A personal connection with a customer is the gold standard for brands. Once that connection is made, loyalty starts to build and the brand has a customer for life. The building of that connection, however, is more difficult. Fighting for a customer’s attention is difficult enough, but keeping them engaged enough to form a connection is a challenge. Extended Reality (XR), which encompasses Virtual and Augmented reality (VR and AR), offers brands a means to stand out from their competition and to craft that bonding experience with consumers by creating a positive relationship with them by engaging them with immersive experiences that push the bounds of creativity.
The most effective experiences create brand loyalty and can be accessed with little effort on the consumers side yet still leave a lasting impression. McDonalds accomplished this in 2014 with a simple Fifa World Cup-themed AR app. At the time, it was the largest mainstream rollout of an Augmented Reality promotion in history. This global augmented reality soccer app celebrated the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil and was available in 119 countries via 1.3 billion special edition McDonald’s World Cup french fry boxes. In the promotion, the customer would view their meals packaging on a table through an interactive AR app that they downloaded to their smart phone or tablet. Once in the game, they would aim the camera at the soccer-decorated fry box. The game then turned the real world view of a box of fries sitting on a table into a soccer scene. The box became the goal and the table the pitch. This simple, yet effective, game strengthened the bond between customer and brand by giving them a fun game to play using a technology that was cutting-edge and most likely unique and new to the users. Those same emotions of fun and intrigue transfer into positive thoughts, in this case about McDonalds, and ultimately lead customers to a desire to spend time and money there. The novelty of XR has the ability to drive interaction with branded content. The McDonalds campaign positively demonstrates how XR campaigns build brand loyalty by being easy to understand, interesting enough to engage customers, and don’t overstay their welcome by becoming confusing or tiresome.
Other brand building XR experiences can be more on the functional side, like Lowes Holoroom How To. Lowes, along with most other hardware stores, offers text and video tutorials for their customer’s DIY projects. The Holoroom sets the home-improvement megastore apart from other hardware stores by giving their customers a VR space, allowing them to virtually learn how to do projects, such as tile setting or test-driving a power tool, directly from a Lowes store. The experience shows customers how to do tasks, in an immersive, memorable way by having them do the task, step by step in a virtual space. When compared to a group that watched a video tutorial, customers that used the Holoroom had 36% better recall for their task. A customer who participates in this experience is likely to enjoy it and remember it, creating a personal relationship between the customer and the brand. Not to mention, the customer will likely purchase all the necessary materials from Lowes and look to this technology to guide them through future projects.
As the technology for augmented and virtual reality continues to develop, designers and brands can use the tools to craft clever experiences and gather and engage audiences all while using the technology as a hook. Brands are capitalizing on this new technology to build relationships with their customer base that build loyalty for years to come.
