Several retail and fashion campaigns have leveraged immersive technologies to build a brand experience that is social and provide value to customers.
It’s your typical overcast Saturday in downtown Portland, Oregon, and I’m heading out to the park to walk my dog, Betty. What I find this particular evening is anything but typical as instead of a few homeless guys sleeping on benches and fellow dog walkers, I encounter hundreds of people of all ages walking through the south park blocks. Their excitement was infectious, and I was delighted to see so many Portlander’s enjoying one of the cities most prized resources. But what made this Saturday different from every other and why had this happy mob descended on my neighborhood?
As I took a closer look, I noticed that everyone was engaging with their phones, some even had two, three, up to four different phones. I had to learn more about what was going on and if my suspicions were true that this was some sort of online community. My thoughts immediately went to Pokémon Go, but wasn’t that a thing of the past and had that game appealed to such a cross-section of the population? There were families, young children, groups of teens, adults – some solo but the majority were traveling in packs. I stopped one group who were kind enough to answer my newbie questions and learned this was indeed a Pokémon Go Community Day. A special global event that features rare Pokémon and other in-game goodies during a dedicated window of time. According to Wikipedia, Pokémon Go has accrued over a billion downloads worldwide and has 147 million monthly active users.
So how does this story relate to immersive retail and fashion? Good question! Love or hate Pokémon Go, there’s no denying that it is the most broadly used immersive app to date. The secret sauce its creator, Niantic, has cooked up is chock full of lessons for all of us looking to leverage immersive technologies to build brand experiences and ultimately sell more stuff. Let’s dive a bit deeper into how brand marketers can build effective fashion and retail experiences using immersive technology.
1. It needs to be social
The most successful digital disruptors over the last few years have one thing in common, they build social into their DNA. Recent examples include Pokémon Go and Peloton, who has grown a $4 billion dollar business by replicating the community of an actual fitness class at home. A great example of this within the fashion industry is China’s Tmall. This shopping app has leveraged immersive technology to provide their online audiences access to VIP events such as the hugely popular “See Now, Buy Now” event last year.
This “retail-as-entertainment” event is part of Alibaba’s Singles Day shopping event and featured big-name designers, celebrities, musical productions and much more all filmed live in front of a select VIP audience. The live-stream was broadcast across both immersive and 2D channels to over 57 million viewers and included a streamlined ‘see now, buy now’ app that allowed viewers to buy the products they saw on the runway instantly. The show also offered a “Play Now” feature that allowed the viewers to rank the outfits in real-time, creating an instant trend report and sending feedback to the designers. According to Sean Lane, immersive retail specialist and Technology Principal at digital studio Point B, the Singles Day event “had over 8 million users make purchases using their VR headsets. They have also been very successful with Tmall VR experiences with users watching fashion shows on the runway and leveraging the ‘purchase now’ feature.”
2. Provide value to the customer
What differentiates a good immersive experience from another is the value it offers to the user. To pay off the hassle of either strapping on a VR headset or downloading an AR app, the user must gain substantial value from the result. There are several ways that innovative brands are both meeting their business objectives while meeting the needs of customers. Immersive technology is an amazing way to take users to places they otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. Providing customers something they want and can’t get anywhere else is a good formula for success. One B2B fashion app based in Paris, Change of Paradigm, offers designers and brands the ability to do just that. Their high-quality, 3D models of luxury brand apparel are the best I’ve seen. If I were a clothing designer, I would want its Paris studio director, Franck Audrain, to create the digital version. A fashion designer in his own right, Audrain has spent years in the technology industry and meticulously mimics the most complicated garments in 3D. His team can create a hyper-realistic version of an already exiting garment or build a digital proto-type of a garment that only exists in the imagination of its designer.
