Note from the editor: Today is October 21st, 2015, the day Marty McFly travels to the future in the 1989 classic Back to the Future II.
As a kid, I like many others, wondered if the future Doc & Marty visited would be the one I'd live in as a man. Some of the movie is humorously wrong, some eerily right, and while you'll no doubt read plenty "what they got right" articles today, this is not one of them.
Instead, this is about how a technology that was just barely recognized back in 1989 is coming into it's own now, and has many technologists saying "Great Scott!" about it's potential to change the way products are bought and marketed for ever.
The following is a guest post from Hassan Ud-Deen
How we shop is changing...people no longer solely rely on direct mail and physical retail to purchase goods and necessities, and are becoming increasingly comfortable with buying goods online.
And as smartphones and tablets have become common, sales from desktops have declined. According to Capgemini, mobile now accounts for 40% of all retail sales.
There’s an interesting pattern to be noted here. Mainly how we’re “putting our foots in our mouths” with regards to our oscillating assumptions of technology’s influence on our buying behaviour.
35 years ago, the consensus was: “A home computer? Why would I ever want to buy one of those.” Never mind buying anything online.
8 years ago--like the predictions of a mental asylum patient for the end of the world--people ridiculedthe iPhone. Yet, here we stand in 2015 with millions of iPhones sold.
History doesn’t lie.
And it tells us that, just because we can’t currently wrap our heads around a new technology, or understand how it can impact us; that doesn’t mean it isn’t viable or will not be useful in the future.
Now new waves of technology are crawling out of their primordial ooze, and are ready to make their debut as viable additions to the way we shop.
I'm talking about Augmented and Virtual reality.
Store owners will let customers try clothing and accessories in a virtual “store”, place furniture into their customer’s houses within an app on the smartphone, and show people how to assemble and use products step-by-step with “live” customer support.
They’ll let customers flaunt potential purchases to friends, and make their brands more fun, personable and engaging. They’ll crank up the potency of their storytelling, segmented marketing, cross-selling and upselling.
In essence, store owners will soon be bridging the gap between physical and online retail.
Sounds like a crossbreed between a marketer's deepest desires and a tech geek’s saliva-inducing fantasies, right? But it’s not.
Today, top brands like, Lego, Rayban, BMW, North Face and Marriott Hotel are testing the waters with augmented and virtual reality. So before rushing into their futuristic applications, let’s look at how they are currently being used.
Virtually Furnishing Homes and Helping Make Decisions
When homeware retailer Ikea conducted research on buyers, they found that:
- 14% of customers have bought wrong sized furniture for their rooms
- Over 70% say they don’t really know how big their homes are
- And 33% admit to being confused about measuring up
To help customers battle this “square peg round hole” syndrome, they took advantage of AR technology and merged it with their Ikea Catalogue app.
The app (which is downloadable on smartphones and tablets) allows customers to virtually fit furniture in their homes before ordering. Customers can test up to 90 products and make decisions based on style, size, shape, color and positioning.
To use it, you place the catalog in the space where you’d like to position the furniture. The app then scans the size of the room and the catalog, and scales a 3D representation of the product to the screen.
If the “furniture” needs rotating or adjusting, you adjust the catalog accordingly.
Last year Ikea reported that it has “resulted in 8.5 million downloads, with more than 42 million visits to the digital catalog via the app or online”.
And AR technology related to homeware is already evolving.
Cimagine, a specialist augmented ecommerce company, has released an advanced version of the Ikea Catalog app which no reference points or anchors are needed. It just scans the user’s surroundings and shows the product.
The app can be integrated into ecommerce and mcommerce product pages with a single line of code. Making it easier for online furniture and homeware retailers to use.
