Peter Evans, Chief Strategy Officer, McFadyen Digital, shares insights on developing a roadmap for Web3.0. He advises retailers to consider various options, including returns, sustainability, and vertical marketplaces. He highlights the key questions retailers should ask when developing a Web3.0 plan, such as what trends to look out for, how much to invest, where to invest, and what capabilities and risks to manage. He suggests conducting trends analysis, observing what other brands are doing, and researching the space as ways to understand the market better. Evans also mentions notable NFT projects, including those of Nike and Volkswagen. 43% of the best global brands have already done some kind of NFT projects, generating revenue and building community engagement. Finally, Evans highlighted the importance of research and digging into the NFT space to understand the nuances of different types of NFT programs and their impact on the luxury and mass markets.

Nick Katsivelos, Global Media Industry Digital Strategy Director at Microsoft stresses the importance of bridging physical and digital domains, and unifying various activations happening all over the retail shops to bring them all together in one place for a larger community. He emphasized the need to find partners who can understand the business and help drive value. He also talks about the challenges of always-on relationships with customers and how building an ecosystem around the new immersive technologies is essential. Nick also mentioned the value of customer engagement, especially in building communities, and how large communities like Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox, and World of Warcraft manage to keep millions of people engaged through a sense of mission, purpose, and community bonding. Nick also talks about the value of platforms and how they make it easier to put a toe in the water to begin to understand the space. He compares it to the evolution of building a website, where it was initially hard but now platforms like Squarespace make it easy to build a website with e-commerce capabilities.