Immersive Marketing 101
Whenever we develop new technologies, we immediately invent ways of implementing them in our marketing strategies. New technologies give an innovative image to your company and brand and are a good way to surprise your customers. One of these new technologies is VR. It has become very accessible over the years and it has a wide range of applications in shopping.
Here we will explore what exactly Immersive technologies are and how they fit in with marketing strategies today.
What Is It?
Simply put immersive marketing is when you don’t just deliver your brand message to your customer but have them engage with it as well. Your customers don’t just react, they act, and isn’t that every marketer’s dream? The two best examples of this are Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). While with AR you can have an experience with almost any modern smartphone today and it is definitely more inexpensive to produce. With VR you have to have a headset but the immersion and interaction are beyond compare. It all comes down to the budget you have and who your target audience is.
Base Everything on Focus
When it comes to VR focus is everything. Marketers use different strategies and techniques to capture their customer’s attention. They have to because there are 5 different types of attention, according to Solhbergs and Mateer notion: focused attention, selective attention, alternate attention(when we go from one task to another very quickly), and divided attention (when we try to do a few things all at once). When using virtual reality to apply and evaluate these types of attention researchers have found numerous solutions to polarizing users’ attentional functions. When we put on that headset we are immersed in a virtual environment on both visual and auditory levels. By using the virtual environment we created, we can shift the focus of our user to the product in a more natural way. This way we are essentially cutting them off from the physical world and any of its interruptions, such forms of attention like selective, alternate, and divided.
Create an Immersive Experience
A static Virtual Reality experience is one that may offer an immersive video but with no interaction, that’s something that won’t pique the interest of your customer. A more choose-your-own adventure kind of approach yields much better results and has become a sort of industry standard when it comes to designing VR experiences. The cost of production might be higher but is more than balanced out by the value it creates. A good example of this is in the interactive film OUTAGE by IBM. Though it isn’t really a true VR experience it did let different users put themselves in the main role. They even had the ability to ask passing onlookers for any advice while trying to restore the power to the entire city. The ability to share the experience with others has great appeal when it comes to turning VR participation in staged company events. The goal for IBM, in this experimental Immersive marketing strategy, is to position its brand as a leader in innovative technologies.
What Are the Limits?
In short, yes there are limits. VR can currently mimic only two senses: sight and sound, others are necessary to truly prove the values of a product. The weight, the smell, the texture of a product we hold are also greatly taken into account by us when evaluating it. If the ultimate goal is for the consumer to have the real experience, well we are simply not there yet.
Conclusion
The number of sold VR headsets worldwide in 2020 is almost 5.5 million units with an expected forecast in 2023 of over 23 million. This is a growing market and ignoring will be a mistake, and so your marketing strategies must take advantage of it. Not to mention that the use of this technology shows that your company is innovative and ready to embrace the future, giving your brand a new image to your consumers.
