Can AR help save retail?
Silicon Valley is doubling down on AR as the next big innovation of the smartphone era. But a recent study from Unity, one of the software companies leading AR development, suggests that brands and agencies are struggling to find creative applications for the technology.
In the meantime, brands continue to experiment with technology in bricks and mortar retail, but the results either tend to be one-off stunts that require expensive installation, or they focus on technology as an enabler for speed and convenience. But the shopping experience isn’t just about convenience these days. There’s a huge opportunity for brands to develop strategies for ‘retail as experience’, offering a more layered and imaginative customer experience (CX) overall.
Until fairly recently the function of the store was to drive sales, but today it’s just as important to provide a space where customers really experience the brand and what its values represent. So should brands be considering using AR to improve the customer experience in store?
An established behaviour has emerged over the last decade, whereby customers will browse and research potential purchases online before heading for the physical store to buy in person. This trend, which the industry has started to call ROPO (research online, purchase offline), suggests that more than 90% of all in-store purchases are now researched online first. Most importantly, however, once in-store customers will still reach for their phones before making their final purchase decision — giving brands another opportunity to enhance the overall customer experience.
What if we start to think less about AR as a gimmick and more in terms of augmented intelligence? Customers now arrive in store with a device in their pocket that has extraordinary processing power. Smartphones are increasingly able to capture and visualise the world down to a mindblowing level of detail and recognise the objects they see in real-time using Artificial Intelligence. This is changing the ability of smartphones to understand and interpret the world around them, particularly in a controlled environment like retail.
These technical advances have perhaps created the misconception that Augmented Reality experiences are complex to develop. However AR itself is relatively simple and cost effective to produce, with an increasing number of platforms and frameworks being launched — including Facebook’s Spark AR, Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore, alongside a host of web based options — making it accessible to brands.
The barrier to uptake from customers is also pretty low these days. They just point their mobile camera at a predefined marker, which in turn acts as a trigger for the AR experience. Almost any image with high contrast can be used as an AR marker (the more unique the better). In some cases the experience is anchored to objects picked-up by the camera (like a filter for your face) and in others the experience is anchored to the marker itself, creating an impression of objects being fixed in relation to the wider environment. The next wave of technology is already promising to connect users so they have a shared AR experience, both in terms of what they see and what they hear.
There’s all sorts of opportunity to bring useful product information to life. Brands could use AR to introduce insights about a product’s innovation or to share inspirational stories from product designers. See how a material performs in different conditions, or bring hidden technology to life. Learn more about a product’s provenance, its supply chain, or its sustainability credentials. Or simply provide realtime information about sizing, availability, and related products. This information, presented in a creative way at the point of purchase, has the potential to influence the final purchase decision.
Then there’s the environment around the product. AR can be used to draw customers closer to the product, and to slow down the shopping experience to a deeper level of engagement. A neutral environment in a department store can be transformed to reflect a premium, high-fidelity brand experience, or reflect the latest seasonal advertising campaign without expensive fabrication and creation of wasteful disposable materials.
In order to be a success in retail, AR experiences need to move beyond cheap visual tricks (fewer dinosaurs and space rockets please), and start to focus on how it comes to be considered as creative and useful augmentation of information with the real world shopping experience. With 5G on the horizon and smartphone processors, cameras and displays becoming more and more advanced, the opportunities will only get bigger and better.
Stink Studios is a member of the official Spark AR partner network.
Originally published at https://www.creativereview.co.uk on August 12, 2019.
