Abstract

The metaverse is reshaping marketing through immersive experiences, avatar interactions, digital ownership, and virtual commerce. However, existing research remains fragmented across technology adoption, immersive advertising, and virtual consumption, offering limited integration of the behavioral mechanisms and governance structures that shape consumer experiences and brand relationships. This study develops an integrated framework conceptualizing metaverse marketing as an experiential ecosystem connecting immersive interaction, virtual identity, decentralized ownership, and engagement mediated by artificial intelligence. Drawing on experiential marketing, symbolic interactionism, service-dominant logic, self-congruity, digital embodiment, platform ecosystems, and consumer culture theory, it explains how consumers become participants, creators, investors, and co producers of brand value. The research combines bibliometric analysis, systematic literature review, netnographic observation, virtual ethnography, expert Delphi analysis, and conceptual synthesis. Findings identify immersive presence, avatar identity expression, perceived digital ownership, social interactivity, personalized interaction, and decentralized governance as central determinants of consumer engagement and virtual brand attachment. They also reveal tensions involving privacy, algorithmic surveillance, digital addiction, virtual inequality, identity fragmentation, and governance uncertainty. The framework indicates that metaverse value creation combines experiential, participatory, symbolic, and economic dimensions. Virtual products, nonfungible tokens, digital land, and avatar customization simultaneously operate as assets, identity signals, and sources of social capital. This study advances marketing theory by integrating experience, identity, ownership, and governance within one explanatory framework. It offers marketers, platform developers, and policymakers guidance for designing responsible immersive experiences, protecting consumer interests,