Key Takeaways:
- AR and VR create immersive experiences that take your brand activation to the next level
- It builds the emotional connection that helps grow your brand
- Experiences linger far longer with consumers than physical products
- 91% of consumers say their feelings about brands are more favorable after they’ve attended events and experiences
- AR and VR remove the usual restrictions on marketing to make almost anything possible
Immersive Experiences Can Take Your Brand Activation To The Next Level
Immersive experiences can have the potential to deeply connect with their audience via a memorable and personalized experience. Buyers connect with products in new ways, improving the customer experience. The metaverse is here, the door is open, and customer/brand relationships will never be the same. Therefore, the connection will go beyond the product to embrace the brand.
Customer experience is a core element of company success, and a good experience means supporting loyal current customers while attracting new ones. Smart companies are using innovative augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to create immersive experiences that take customer relationships to the next level in brand activation. This immersive marketing strategy uses events, campaigns, and activities to generate brand awareness and cultivate lasting connections.
Basically, it’s all about elevating your brand above the noise to make it more recognizable, memorable, and meaningful. Successful marketing creates the emotional connection necessary to build the community that grows your brand. An immersive experience means your target audience can interact with your brand in a tangible way that fosters engagement. Here, we’ll explore how activations and other immersive marketing can convey your brand’s personality and unique story.
Defining the immersive experience
An immersive experience alters the physical environment and builds on it to offer enhancements to reality. With technology, users can see, hear, and interact with products not physically in front of them. Besides, the experience feels genuine, and users can empathize, be inspired, and learn on a whole new level. Sight, sound, and touch should all be used to make the experience captivating and engaging.
Immersive experiences are essential for engagement
Research has shown that experiential purchases, no matter how far down the road it’s measured, make people happier than material purchases. In other words, even though people spend more time using material possessions, experiences ultimately provide more satisfaction. Prioritizing experience over products creates a deeper connection. By designing your immersive experiences to incorporate your products, your customers can enjoy the experience while learning first-hand about them. This leads to more informed, faster decisions and provides the seamless experience customers expect today.
The age of hyper-personalization is upon us, and an immersive experience can deliver content unique to your target customer. It also can make your brand more relatable, which has the power to both engender current customer loyalty and pull in new ones. Let’s look at how your brand can use AR technology to create immersive experiences and brand activation to engage and convert.
Some ways to use immersive brand experiences
Altogether, the immersive brand experience can take many forms and be used differently, and technology powers some of today’s most memorable customer experiences.
- You can use a physical space, such as a pop-up at a mall or other public location.
- You can use a virtual space, such as an app – remember Pokémon GO?
- The online shopping experience can be enhanced with AR. A great example is Sherwin Williams’ mobile ColorSnap® app, which has an AR feature that lets users experience more than 1,500 paint colors in the user’s room.
- In-store shopping can be improved with AR. For example, Lowe’s is using it for an in-store navigation app. Macy’s is using an in-store VR experience for furniture and décor shopping. Users can place their selections in a virtual room mapped on a tablet. They then put on a VR headset and interact with their design.
Like the examples above, companies seeking to elevate their brand and maximize audience engagement should employ brand activation as a part of their marketing strategy. Brand activation events make your brand stand out. Here are some ideas.
Immersive experience and brand activation
In the past, brands weren’t concerned about personal connections. Today, those connections are vital to business success for both B2C and B2B companies. For example, personal value has two times the impact of business value in B2B purchasing decisions. As marketers look for new ways to develop more profound and personal connections between their target audience and their brand, brand activation is a powerful tool.
- After attending events and experiences, 91% of consumers say their feelings about brands are more favorable.
- A live marketing event makes 85% of consumers more likely to purchase a product or service.
- Fully 98% of consumers who create digital or social content at events share it.
Evidently, integrating VR and AR into your brand activation adds a wow factor. AR concentrates on real-world environments, and an app can allow potential customers to view products. VR transports the user into an entirely different world and allows them to experience your brand in it. It’s all about showing rather than telling.
Brand activations usually have limitations regarding planning time, site installations, manufacturing, and so on. AR and VR have no limitations because they use digital reality to tell your brand story. They can change the way your target audience thinks and feels about your product and your vision.
How brands use immersive experience for brand activation
AR, in particular, allows brands to offer a unique and immersive digital experience to engage customers in a meaningful and memorable way. Here’s how some brands have used it to their advantage, both online and in person.
- Snap’s City Painter App was launched on Carnaby Street, London, a pedestrian shopping district that’s also a cultural center. This AR tool lets users virtually spray paint above the shops using pre-created murals. Others using the app saw any changes made in real time.
- ASOS launched “See My Fit” in 2020, which enhances the customer experience by showing them how products would look on them using AR to digitally fit clothing onto models of different body types. By the end of February 2021, revenues jumped 24%.
- Burberry Pop-Up for Olympia. When Burberry launched its new Olympia bag, customers could use a QR code found in Harrods department store. This QR code would use AR to watch the Elpis statue walk around and take photos and videos to share.
- IKEA Place. This app employs AR to allow users to place true-to-scale 3D furniture and accessories into their own rooms.
The list of major brands that have embraced the immersive experience looms large, but it can be a game-changer for even small businesses. The cost to create a mobile app with AR is much less than you might think and provides quite the competitive edge.
Immersive technology is the future of marketing. It elevates live experiences, facilitates try-before-you-buy, maximizes the use of social media, and optimizes customer touchpoints. It allows brands to transcend the restrictions of traditional brand marketing while creating experiences that merge both. At events, in-store, or on the street, these experiences fully leverage brand engagement.
At Shockoe, we partner with you to build tech for a future that is immersive, predictive, and connected. We’re a custom mobile software development agency that creates innovative solutions for high customer engagement and anywhere/anytime content delivery.
Mobile is in our DNA, and our team uses collaboration and clear communication to create an impactful, measurable digital experience with a solid eye on ROI. Let’s build something amazing together. Start the conversation today.
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