Emotions Sell: How VR and AR are Changing the Landscape of Marketing

Old-school print and television advertisers have always wrestled with the problem of connecting with their audience profoundly. Their solution? Introduce suggestive, mildly titillating content in ads. But there’s some new game in town, a kind of currency that is designed specifically for the digital sphere, evoking an even more instinctual and fundamental response than suggestive content ever could.

These are emotional experiences and connections. For better or for worse, smartphones and social networks govern our interactions and connect us remotely while keeping us physically apart. As a result, we’re left craving a genuine experience or even left completely isolated. However, virtual reality and augmented reality could change this, creating a more satisfying and more profound connection for potential customers, and re-introducing the element of experience.

This new emotional-based currency is causing marketers to sit up and take notice. This is because emotions are at the heart of a customer’s decision-making process.

But what about the wider goal of marketers? Brands — and marketers, by extension — want to narrow the gap between a display of ads and the customer’s purchase decision. It’s not just about minimizing the buyer’s journey — it’s about making a definitive, emotional impact quickly and effectively. A brand only gets a short time to persuade a potential customer to convert, so they need to capitalize on this, in a subtle and yet persuasive manner.

This is emotional experience 101.

Some naysayers observe that virtual reality, as a medium, is not quite “ready” for the marketplace because not every consumer is carrying a VR-enabled device in their proverbial back pocket.

But recent developments show that there is a very definitive shift from using VR, AR, and “MR” technologies as novelties, to using them as opportunities for selling at scale. But before understanding the opportunities they present, we need to understand the terms themselves, on a conceptual and a technical level.

If you’ve ever been chasing a “wild Pokemon” on your phone’s Pokemon Go app, you’ve experienced augmented reality.

As the name suggests, augmented reality is an experience where digital, 3D content is “placed” into the real world through the use of optical inputs — like the camera on your smartphone. Michael Kors’s glasses campaign was a prime example of this.

For marketers, AR can open the door to some innovative offers. By combining other techniques such as geotagging, marketers can “pop up” particular personalized discounts for products in-store, based on where the customer is shopping or on the customer’s purchase history.

It sounds like “mixed” reality should be augmented reality — but it’s not. Technology like Magic Leap and HoloLens is all about layering physical, felt, and tangible reality together with designed, constructed, and “virtual” reality, one on top of the other.

Mixed reality gives a much more illusory experience. Here, an interactive experience, like a virtual world, is layered on top of our actual reality and changes as we approach the interaction and environment. It essentially responds to your position in space.

To understand how these VR and AR experiences work, it’s best to see them in action. There are specific, marketable uses for these immersive experiences especially when it comes to converting a customer.

One example is compressing the customer journey. VR and AR can take a customer from a problem-aware stance (where they know they have a problem) to solution-aware (where they see a brand’s product as the solution) in one interaction.

Product demos or “try before you buy”, experiences allow customers to connect themselves to the product in a way that helps them to see the product in the context of their own lives. This is one of the most effective ways to enhance physical shopping experiences.

Fuselab Creative is the best Virtual Reality agency in the DC Area.

Fuselab’s crisis and leadership training project, known as the Submarine Control Room (anyone else thinking about Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru exercise?) as well as our employee training project, “Persona VR”, demonstrated this. These projects showcased two very important things about using VR and AR as a pathway to trying and testing in a simulated environment:

• First off, all aspects of the senses must be engaged. The power of the emotional connections of AR and VR is based on the fact that they give the user the ability to act upon and within their environment. In other words, it’s not just about passively experiencing but actively interacting

• Secondly, UI/UX design in these trial and test environments must be flexible enough to provide a guided experience. They must lead the user to some kind of inevitable conclusion but still allow the user to feel like the environments are “free” rather than constructed

Another fantastic example of this utility and flexibility in action is IKEA’s furniture setting, VR-based app.

Through wearable headsets, customers can choose from IKEA’s famous catalog of inventory and then “place” this furniture into their homes, helping them to understand how it will look in the real world.

An innovative way to use VR and AR in marketing is to incentivize purchasing behavior.

The New York Times did precisely this when they decided to “reward” their most loyal customers with Google Cardboard glasses, as a gateway to watching their VR-based films and short stories.

Never underestimate the power of a brand story. Especially when marketers can actually use VR and AR technology to immerse the user and/or customer and make them a part of that story.

The North Face understands this well. Via a VR environment, it offered its customers the chance to hike through two different settings: Yosemite National Park and Nepal.

Customers in these experiences felt something inspirational, and remembered why they want to visit these places in the first place. The reality of the environment also communicates a compelling reason to purchase North Face products for these real-world environments.

Toms, an entirely feel-good shoe company, decided to translate this feeling to a felt experience for their customers. In a move similar to North Face’s, their VR tech campaign put the customer in the “shoes” of company representatives on charitable giving trips to areas such as Peru.

Since Toms’s story and campaign have long been based on the fact that they donate one pair of shoes for every shoe bought, they made their customers not only witness the journey but also feel what it is like to go to South America and gift a shoe to someone.

This is empathy at its most demonstrative.

Even when a customer can identify this as a purely persuasive exercise, it’s still effective because it is appealing to their feelings and emotions. After all, that’s what any purchase decision is based on, even if we’d like to think of ourselves as “rational” shoppers.

One of the most obvious uses of AR and VR in marketing is to offer test drives to potential customers.

On the buyer’s end, this is extremely useful because it means they don’t have to waste time and energy driving to a dealership and waiting for interaction from a salesperson.

On the dealership’s end, however, this makes for a much more informed but also much more motivated buyer.

At the point of contact, a salesperson can focus less on persuasion and more on support. Their role transforms into that of guide, coach, or product specialist. They’re there to fill in the gaps, answer questions, and offer some attractive packages or deals.