In Part I, we discussed examples of augmented reality best practice in any general retail environment. This post will now address Part II: How to tackle retail challenges, specifically food retail marketing, with augmented reality. Much has been said about how technology can help bridge the growing gap between retail and digital, however this will be taken to a new level through the incorporation of AR.

If used correctly, AR marketing will do wonders for your business. Not only does it promote the notion that your business is at the forefront of technology, but it also creates a more efficient, effective and engaging experience for your customers.

Aside from the previously mentioned points in Part I, the following are specific ways to use augmented reality in food retail marketing.

Recipe Calculator
An obstacle that many tend to face when cooking a meal, especially for a dinner party, is knowing the necessary amount of ingredients for a recipe. Augmented reality offers a solution to this.

When a customer sees a delicious recipe in a supermarket magazine, they can scan the page and select the number of people to cook for. This would display the exact amount of ingredients needed to suit the party. Not only does this make the whole shopping experience easier, but it saves time, money and prevents waste.

Suggest A Meal
Have a favourite vegetable? Customers can use the Layar app on a particular product, and see complementary products that pair well with it. For instance, scanning a page with a red pepper will bring up delicious compatible ingredients, like sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo.

This allows individuals to spice up their usual recipes and ingredient pairs in an innovative and fun manner. Similarly, this encourages customers who have little experience in the kitchen to explore and experiment with new foods and products.

Helpful GIFs
You should also embed helpful GIF animations into your food publications. For example, scanning a recipe page with onions as an ingredient will lead to an animation demonstrating a method of cutting onions without tearing up. This would help those with little experience in the kitchen to master the basic cooking skills, essentially making the whole process simple and fun. Additionally, it adds value to the AR content and diversifies it from promo videos and discounts.

South African food magazine, Food & Home Entertaining, is a prime augmented reality case study. For their Christmas issue, scanning each page provided customers with animations on how to recreate delectable treats - making the festival season that much more fun and interactive.

Price Comparisons
Shoppers like to know that they are getting the best price for what they are buying, and augmented reality is an ideal way to demonstrate that. You should incorporate an HTML widget which clearly displays the price of a specific product compared to other brands, which will easily sway consumer decisions. This would allow your business to position your brand as more affordable than others, thus establishing yourself as the price-leader. It also adds to transparency and openness in communication with stakeholders.

Special Deals Around You
The best two combinations to customers are “food” and “special deals”. If you’re running special deals or discounts on specific products - advertise it! This would promote customer reach and push customers to your store, giving you an advantage over your competitors. This would make it both more efficient and intuitive for shoppers to find the best deals at any given moment, wherever they may be.

Stay tuned for the last part of this blog series discussing augmented reality best practice. Part III will address how to use augmented reality to increase social interactions and brand loyalty, as well as trigger customer feedback flow and communication.

Interested in adding a layer of augmented reality to your campaign? Contact us here.

In our last blog post we revealed some of the retail marketing challenges a major retailer has tackled by integrating Augmented Reality (AR) into their mobile app. Did you download the case study?

Now we’ll show some examples of specific use cases to achieve a variety of marketing goals with AR. Contact us for a tailored approach and extra examples fitting your retail business.

Interactive mannequins
Wondering how to make the shopping experience more fun and engaging, raise brand loyalty and facilitate your mobile app use?

Why not use interactive mannequins placed in the store? Your customers can scan a marker on a mannequin (for example, a t-shirt) and directly try out different item combinations, browse size availability in the store and purchase items with a few taps.

Scannable posters
Similar to making physical items scannable, posters give you the opportunity to engage customers on their mobiles inside or outside of the store.

Place scannable posters inside the store so app users can see where to find items around the aisles, what colors (or flavors) they come in, or even purchase them right away after reading about them or trying them on. Make your store “always-in-stock.”

Posters by cashiers
Queueing and mobile phones go together nowadays. Make that waiting time valuable for your customers and they will be thankful.

If you have contests, promotion codes or discount offers, this is the perfect time to introduce customers to them. It will also increase app downloads and sessions as you can get them to focus on the experiences you provide. This moment is also a great opportunity to get them acquainted with your new app features and explain how to use Augmented Reality.

Scannable offers on items

Some items not selling well or do you want to push an offer? Add a code customers can reveal after scanning an item which the cashier can reimburse with a discount, extra value points or a gift.

Store locator
The store locator feature is what it sounds like – an intuitive way for customers to get to their favorite shop. Through a Geo Layer, your loyal customers can quickly and easily find your nearest shop when they are in a new area or country.

360-Degree Product View
Whether in your catalogue, poster or offer leaflet, an image of a product can be seen in 3D through scanning. Your customers can rotate and zoom it to see all angles so there is no doubt that they want it. This will help them to form a stronger opinion and make a decision.

This is a series of blog posts illustrating the vast variety of use cases depending on your strategy, goals and business type.

Don’t miss Part II next week when we’ll focus specifically on Food Retail marketing with Augmented Reality, and showcase more examples of how to tackle retail challenges with AR.

Part III will discuss how to increase social interactions and brand loyalty as well as trigger customer feedback flow and communication.

Contact us if you want to talk to us about integrating our Augmented Reality SDK to your retail mobile app.

Just over a month ago, the news broke that Metaio, a fellow Augmented Reality provider, had stopped selling its services and had been acquired by Apple. Since then we’ve received a lot of messages from Metaio users inquiring about what Layar has to offer. With that in mind, we’ve created a helpful guide for anyone looking to transition from Metaio.

Read more »

^{By Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar}

This week, in collaboration with Metaio and Wikitude, we here at Layar are very excited to announce that we are adding cross-platform interoperability into our mobile Augmented Reality apps. This will allow location based content (like Geo Layers) to be viewed on any of three AR browser platforms – The Layar App, Metaio’s junaio browser and the Wikitude app – regardless of which platform the content was created for.

Back in February at Mobile World Congress, we came together with Metaio and Wikitude to demonstrate cross-platform interoperability during an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) workshop. As of today, these capabilities are now supported by all three platforms. We will include interoperability in version 8.3 of the Layar App which is coming soon.

Publishers of location-based AR experiences can now use a single platform to create and publish their content and can use the new “ar://” scheme to promote their work. Users can open these experiences on any of the three AR browsers.

Right now, interoperability supports simple location-based points of interest (POIs) with a title, description and image. They can have basic actions with custom labels, including link to a website, get directions, make a call or SMS, play video or audio and send an email.

Features not supported include 3D models, complex interactions (scripting, server calls) and animations. The format used to exchange AR content is CARIF (PDF), which is based on ARML 2.0.

This is a huge step towards interoperability between the various AR platforms. We view this as only a first step, as a lot of work still needs to be done to get full interoperability between the various AR browsers.

We’re happy to see that our three companies were able to work together in such a constructive way to alleviate the pain of developers of AR experiences that have to work with so many different platforms. I’m looking forward to continuing this journey, and hoping that more companies can join this effort.

Newspapers around the globe – from national dailies to local weeklies – are using Interactive Print to boost revenue and reader engagement. Given this growth, we thought it was a great time to share our insights on how AR adds value to this industry.

Yesterday we hosted another of our popular webinars in which our North American Director of Business Development Nigel Newton detailed how Interactive Print can benefit the newspaper industry. We also shared great Interactive Print examples from papers all over the world.

These included the Toronto Star and Glacier Media from Canada, De Volkskrant and Wegener Media from the Netherlands, Folio Magazine from the United States and Lancashire & North West from the United Kingdom, among several others.

To accompany to the webinar, we’ve created a Newspaper Industry Overview, which dives into trends, methods and the 6 business benefits of Interactive Print for newspapers. Visit our Layar for Newspapers page to download the overview and to download the slides and recording of the webinar!