Immersive experiences appeal to multiple senses, making XR a new frontier of storytelling, co-creation and insight. As gathering components of marketing, this is the element that drives meaningful brand evolution over time.
A continuous brand evolution is essential for growth. Of course, customers expect brands to improve, adapt and innovate in response to the changing market, and those that stay stagnant, risk becoming irrelevant. XR technologies offer brands the opportunity to evolve within the immersive space — if they are willing to embrace visions that comes with the new technology.
So what happens at the fundamental level? XR experiences reshape how customers perceive a brand. They can step inside a brand’s virtual or augmented realities, and gain the capability to interact directly with products, connect with employees and co-create alongside other customers. The insights gathered through these interactions, combined with companies’ abilities to prototype and test XR experiences, can help brand evolve, because it contains a direct consumer input.
The pioneers of new forms of storytelling leverage VR simulations, AR overlays and environments enabled by spatial computation. Storytelling is a proven strategy for brands, and by making it immersive, there is an opportunity to forge strong connections with audiences that translate into loyalty and advocacy over time. A long-term loyalty is what every brand should strive for, as it signals a strong capability of the company to navigate the ever-changing business dynamics.
The transformative potential in this case then lies at the intersection of immersive experiences, interactive storytelling and real-time customer insights that fuel an ongoing cycle of innovation and improvement. Let’s have a look at how to leverage these capabilities and navigate this new frontier of marketing, sales and customer service in the years ahead.
Spatializing Customer Experiences
Spatial computing is only a recently emerged term within the marketing sphere. The easy way to understand it is to imagine digital objects that are used for interacting in space, whether it is digital (VR) or physical (AR/MR). Collective virtual worlds or 3D shared virtual spaces can then function just like “regular” space of gathering — they provide always-on, life-like virtual environments for brands to inhabit alongside customers.
XR is also moving beyond just marketing into transforming experiences across the entire customer journey.
Virtual reality is being used for employee training, consumer product demonstrations, hands-on prototyping in design collaboration, and remote expert support in customer service.
Augmented reality is powering interactive product catalogs, assembly guides, installation instructions and gamified sales tools. Even virtual and hybrid events are utilizing XR to deliver memorable brand experiences.
In all of these applications, XR solutions provide a combination of visual, auditory and haptic stimuli. Customers can touch, manipulate and inhabit brand worlds. And if brands utilize the interactive components well, it will drive loyalty, advocacy and willingness to spend.
Telling Immersive Stories
How does immersive storytelling look like? As interactive narratives that respond to users’ actions and inputs in real time. Users can inhabit brand worlds, influencing how stories unfold through their choices and interactions. Current marketing strategies are rooted in passive consumption of information, which does not give customers the opportunity to participate in brand formation. When customers feel they have influenced or helped shape a brand’s narrative, they form an attachment, which is the utmost lifetime value for any business.
XR storytelling also humanizes brands by highlighting the real people behind them. Through virtual human interactions, virtual tours of workplaces, and 360-degree views of production facilities, brands reveal the heart and soul that brings them to life — that helps them stand out in an oversaturated marketplace. It reveals the humanity behind.
Involving Customers in Co-creation of the Brand
XR solutions offer the ability to gather customer insights and feedback within branded virtual worlds. Testing products, providing reviews and suggestions, and giving an open feedback while immersed in simulations captures nuances of perception.
And because XR technologies enable real-time-ness, customers can ideate, problem-solve and make decisions alongside brand representatives. That can be via virtual conferencing, co-located virtual spaces and shared annotations in extended reality, where brands gain an inside view of customer needs and preferences as they evolve. This is a great foundation to continuously adjust the strategic direction based on collective intelligence.
Putting ideas into practice
To successfully evolve, companies should focus on practical implementation first. Well-executed cases of leveraging XR are for instance IKEA using IKEA Place for AR-based interior design, Volvo collaborating with Gravity Sketch for virtual car design, and Lexus developing VR showrooms to demo vehicles. Meanwhile, Disney is pioneering metaverse storytelling with experiences like Vader Immortal, and LinkedIn has piloted VR training to onboard new hires.
For brands looking to get started, action steps include:
- Define objectives —Who is your key customer and what’s their journey? How is that relevant to you company and how can that shape your brand?
- Analyze capabilities — Audit your organization’s security, integration, data and device management capabilities to understand scaling requirements.
- Prioritize touchpoints — Determine your highest-value customer or employee experiences that will be the first to transform with XR.
- Pilot solutions — Start with small scale, proof-of-concept projects to demonstrate value, gather learnings and build internal support.
- Scale strategically — Develop an XR roadmap addressing enterprise needs for security, integration, monitoring and support.
- Institutionalize change — Understand that with XR, you are entering a constant improvement cycle. It will be linked to KPIs, compensation and incentives of your company.
After implementing these, the most important is the long-term vision and scalable roadmapping to bridge the gap between ideas and realities.
Takeaway
By creating alternate digital realities that customers can step inside, brands can reshape perceptions and identities through interactive storytelling, real-world simulations and spatial computing. When combined with the ability to gather insights from immersed interactions, companies can co-create directly with customers in real time.
The most transformative potential of XR for brand identities lies at the intersection of experiences, insights and collaboration — if companies can harness these capabilities at scale and link them to an institutionalized process of perpetual evolution. Leveraging this intersection effectively will determine which brands thrive in the digital future and which will be left behind.
Embracing new immersive technologies proactively and viewing them as tools for ongoing transformation will bring the opportunity to stay relevant to many brands, connect meaningfully with customers and evolve continuously in response to any change.
OWNverse provides XR solutions for businesses, creators and enterprises. Consult your case with us and we can find the best solution for your brand together.
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