The marketing sphere revolves around mobile technologies like never before. Brands are pushing discount codes to customers’ mobile phones, sharing new product pages through social media and rewarding shoppers for checking in at retail locations. Car wash operators should also know about two other mobile marketing tools — augmented reality and facial recognition — that are gaining traction.
AUGMENTED REALITY: SEEING LIFE WITH NEW EYES
Augmented reality (AR) has been around for some time, but Shane Stearns, director of innovation at Austin, Texas-based Mutual Mobile, says a recent resurgence is making the technology — and its applications in retail — feel fresh and new. “Really, the first AR-like technology was introduced four or five years ago, and has been around with iPhone and Android for a while,” Stearns said.
One common use case centers on object recognition, where a mobile device is used to recognize an object, and the application displays content related to that item or product.
But while object recognition has seen some use in the retail sector, such as when a consumer snaps a photo of a product for comparative shopping purposes, the release of Apple’s ARKit as part of iOS 11 has moved the technology to the forefront.
“Instead of looking for an object, it looks for more complex mapping using image processing through the phone’s camera,” Stearns said.
With this type of AR technology, an application can locate a flat surface in a room, such as the floor or a table, and then project content—a house with decorative landscaping, for example —onto that surface in a way that makes it look like it’s really inhabiting space within the room.
Marketers in such diverse industries as furniture and automotive are already deploying AR with good success. Shopping for a new coffee table or a set of chairs can be time consuming. Home furnishing retailers can use today’s AR technology to remove some of the guesswork. “People can drop a couch in their own living room to see what it looks like,” said Kristin Sheppard, Mutual Mobile’s director of content. It can also offer shoppers similar benefits in the automotive sector. “Want to see if a Maserati fits in your garage? You can try it on for size,” Sheppard said. Car owners may soon be able to take vehicle accessories or other in-car items for a test drive using similar AR applications.
Marketers are also looking to AR technology to broaden engagement while customers are in the store, by removing friction around impulse or follow-on purchases. “A customer might know they really like a couch, but they don’t know how it looks with a particular lamp,” Stearns said.
For areas of a store that are low on traffic, AR could provide ways to draw customers’ attention.
According to Stearns, they can make an unexciting, non-interactive place more interactive by introducing AR. An AR experience layer added to an area that isn’t getting a lot of interest could help to boost sales and keep customers engaged.
Retailers and software developers still have a lot to discover when it comes to deploying AR technology. “Brands are just starting to scratch the surface of ways to aid in the decision-making process,” Stearns said. The deployment of shareable experiences using AR being one of the next uses on the horizon.
For instance, it might soon be possible to have multiple people using their phones at the same time to interact with the same AR experience. “It’s a great conversation starter,” Stearns said.
With many brick-and-mortar locations struggling to connect with consumers who are spending more of their money online, what Stearns calls a “retailtainment” aspect of shopping could help to change that. “If you can add more entertainment and excitement to the retail experience, AR could play a role there,” he said.
Bringing together a blend of reality and fantasy plays well in the AR sphere because it also offers retailers a number of fun capabilities to help engage consumers and make their shopping experience more compelling. “Just as people are trying furniture in a room, something like a SnapChat filter may allow them to try on an outfit or a costume, and then buy it,” Sheppard said.
Clothing, home décor and furniture — retail brands are finding wider use for AR technology within their marketing programs. With the strides brands have already made, this is a great time for retailers to take notice of AR and see if there’s a place for it in their strategy.
FACIAL RECOGNITION: MAKING THE CASE FOR THE FACE
Facial recognition is another technology making serious inroads into the retail market. Crowd analytics, which blends the power of facial recognition into the ubiquitous big data mix, is one popular use. “Basically, it’s passively measuring consumers or shoppers as they come in and out of a retail property,” said Ben Virdee-Chapman, chief design officer and head of product at facial recognition platform provider Kairos in Miami. That could be a brick-and-mortar store, a shopping mall or strip mall, even a supermarket or gas station. “It then extracts the demographic data of those people, so things like age, gender, even ethnicity,” he said.
In recent years, emotional data has also begun to be harvested using facial recognition technology, an evolution that aims to help marketers and property owners better understand how visitors are feeling. For years, stores have employed greeters and people working near the entrance to not only engage with customers, but also to get a feeling for the emotional state of shoppers — their interest in nearby display items, for example, or whether their visits are relaxed or harried.
According to Virdee-Chapman, the facial recognition technology now allows retailers to do this at scale automatically. Images are gathered either with an existing security network camera setup, or by installing new cameras. “You can now deliver this data with far more accuracy, and retailers get more usable information on their consumers,” he said.
Beyond the obvious applications of better understanding who’s visiting a retail location, there are more nuanced uses for facial recognition technology that marketers should understand. With improved demographic data in hand, facial recognition gives retailers data on a per-store as well as system-wide basis.
“Because we know who’s in store, we can tailor our displays, we can tailor our marketing messages and even how we interact with customers from an employee point of view,” Virdee-Chapman said. That information can then be applied not just at one location, but across the entire region or organization. How does the Monday lunchtime crowd differ from customers who visit on Saturday morning?
“It’s measuring the consumer, analyzing the data and then determining how to use this to affect the bottom line,” Virdee-Chapman said.
With the data returned through facial recognition technology, retailers can also look at ways to improve the out-of-store experience. It’s a critical component in any marketing strategy, given the proliferation of mobile commerce.
“It’s about placing orders or purchasing things away from the store,” Virdee-Chapman said. “We think that’s going to be a big area of growth.”
If facial recognition is used to identify return customers, for example, the store may be able to bring up past purchases. Shopping or wish lists the person has created online could also be linked. “If you set those up away from the store, then when you go into the store and you’re in the system, there’s an experience created,” Virdee-Chapman said.
Facial recognition could be an important component of developing more personalized shopping experiences and more engaging in-store visits, but Virdee-Chapman cautions retailers to be mindful in how they make those connections. He says that avoiding the appearance of being creepy is a common question his team hears. “I think it really comes down to thinking about the benefits from the consumer’s point of view,” he said.
To reassure shoppers, brands may consider making it known that store cameras are being used for things other than security. “You can start to sell the idea that you removed friction from the checkout process, and that happens to be done with facial recognition,” Virdee-Chapman said. This approach provides the kind of transparency consumers increasingly demand, and also allows them to understand that their experience is key.
Another potential application, which isn’t quite here yet but Virdee-Chapman believes is on the horizon, is the implementation of facial recognition for payments. “Apple recently launched its new Face ID, which is probably going to be the driver of the adoption around payments with facial recognition,” Virdee-Chapman said.
Customers have long been able to pay using cash or a credit card, and the options recently expanded to include digital wallets, such as Mastercard PayPass and Apple Pay. “With those you’re touching your phone on the POS system,” Virdee-Chapman said. “Now it’s looking likely you’ll be able to take a selfie and
reconcile your shopping.”
It’s possible that facial recognition technology could also one day give shoppers access to targeted coupons linked to loyalty cards and similar retention programs.