Before starting an augmented reality project, a retailer should ask seven questions: whether the idea is a gimmick, whether it will last, whether something else would work better, how to win leadership over, whether it needs an app, what people should do next, and whether the audience is ready for AR. AR pays when it takes the friction out of a hard part of the customer's journey, and keeps doing so once the novelty wears off. Asking these questions at the start saves time, money and a lot of development headaches.
AR lets a brand into a customer's physical world, a natural fit for retail marketing, and 67% of media planners and buyers want AR and VR ads in their digital marketing campaigns (Business2Community). 4 Roads had been devising and building AR projects for clients such as Hitachi and Philips for several years when it wrote this, in April 2022.
Is your use case a gimmick?
Customers want real value, not a passing novelty: take the first boost in engagement, but have something that stays useful once it fades. Ask whether your AR reduces friction at a key point of the sale or adds complicated extra steps. Shoe-horning AR into a campaign to ride the novelty leads to a gimmick; starting from the customer's pain points puts you on the right path. Utility over gimmick.
Will it still be useful after the campaign?
Think beyond an animated character, a video placement or any other special effect. These can work: One Stop's elf campaign raised brand awareness. But it was tied to Christmas, so for the rest of the year it was useless, which is a problem given what AR costs to develop. The elf is literally on the shelf.
Make your AR useful in everyday life, or at least several times a year, by solving an ongoing problem, and people come back to your app, and to you, each time they meet it. 4 Roads' AR project for Hitachi Vantara let it show its hardware racks without carrying heavy equipment from event to event, and in 2022 it was still being reused year after year for its latest products.
When should you use something else?
If seeing a product where it will be used can reduce sales friction, cut returns or improve the customer experience, AR will pay off. In ecommerce, people often can't see how something fits, on themselves or in their home, until they have bought it, which causes returns. In store, too little choice, or no way to compare options and reviews, gives people less reason to visit. If AR can't fix the bad parts of the journey, look for a different solution.
How do you get leadership to back an AR project?
AR costs more to develop than traditional marketing, so stakeholders can be hard to win over. Three things help.
Start with a pilot. Many of the brands 4 Roads has built AR for started this way, without committing much of their budget. ASOS found that one model can't represent the range of women's body types, which drives returns and eats into profit. Rather than going all in, it overlaid its top 16 dresses on models of different sizes and heights, for shoppers to pick the one closest to their shape. A pilot like that gives you data to take to stakeholders, for or against.
Show what other brands have done. Brands are often reluctant to go first, and AR has been around longer than you might think:
- Nike Fit, in Nike's app, finds a customer's true shoe size from the phone's camera, at home, in under a minute; more than an estimated 60% of people wear the wrong size.
- BMW of North America and Google Cloud launched AR around the i4 and iX electric cars, letting customers change paint colours and lighting, and open and close the doors.
- Wayfair's View in Room 3D shows its furniture in customers' own homes.
- Sephora's app scans a customer's face so they can try on shades of make-up, buy them, and follow tutorials, such as contouring, laid over their face.
- Warby Parker lets customers try on glasses digitally, including frames its stores can't stock, and share the pictures with friends, as they already did in store.
- Home Depot's app places a selection of its products, from refrigerators to chandeliers, in 3D in any room; Forrester Research has in the past ranked it the number one retailer mobile app.
Explain the less tangible benefits. Adopting new technology ahead of competitors can set your brand apart in the long term, even without an immediate return, and being seen as innovative has PR value. Airwalk's Invisible Pop Up Store earned $5 million of media coverage, in Mashable, Business Insider, TechCrunch and other major publications, and coverage like that isn't unusual for AR.
Does it need to be an app?
Not necessarily. The best AR experience asks as little of people as possible, which can mean not making them download a separate app. Apps work for many brands, but AR can now run in the browser, on the phone people already have. (Nor is AR virtual reality, which needs a headset.)
What do you want people to do next?
For many retail AR tools the goal is sales, so connect the experience to a checkout, or you miss people who are ready to buy. Plenty of AR campaigns, from brands such as Kate Spade, Heineken and Heinz, don't ask people to do anything, give unclear instructions or complicate the journey. Know exactly what people will do, and how.
Is your audience ready for AR?
Younger people lead. Global Web Index found 35% of 16 to 34-year-olds engaging with AR, falling to 27% of 35 to 44-year-olds, 11% of 45 to 54-year-olds and 3% of 55 to 64-year-olds. More men (29%) than women (17%) engaged with it, a gap explained by awareness: 71% of men were aware of AR, against 59% of women.
Many people use AR without knowing it: Snapchat has reported over 70 million people using its AR lenses every day, yet many of its users would say they don't often use AR. To them it is simply a tool that helps them buy, makes life easier and entertains them. If your audience is 16 to 34, AR is likely to be taken up easily; if it is 45 or older, expect to spend more time perfecting the experience to get uptake that pays back, though don't rule older customers out if AR removes real friction for them.
This is adapted from our guide, Augmented reality in retail: 7 questions to ask before starting an AR project, which has more on each brand's AR, including what Wayfair's co-founder said about it, and a one-page recap of the seven questions: download it free. How 4 Roads builds apps and augmented reality.
