LAUSR

ABSTRACT This paper presents a marketing study of the metaverse's potential audience, particularly focusing on museums' use of cyberspace and how some of their physical functions can be replicated online. Among digital transformations, the metaverse has become one of the most significant alternatives to offline events, with museum exhibitions highly representative of it. However, existing virtual museums fail to attract the MZ generation despite the opportunities arising from their contactless lifestyle. Therefore, this study aims to create new content suggestions that the MZ generation positively reacts to and becomes involved in. This research was conducted through five methods: a literature review, case studies, survey, persona creation, and in-depth interviews. According to the market segmentation and strategy (MS&S) technique, two types of responses were used to create and target two types of personas of potential users—‘explorative persona' and ‘entertaining persona’. This study thus suggests three future directions and content for metaverse virtual museums to better target the MZ generation: technical development for users of both personas, user creation content to enhance user participation for the users of explorative persona, and more active marketing through various community for the users of entertaining persona.