AR and its role in the world of marketing & sales
AR has immense capabilities and uses in many parts of the product development cycle; however, some of its most useful application might not be its aid in the creation and implementation of products/technologies, but its ability to help create revenue and turn a profit. Yes, AR is not just a tool to aid the product development cycle and implementation, but the actual marketing and sale of the product itself, meaning that it not only saves money during a design process, but also helps generate revenue once the design is ready to be sold.
From selling/marketing to enterprise or directly to consumer, AR has its place in the world as a powerful business marketing and sales tool. In fact, more and more large companies are taking notice of the technology and implementing it. Let’s take Ikea as an example. One of the hardest parts of decorating a room in a house or an apartment is imagining a piece of furniture or a painting in the room. Up until now, the best we had was a combination of measuring tape and our imaginations. Now, however, Ikea has come out with an AR app, Ikea Place, which allows the user to see Ikea furniture in their home. Whether you need a new couch or bed, you take your mobile phone or tablet, point it at the area of the room where you think it might fit, and see your chosen piece of furniture in your room. This is a sure way to get less returns on merchandise, and drive up sales, since you can then purchase the items online if you like them. AR helps reduce friction during the selling process immensely.
Customizable and intricate
But where else can this technology be used for sales, other than for huge furniture retailers? Anywhere where it is valuable to be able to see an object in its actual place can benefit from this – from consumer to enterprise sales.
Take a car dealership, for example. It is important to many buyers to be able to see a car they want in their preferred color, trim and body styling. Although a similar concept to looking at furniture in a room, this is far more intricate. The buyer must be able to see all available finishes of every part in different lighting situations, which changes depending on the viewing angle. Considering the interior door trim, car dealers usually give options such as wooden grain, carbon fiber, brushed aluminum or other glossy finishes. Customers want to see in person the combinations they want, but a dealership cannot possibly have every color combination on the lot for ever model. An AR solution can be created so that the salesman or customer themselves can pull out their mobile phone or tablet, and look at different options for photo realistic finishes, complete with dynamic, real-time light adjustments so the customer can understand what different color/material options will look like in every environment. Using 3 different modes of tracking, customers can see their trim in any situation, whether it’s a part already on a car, a piece of trim by itself at a sales desk or merely a drawn outline of the part. Anything is available to be seen in isolation or as a larger piece of the whole design. Having every option available for viewing at any moment helps convince a customer for a sale far more effectively.
Enterprise
How about enterprise sales? Taking the same car trim example, a trim designer is able to use such a solution as a pitching aid for car companies themselves, presenting them with potentially hundreds of different designs in AR while only utilizing one piece of physical trim. This eliminates the need of a trim designer to bring tens or possibly hundreds of pieces of the same trim with different finishes with them to every meeting. For trim, this may not seem extremely significant to some, but the same problem is more apparent for larger pieces of transportation material, such as bus seats. Different designs of bus seats can be loaded all into the same solution, eliminating the need to create and transport multiple seats to every sales meeting.
Manufacturing and sales
Customizable design is not the only form of business that can benefit from these solutions, though. Even large manufacturing can benefit. Factories, for example, are constantly updating or retrofitting machines to their assembly lines – machines that must be engineered to physically fit perfectly among, and/or work in conjunction with the existing machinery. A designer who creates and retrofits manufacturing machinery, for example, can have an AR solution that allows their clients to be able to visualize exactly how a new factory layout might look, and how new parts might work in conjunction with existing ones. This helps the factory owner to be able to visualize workflow and be more confident in the designer they have chosen. Moreover, a designer can use this tool to sell confidence and proof of concepts to new clients, allowing him or herself to market themselves more effectively.
Versatility
AR solutions are extremely versatile and can be used to market all sorts of different designs. Solutions are able to wow an audience and be used as a sales tool even without the need for a marketing or sales specific solution. If you need a solution for design visualization, or for training and maintenance purposes, these solutions can be adapted to use in the sales and marketing aspect of a business. When selling a product or design, the sales process is driven faster by the use of hyper-realistic visualization, which AR allows the user to achieve and provide to a client, regardless of the original intended use of the solution. If you already have a solution for design or training purposes, for example, but require one specifically for sales, which omits some of the solution options, one can be created extremely quickly, as all the designs and models are already available in an existing solution.
These AR solutions don’t just help drive sales while allowing users to confirm designs to their liking, they also drop the cost of marketing. To sell different finishes on car trims, every finish would need to be printed on a different piece of trim – this costs money to do and takes up space in storage. Even more expensive is our machinery example, showing different designs to a client with large pieces of machinery is extremely expensive when multiple iterations of a design need to be prototyped just to show a client. AR solutions takes care of this by having to create at most just one piece of material – a recognizable tracking point.
AR solutions for sales and marketing helps generate profit as well as reduce cost for the sales team. CADmech Design can create exactly these types of AR solutions, all built custom to include every version of a design to be shown in the best way possible to a client. Any specification that a sales team could need, exactly how each design should look, where the lighting and shading should come from, can be built after a consultation with our XR development team. Contact victor@cadmech.com for more information and a demo, today!
