
They have the money, the advertising guys/women, the connections.
An university simply does not, since it's not their department at all.
Besides, you are just a student.

I'm staying firm on the No side. I have no desire to see RL companies marketing to me in SL, they can't offer me anything a resident can't. They couldn't give me any of their stuff for free if they tried.

Zero Dollars.

If a RL brand comes to SL, they're clearly using SL as advertising, not as a way of delivering the "virtual products that people need and want".. at which point, such blatant advertising items should be freebies.

Otherwise, why should I use "Brand X" when I can use Brand Y for free?

SL items are created by SL users, for SL needs. Most RL branded items are cheapo knockoff items. An example is a Sony Vaio.

in RL, this is a big, established, name brand computer. High quality, it's a status symbol. In SL, the most it can be is a typing enhancement. A cutsely little floating laptop when soneone types. A Volkswagen, in RL is a reliable german made automobile, with big points on longevity and durability, with a rabid fan base. In SL, vehicles suck.. (and I'm a vehicle maker).. sim crossings are dangerous, and vehicles (for the most part) resemble cardboard cutouts of cars, taped to a skateboard.

If you can successfully dupe a RL brand into paying you to produce virtual version of their products.. good luck to you. But you're extremely unlikely to find anyone who really "wants" those products.

I'd rather buy my latex from the people inworld, who make it best, than from one of the realworld fetish brands.. just to have the label.

How would these items be better than the items currently available in Second Life?

I believe there was this official Versace store in SL, might've been another brand, but I thought it was Versace.
But in 3 words: it was crap.

It would've been nice if their SL stuff was as good as the real deal, but it sadly wasn't.
If some brand is serious about developing branded SL versions of whatever they make, then I'd advice them to simply explore SL for a while, find out who the leading SL creators are, and give them an offer they can't resist.
I'm pretty sure some RL brands would look into that option. But so far, we've mainly seen brands who didn't, which to me, makes such a RL brand look rather amateur.

The thing that companies need to understand is that unless they're really putting RL levels of effort into their SL releases... putting in even a fraction of the time and effort they'd put into even just a new year's release for an existing product... what they're creating in SL are "gimmies", like the free ballcaps and T-shirts that manufacturers give out at trade shows. And they have to sell for the same price... L$0.

Here's the companies I can think of, offhand, that have figured this out:

Sun Microsystems.
Nissan.

That's it.

That's why people have jaundiced views of big companies, and why I'm the odd-man-out here, because I'm wildly overoptimistic in thinking that it's possible that some RL corporation would actually decide to put that kind of effort into creating something that people would buy in SL.

In real life, I shop with businesses that have expertise, reputation, supply the best products, and reinvest profits locally.

And in second life, the same goes. My few Lindens get spent with the best and nicest sl creators, people who also live in sl. I like to see it encourage sl creativity. So no, buying a gucci from gucci does nothing for my sl happiness, and little for sl as a whole.

Does Gucci make a bag with a concealed carry holster in it?

If only because paying the price for a Gucci, gets you a Gucci. One that you can feel, and smell, and hold and caress.......

But all you are getting in SL are some cartoon shapes and images that any of the great makers are already doing. The label is meaningless. same with cars. I've bought several cars from different makers, all great works. What can Nissan do to make me buy from them instead? Nothing. I'm inundated with RL brands enough. I like not having to see them in SL. I hope they continue to stay away.

No.

Custom order only. 6 to 8 weeks.

I'd run the opposite direction. But then again, I'm a filthy hippie who would go out of my way to support amateur creators rather than supporting "the man".