The battle to bring your product to market in an increasingly more sophisticated and complicated digital world is a challenge for businesses world-wide. Any tool that can be used to lever a competitive edge is quickly grabbed upon and evaluated for its usefulness. Virtual Reality is a marketing tool that is perfectly suited for today and the future’s changing world. This article shows some of the ways it can be wielded, and why you should be looking at its potential for your business.
Storyscraping with Virtual Reality Marketing
The methodology of ‘storyscaping’ was first outlined in the book ‘Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds` (Wiley, 2014) by authors Gaston Legorburu and Darren McColl. It was immediately recognized as a marketing game-changer, bringing insight and strategic guidance to many of the world’s biggest brands (Virgin, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Mars, Foster’s, Burger King etc.).
Its core concept is the need to “create immersive worlds that resonate with the highly connected and digitally enabled consumer of today”. In effect, a call to action is more effective if it is embedded in a compelling story; a story that emotionally connects the customer to the brand.
Virtual Reality is the perfect medium to realize this strategy, creating as it does an emotional experience that floods the senses with a feeling of being actually within the story, coupled with a freedom to self-explore at will. With Virtual Reality, the customer is part of the story, they can interact with it and make it their own. Marketing is transformed from still adverts or video commercials into something that engages with the imagination and senses.
We show how Virtual Reality can support the marketing process at every point of the customer journey.
Virtual Reality Shopping is the Future
E-commerce sales are growing exponentially, already meaning some long established companies who fail to adapt are going to the wall. Take for example Thomas Cook, the world’s first travel firm, recently gone into liquidation after 178 years trading and citing online competition as a major reason for its demise.
But whilst online shopping provides value for money and ease of searching, it loses the shopping experience of actually visiting a store, browsing the shelves, and physically comparing products side by side.
This is where Virtual Reality fills the emotional gap. It is better than reality in that you have the store – or even the whole mall – to yourself, can pick up and have a closer look at the product in 3D without leaving your armchair, and have specifications and comparisons magically pop-up at your finger-tips.
With the equipment becoming cheaper and more sophisticated, and tools for creating virtual words become more user-friendly, a future where it is commonplace to visit virtual reality shopping malls is already at the front door. If you want to get a competitive advantage of the new technology, you should start now!
Push Your USP to the Max with VR Marketing
In many marketing sectors the unique selling point can often be the ambience of a place, or the realization of a concept, or a convivial atmosphere. Restaurants, hotels, holiday resorts … all places where your customers would flock to if they could only get a sneak peak of experiencing them beforehand.
Take for example The Flushing Meadows Hotel & Bar in Munich, an exciting boutique hotel near the scenic river Isar with eleven loft studios individually designed in collaboration with an equal number of prominent creative types. A Virtual Reality tour has proved the perfect medium to showcase its stunning interiors and views from the rooftop bar, letting visitors experience being there and immersing them in the concept before actually booking a room.
Discover more about the Flushing Meadows virtual tour and why VR is such an effective medium for conveying soft-marketing experiences by following this link.
VR Marketing for the Big Sell
Sometimes taking your product to market is an impossible task. Imagine trying to demo heavy plant machinery or an airplane interior at a trade fair. Size is no limit though, when you can give your customers a VR experience of viewing your product first-hand. With a VR headset they can see your super-sized product in situ, walk around it, watch it in operation, all from a trade booth.
For examples of marketing products in inaccessible locations, in prototype, or too big for trade fairs, see our five examples of using VR to increase sales.
VRdirect: Your VR Marketing Enabler
Use of VR as a marketing tool is clearly on the rise and opens up an emotional and memorable connection with your customers that can draw them in to share your story and buy your products. Wether it is a car, real estate, holiday homes, a travel location or an event, Virtual Reality can bring your message across like no other medium.
The easy-to-use VRdirect platform can help you get started in Virtual Reality marketing. It takes you from conceptualizing a 360° VR experience, through building it with software that requires no previous programming knowledge, to publishing and distributing it to you customers across a wide range of platforms and devices.
Learn more about VRdirect and request a free demo here!
