As technologies continue to develop, consumers are eager to embrace these new developments and are growing increasingly distant and uninterested in the often static nature of traditional advertising media. That being said, there’s a lot to unpack in the case of artificial intelligence, chatbots, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). In this article, we discuss and explore AR development and its place in promotions and branding.
Before clamouring to incorporate AR into your marketing strategy, we need to discern the suitability and actual value AR can provide for your brand. New developments and technology are exciting, but in the excitement, we can confuse the level of necessity and helpfulness they provide. AR is very engaging, it’s useful, and experimental but, there’s still a lot to be explored and developed.
The last thing you want is to rush into building and investing in AR without considering its place and longevity within the brand. For example, the metaverse is an ‘aspirational’ concept of a virtual world that many businesses, including Meta (formerly Facebook), have tried to contribute to. It was a new ‘cutting-edge’ addition to the digital landscape that many marketers were eager to capitalise on and arguably, rushed into.
Now in 2023, the metaverse hardly ever comes up in conversation. In fact, if I were to ask the average person the name of Meta’s metaverse project, they would likely respond with ‘metaverse’ or have no clue.
For those who don’t know, Meta’s project is Horizon Worlds. Launched in 2019, the project is, supposedly, worth $36 billion, but never really seemed to take off despite the initial buzz. Reports of its daily active users have seemed inaccurate and greatly exaggerated. With initial active users being reported at 300,000 in October 2022 before dropping by 100,000 by October. It’s an excellent example of how these terms can become marketing buzzwords without providing actual value to a brand.
Brands looking to incorporate interactivity and engaging visuals into their promotional campaigns can find other solutions that may be just as effective, if not more, than augmented reality. Gamification has been a tried and true way to get consumers to engage with a brand and VR is not a necessity in implementing these gamified experiences. Yes, it certainly can be incorporated but arguably, it doesn’t need to be there to create an engaging experience.
That being said, AR still can provide a lot of value and perhaps as research continues and AR technology becomes more refined, more possibilities become available and it becomes a more promising integration for brands
To put it simply, AR is the integration of digital elements into the physical world. This is achieved by simulating sensory stimuli such as visual or auditory effects in a digital format, all this information is then delivered to the user through technology–particularly mobile devices.
In the case of augmented reality, the primary objective is to enhance the physical world, adding new information to what’s already there. AR is thus, not to be confused with VR, or, virtual reality. In contrast, the primary objective of VR is to transpose the user to a completely different environment, a digital ‘world’. The goal is not to enhance the environment around us but to immerse the user in a new digital landscape.
Initially, retailers and brands seemed hesitant to incorporate AR into their campaigns but recently, this reluctance has decreased and businesses are seeing the value AR can provide after the digital boom, circa 2020, with the COVID-19 lockdowns acting as a catalyst for this sudden hyperactivity on the digital landscape, making many digital innovations more accessible and reasonable to integrate both in terms of cost and investment of time. It has also highlighted the importance of communicating with consumers through digital channels and there’s undoubtedly a sense of urgency for brands to adopt new digital features and technologies.
With how quickly interest in these technologies occurred, it raises the question as to whether this onslaught and emphasis on the metaverse, AR, VR, AI, and chatbots, is mostly a passing trend in brand circles.
Is it another part of the ‘disposable’ digital campaign tools that will be overused and cast aside? Or are the likes of AR here to stay and continue to trailblaze the way we communicate digitally for the long haul? Of course, advancement is inevitable and no doubt that some facets of these technologies will reside and continue to develop, but as far as AR goes, what can we expect for its growth? In 5 years, will AR still be as immersive and engaging as we see it currently?
Regardless of its accessibility, evaluating whether or not to adopt AR into a brand is still an important process. Not every brand will benefit from AR and thus, understanding its capabilities is the first step in deciding if the impact AR will provide for a brand’s growth and development will be positive and worthwhile. According to WBR Insights, 52% of retailers, i.e. senior retail executives, feel underprepared to support technologies such as AR. That’s a 22% disparity to the 74% of consumers worldwide that are expecting to increase their usage of AR over the next 5 years, according to the 2021 Global Snap Consumer AR Report.
AR can communicate with users digitally in a way that was not possible before. It’s can be hard to convey dense-information when you’re limited in a 2D medium such as text; images have always been more impactful but still, quite limited. Elevating mediums to 3D and interactable makes communicating and visualising dense and complicated information, concepts, and processes more accessible and digestible to users.
AR allows the creation of high-impact visuals that can captivate and encourage engagement of audiences, it’s a ‘re-colouring’ of reality that’s usually far more whimsical and entertaining than your traditional marketing media.
Having AR available to users also supplies them with a sense of confidence, being able to evaluate something visually and interact with it takes away some uncertainty of their perceived knowledge provided by something such as text or print.
All this being said, what are some real cases in which AR has been used and what scenarios can we use AR for, as a brand or business?
The study found that not only did AR users spend double the time sampling the products, but they also sampled 7.5 more products on average, and were more likely to purchase during a ‘session’.
Those who used the physical product testers tended to focus on specific brands and only tried a few products.
AR users tried a larger variety with a more even distribution and hence, were more likely to consider smaller brands as it was simply more convenient to try these brands with AR.
Brands that offer an AR fitting room experience for clothes, cosmetics, and accessories have a better chance of increasing their revenue, particularly for small brands as it somewhat levels the playing field by making the act of trying something much easier.
Your brand becomes more visible and interesting and allows consumers to see a more diverse range of your offerings to a more detailed extent that they would be unable to experience in person, especially if a brand operates primarily online.
AR can act as a way to lessen purchasing anxiety particularly if they’re a new customer.
When customers return, their reliance on AR lowers as they become more accustomed to what to expect. This way, AR acts as a tool of ‘induction’ and assurance to new customers.
By passing off more control to the buyer, the more sure they become in their purchase decision, especially for riskier and more expensive purchases.
There are many ways AR can be incorporated into ads: through gamified experiences that engage the audience in an entertaining experience; as mentioned before, to demonstrate the products’ features and capabilities; as well as enhancing the traditional methods of advertising, bringing static mediums like print ads or flyers into motion, adding a layer of storytelling and interaction to your brand.
Augmented reality allows brands to construct a memorable campaign but also gets customers invested in the brand by proxy of spending a lot of time interacting with it. It becomes front-of-mind and builds that awareness by nature of creating interesting and new content in very saturated advertising spaces. Of course, just having AR is not the appeal, it’s about using an engaging medium to create good content that will capture and hold the attention of the market by extending control to them and allowing them to interact with their journey through AR.
It’s also less intensive for users to interact with your brand’s AR experience through their web browser than an AR application which not only can be quite data-heavy to download but also creates an additional step for users to go through in order to interact with your brand.
Despite being an instrument for new channels of communication, engagement, and interactivity, AR is still underdeveloped. So far, widespread use of AR has been on applications such as Snapchat, TikTok and other social media platforms via filters–even then, performance on those applications is often mediocre: glitches, latency, and other technical issues occur frequently. When we apply higher fidelity AR in campaigns, the concern there is its performance, would AR even be an enjoyable experience for the user at that point? It may be memorable and unique but will consumers have a positive experience with your brand or would it just be a moment of frustration for them?
Moreover, creating an individual application can be quite costly. Whether it’s hiring from a third party that specialises in AR development or hiring talent with very specific skill sets in coding, 3D modelling, and knowledge of certain software and tools, implementing a successful AR experience can be costly. It can also amount to an experience that is confusing and unenjoyable. This begs the question, is implementing AR worthwhile given all these caveats?
Some brands are embracing the often surreal imagery produced by AR that is ‘lower fidelity’ and adding that sense of unique otherworldliness to their campaigns. However, this will not work for every brand so the considerations for depth, surface detection, lighting, texture, and shadows are an important component to having a polished result in an AR experience which for some brands, may not only be recommended but necessary to create a cohesive and sensible experience for their image.
To further illustrate this, imagine a clothing brand that operates primarily online. Having an AR fitting room for their customers would be a very valuable addition to their business–but they need to consider the semantics of such an implementation. The digital clothes are going to have to react to the user’s movements, the brand needs to account for angle changes and the proportions of the user’s body, a user who usually wears plus-sized clothing will not get the same silhouette from a 3D AR model as a user who usually wears extra-small clothes. These details need to be reviewed by the brand, so as not to alienate their customers and to provide an inclusive experience. Some examples of clothing brands that have adopted an AR fitting room are brands like Farfetch and Prada who feature their clothes and accessories on Snapchat
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Evaluating if AR is worth incorporating should, at this point, be done on a case-by-case basis. What I can say is, that AR and other rising technologies are here to stay. They will continue to develop and grow. Being able to cultivate the attitudes and culture growing around these technologies will dictate how we use and treat AR developments. When early adopters innovate with AR responsibly, and with a user-first approach, we can trust that the considerations and issues of AR will be met, faithfully, and with reasonable solutions.
Despite all the drawbacks, AR has still proven to be an effective and memorable tactic used by brands and businesses alike to create a new channel of communication with consumers and open that avenue for dialogue. We know that users are excited and anticipating the growth of AR in daily life and brands should take this excitement in stride, conducting research and ways to improve and include AR in their long-term strategy would be a worthwhile endeavour, or at the very least, paying close attention to developments in AR technology.
