Augmented Reality In Marketing – 4 Ways To Promote Your Business

Learn what AR is, why it is not only a marketing fad and how to make your promotional efforts stand out through this emergent technology...

28 Aug 2019 3972 Views

Written by Daria Gîrju

Learn what augmented reality is, why it is not only a marketing fad and how you can make your promotional efforts stand out through this emergent technology.

Person holding smartphone which uses augmented reality technology to project Spider-Man next to a woman standing in the background.
Image 1: Stand side-by-side Spider-Man in his new cinematic adventure, “Into the Spider-Verse”. Source: ScienceFiction.Com

Gone are the days of direct marketing and telemarketing. Instead, we now talk about social media marketing, programmatic ads, remarketing and immersive brand experiences. Consumers are subjected to the law of the limits to attention, which means that the more content is generated, the less likely it is for it to reach the target audience (van Dijk, 2012). This implies that in today’s world, marketers are always on the lookout for new means to catch the attention of consumers who, under the pressure of information overload and empowered by the Internet, are becoming increasingly harder to reach and to impress. The newest trend that promises to make you stand out of both the online and offline informational clutter? Augmented reality, or AR in short.

Wha>What is AR?

times, less technologically-savvy people have a hard time differentiating “augmented reality” from “virtual reality”, two concepts that are closely interrelated. Both technologies are currently enjoying a surge in popularity from the general public, in addition to the keen interest they have been receiving from researchers in multiple fields such as computer science, engineering, medicine, education, gaming, advertising and others (Cipresso, Giglioli, Raya and Riva, 2018). On the one hand, virtual reality refers to the technology which can transport its user to 3D computer-generated environments leading to a fully immersive, interactive and multisensory experience. VR has recently become more popular in gaming thanks to the increased availability of VR devices such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (Cipresso et al., 2018).

On the other hand, augmented reality is different from VR in the sense that digital elements such as images, information or characters are overlaid on real physical environments and can also interact with these environments in real time (Javornik, 2016). Additionally, you don’t need a futuristic-looking helmet to experience AR as many smartphones nowadays support this technology. To best illustrate how augmented reality works, a recent example of a successful application that implements augmented reality is the mobile-game-turned-global-craze, Pokémon GO. The game uses AR technology to superimpose Pokémon characters on the video recorded by the smartphone’s camera, allowing the user to catch Pokémons in real time, right in his or her own backyard (Bastow, 2016).

You might think: “What does a video game have to do with marketing?”. The very same technology can be used to make creative marketing campaigns that can boost your brand’s awareness or can improve the quality of your customer’s journey. For example, a study done on the real estate market shows that AR can enhance the purchase experience because it helps the consumer get a better understanding about the product or service before even experiencing it. More specifically, in high involvement decisions, such as buying a house, the use of AR or VR technologies could reduce the time spent on making the decision to purchase (Sihi, 2018). Read on to find out the four ways in which you can use augmented reality to differentiate yourself from your competition:

1. Design Your Own AR Came>1. Design Your Own AR Camera Filters

gure class="aligncenter">Two pictures of a woman trying on augmented reality filters on Instagram from Kylie Cosmetics and Netflix.
Image 2: Examples of custom Instagram augmented reality filters. On the left, Kylie Cosmetics. On the right, Netflix’s new show, “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”. Source: The author’s own screenshots.