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.

More good Layar SDK news! We’ve recently released another update to the SDK as we continue to make it as easy as possible to embed your own Augmented Reality (AR) experiences into your own iOS and Android apps.

We’ve always put an emphasis on allowing you to customize your AR experience as much as possible to fit your brand and meet the needs of your users. With the latest update you can now take more control of your AR scenes than ever before. How? Event handlers!

The introduction of event handlers means you can have actions or POI updates triggered by certain events within your scene. This enables you to add more complex functionality to your experiences, including sequencing of videos and dynamic content without the need for an external server.

Here are the new event types you can use to custom-script your AR scene…

onLoad – Triggered when the object has been loaded successfully.
onClick – Triggered when the object has been clicked (similar behaviour as the POI action).
onPlaybackStart – Triggered when the video or audio object playback has started.
onPlaybackFinish – Triggered when the video or audio object playback has finished.

All of these events can trigger new actions, content updates (including adding or removing objects from the scene) or even a custom handler that can be reused for multiple objects and on different events.

This powerful new feature allows AR scenes to be even more engaging and interactive for the user in various ways. If you’re an existing SDK user, check your inbox for links to the latest version and check out the developer documentation page for more details.

If you’re interested in using the SDK, you can try it now for free! Have questions before you start? Let us know, or join our upcoming webinar at the end of the month.

Back in February we told you about the Scandinavian celebrity news magazine SE og HØR (“SEE and HEAR”) which had made use of the Layar SDK to bring Augmented Reality capabilities to its mobile apps.

Readers of the Danish edition of the magazine can gain access to exclusive videos, background stories, photo galleries, interactive polls, contests and much more simply by scanning the pages of the magazine.

Now we have more exciting news… SE og HØR has been given three Danish Internet Awards nominations for their unique and engaging AR integration. Here are the categories in which the project was nominated.

• Social Technology/API
The award is given to a company/organization that in the most superior way utilizes social media technology to promote engagement, sharing, publishing and/or monitoring.

• Mobile Platform
Given to the mobile app or mobile site that best exploits the mobile channel to provide users with a high degree of value when and where the user demands it.

• Branded Utility
Given to the brand that has developed a tool or service for a digital platform which gives the user a brand related added value.

“It’s nothing short of fantastic that we have been nominated so early on in our process. And not only in one but in three categories,” says the editor in chief of SE og HØR, Niels Pinborg. “Our goal has been to create loyalty between our readers, the magazine and advertisers. The fact that the industry is recognizing our work and our vision is a bonus we didn’t expect. I’m extremely proud and honored.”

The awards ceremony takes place on April 27th at the Wallmans Cirkusbygningen in Copenhagen. Best of luck to SE og HØR with their nominations!

Good news! We’ve recently updated the Layar SDK as we continue to make it as easy as possible to embed your own Augmented Reality (AR) experiences into your own iOS and Android apps.

Having the freedom to customize your AR experience to fit your brand and your users’ needs has always been a cornerstone of the Layar SDK, and with this latest update we aim to continue that tradition. So what’s new in the latest version?

Custom Location Provider
You no longer need to rely solely on the built-in GPS of the user’s device to get location data. Now you can hook into any location provider that you choose. For example, you can use iBeacons to create a more accurate location-based AR experience when indoors.

A note to developers: the Layar SDK simply allows for a custom location provider but does not include any alternative providers itself, that part is up to you!

More Custom Callbacks
We’ve added more callbacks that give you more control over the look-and-feel of your experience. For Geo Layers, you can now opt to remove the compass and the messages shown at the top which usually pertain to the number of results found nearby.

These changes make it even easier to create your own customized AR experience, whether that means creating a custom look or using advanced custom location providers to make a more engaging experience.

If you’re an existing SDK user, check your inbox for instructions on updating your SDK. Or if you’re interested in using the SDK, you can try it now for free!