5 Ways To Augment Your Business For Your Consumer’s Reality

Do we live in technology’s world, or does technology live in ours?

Maybe one jumps the gun in asking this question, but only because it’s still too early to ask it. The fact is that our lives, through our products, persons and professional structures, are fundamentally larger today than they were even ten years ago. 

We connect with more people through the internet, we buy more gadgets that improve the quality of our homes and leisure time, and we invest more time in our screens for all kinds of work we do. 

At the very least, you can ask - is digitisation God? Are we as humans developing in a way that best supports its pervasiveness in our lives?

For now, it’s safe to be confident that yes, anyone benefits from entering the space of what’s high-tech, what’s digitally-sound, and for businesses, what’s likely to take your user to the next level. 

And so you’re probably already familiar with Augmented Reality, but don’t even know it yet. Quite literally, the application of AR facilitates an augmentation, an extension, of a digital realm onto our human physicality. AR is when we see a projection of something digitally-created or analysed onto the ground, air or surface around us, that serves to give us some kind of fulfilment, function or just something fun. This is still different from virtual reality, where you are still involved in the optics of the screen only. VR keeps you in technology’s environment, whereas AR puts the technology in your environment.

If the consumer applications aren’t evident yet, have a look at a few that have already set the trend. All you have to do is follow.

• Face-apps: Think about your usual browsing on a face-app like Snapchat. You’re messaging friends, sending ‘snaps’ of yourself, and also flipping through some snazzy filters. Those filters place dog ears on your head, or they give you big googly eyes, or they enhance your cheekbones and add a little blush. You are transformed.

  If you’re a beauty-based, accessories or even skin-art business that is marketing to Gen Z and millennials, you can be sure that they’re happy to experiment with whatever you set out on an AR app. Your consumer is the “before”; figure out how to superimpose the “after” part of your product’s use, be it an eyeliner, a pair of earrings or a tattoo.

• Product ‘placement’ at home: Ever had to convince your consumer that your hardware is perfect for their home (and somehow perfect for every other person you’re selling it to)? IKEA and Wayfair are two furniture companies that commit to this mission of personalisation. Through their AR apps, you are able to look at a bed, sofa, lamp, anything that they’re selling, then transport its virtual figure onto your own floor. You can see if it's a good size, if it complements the wall colours, and quite simply, if it truly fits.

  This solves an old problem of not being sure whether what you buy in the store is what you really want in your living room. Be it plush sofas and chairs, wall decals of some blackbirds, or a large stereo-system, your product can only be enhanced by its digitisation in this way.

• Gaming your consumer’s surroundings: This is perhaps the most-cited example of AR - in 2016, Pokemon released Pokemon GO, an app you could download onto your phone, and use to spot the little fantasy critters on a street, in a park or anywhere in the city! As you walk around your neighbourhood, empty spaces are reimagined on your phone screen with AR, where you can catch Pokemon, train them and make them combat with other trainer’s Pokemon.

  You don’t have to be a video-game producer to be good at this - if you can incentivise your consumer to hunt out your product, you can have them on a bit of a treasure hunt soon. Say you’re a restaurant or food-delivery service; you could create an AR app that helps your customer source the “deals” around your physical outlets. Verify your consumer’s “visit” once they hover around your place, and then let them have 30% off of their next home delivery. Deals are an easy incentive, and something like this also encourages the customer to drop by on a daily route. The applications of something like this are just based on how well you can “gamify” or create a game-like task for your consumer that follows a travel=reward formula.

• Animating your consumer’s environment This is a great way to increase consumer engagement with your product, and well, your commercial field in general. Similar to the AR involved in Pokemon GO, you can stimulate the consumer when they’re enjoying a walk outside, but with information they’re likely to want. Particularly if you’re selling something that is environmentally-geared.

  For example, if you’re a brand that deals in herbal health products, you can relocate product information for the consumer through their own environment! By mapping the green spaces of local public gardens, tree-covered paths, larger nature reservations, you can produce an AR map that contains informational “checkpoints” - a friendly augmented guide-person with interesting facts about the mint tree they are next to, or maybe a digitally-created flower that contains historical information about the aloe vera in the area.

• Supporting your user through visuals If you run a mental-health service, this application should be interesting for you. Research has been done through virtual reality experiments on acrophobics, i.e., those with a fear of heights. These experiments optically simulate a highly-located position, akin to the top of a skyscraper, to expose acrophobics to the experience of heights without the potential danger of it in their minds.

  For example, if you’re a brand that deals in herbal health products, you can relocate product information for the consumer through their own environment! By mapping the green spaces of local public gardens, tree-covered paths, larger nature reservations, you can produce an AR map that contains informational “checkpoints” - a friendly augmented guide-person with interesting facts about the mint tree they are next to, or maybe a digitally-created flower that contains historical information about the aloe vera in the area.

With AR, you could recreate something similar through a phone app for your consumers with anxiety, depression or other conditions that can be combated through the right visuals. This could be the superimposing of calming colours onto the physical environment around them, or of digital figures/icons that they can render by choice into their room for support. The point here is that you are familiar with your consumer’s personal affliction, you already reproduce the usual ways of suggesting fixes, and yet, can still stand to enhance their experience with you in a way that is unique from the way you help another user.

The growing worth of AR, especially in a world that is more digital, more socially-distanced, should make you think twice about how well you can stand to know your customer. 

And in short, you must take a step towards identifying the new conveniences of the digitally-inclined consumer.