Creating Authentic Experiences in Your Research Through Virtual Reality

Business leaders across all industries are seeking ways to capture more realistic customer behaviors and reactions. Based on our experience with leading brands, we believe Virtual Reality (VR) is able to achieve more authentic perspectives on key business issues (relative to other digital collection methodologies).

VR is often brought into the research methodology when the desire is to capture more “in-the-moment” experiences.  While the concept of VR is not new, the quality of the experience and the ability to apply it more readily has improved dramatically.

Marketing and product teams can bring customers into a fully immersive and interactive environment more easily than ever.  This allows these teams to learn how customers interact with floor plans, displays, shelves, packages, and anything else we place within a virtual world.  And it does so in a way this is logistically more practical than other alternatives.

For several of our clients, this has meant creating customized environments, 3D packages, and other stimuli to test unique variables and observe how customers respond.  Our qualitative specialists are there to ensure key learning objectives are achieved.

View our VR demo to learn more:

Based on these experiences we’ve seen 4 key benefits that the latest VR tools deliver:

1. Enabling realistic learning across multiple touch points along the shopper journey

• Environment Engagement: Customers are immersed in a virtual environment and behave as they normally would in the real world by shopping the store as well as the shelf.
• Product/Package Engagement: Customers interact with individual packages using 2D or 3D assets
• Purchase Behaviors: Customers make purchase choices based on the stimuli outlined above.
  

2. Obtaining qualitative and quantitative measures of attention, interaction and navigation

• Optional eye tracking can be employed to obtain a more granular understanding across these metrics

3. Providing the most realistic, flexible and cost-effective way to learn quickly outside of a physical environment

• True to life: Captures behaviors comparable to what we’d see in the real world
• Fast & Iterative: Allows for the rapid evaluation of multiple options/designs
• Flexible: Gathers behavioral data, eye tracking, purchase decisions, and deep dives into attitudes and motivations
• Cost effective: Avoids expense of physical prototypes
• Portable: Tests anywhere quickly and easily

4. Allowing for a wide range of business applications, only limited by your imagination

• Point of sale, merchandising displays & signage
• In store marketing campaigns
• In-context primary 3D packaging
• Plan-o-Gram optimization including shelf design, pricing strategy, product mix, category layout
• Brand architecture or refresh
• Discontinuous store of the future environments & innovations outside of category norms

Want to learn more about how VR can address your business issues? Contact us.