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.

Bzenia, a family-owned and operated luxury organic winemaker from the Czech city of Bzenec, recently teamed up with design agency Little Greta to add a bit of Augmented Reality flair to the company’s bottles.

As part of a project to refresh the label of Bzenia wine, Little Greta made use of Layar’s technology to enhance the label with interactive AR elements. Nicknamed “your personal sommelier” or the “genie in the bottle,” the added AR content allows customers to view a short video showing the winery owners sharing interesting trivia about each bottle’s unique contents.

To access the content, customers need only to scan the bottle’s label with the free Layar App, available for iOS and Android.

“The AR features have been commended by many of Bzenia’s customers, even to the point where Bzenia’s very own clientele requested AR to be featured on the bottles Bzenia produced exclusively for them as Christmas gifts,” said Little Greta. “Thanks to Layar, Bzenia was able to boost their sales and enhance its reputation as a technology pioneer among Czech wineries.”

To try it yourself, head on over to our client examples page and scan the bottle with the Layar App!

Earlier this year we shared an interesting client example from Food & Home Entertaining (F&HE, published by Caxton Magazines), a South African magazine which had partnered with grocery store chain SPAR to offer a recipe contest to readers with Interactive Print. Building off the success of that campaign, the pair have teamed up again to make a special December issue for the holidays with loads of interactive content.

Working with Layar partner Digital Narrative, F&HE has included 18 Interactive Print pages that reveal video recipe tutorials, secret ingredients, bonus recipes, tips and even prizes when scanned with the Layar App. By watching, video demos from the magazine’s food editor Thulisa Martins, readers can win vouchers to SPAR stores, as well as hand-picked kitchen gadgets and cookbook hampers.

Click on the images below and scan them with Layar to see how the holiday edition of F&HE comes to life with Layar.

“We’ve been bringing a lot of our print content to life through Augmented Reality on our various magazine titles as it enhances the reader’s experience by giving them access to exclusive content,” said Jana Kleinloog, Digital Manager at Caxton Magazine. “The Food & Home Entertaining audience is really interacting with us via this medium especially when Layar gives them useful content like cooking tutorial videos and extra recipes.”

“It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with Caxton Magazines and SPAR on this interactive issue,” said Johan Walters, Director of Digital Narrative. “We are firm believers in adding magic to print and look forward to engage the mobile savvy Food & Home Entertaining reader.”

Judith Gale, Group Brands Manager for SPAR, commented that the use of Layar’s Interactive Print technology in the magazine “truly makes the dishes come alive and even easier to make.”

Beverage company Crystal Light launched a magazine advertising campaign with a twist – Layar’s interactive print technology!

Readers of various magazines in the U.S. will see the “Color Me Stylish” Crystal Light ads. Some of the ads feature black-and-white illustrations which can be brought to life with color by scanning with the Layar App.

In this example, scanning the ad brings up a nicely-designed widget that lets the reader view different illustrations for different flavors and colors of Crystal Light. The products in the illustration change color and can be tapped to view more info.

Try it yourself! Click the image to the right to view a larger version that you can scan with the Layar App. It’s a fine example of what’s possible with the Layar Creator.

Often here on the blog we share examples from magazines, newspapers and other print products that bring their pages alive with interactive print. But interactive print goes beyond just “print” in the traditional sense.

Maza, makers of mediterranean delicacies like falafel and houmous, are the latest in a growing group of brands using Layar to enhance the packaging of its products. And what’s even more impressive is that the do-it-yourself nature of the Layar Creator allowed Maza to quickly create a really terrific user experience all on their own.

By scanning the packaging of Maza’s products, customers can get links to recipes built around specifically around those items. As you can see from the photos below (click to see larger versions), Maza produced a great looking, unique campaign for its customers without any development work needed.

We caught up with Maza’s Roberto Oberegger, who put the campaign together, to get a closer look at how Maza used Layar to bring interactivity to its product packaging.

How did your hear of Layar, and how did you decide to use it on your products?
I think I read about Layar long ago and then I saw some advertisements. We started using the Layar App on some of our own advertisements because we have a lot to explain about our products (especially in the Dutch market) and what is possible to do with them. When we started to redesign our packaging, Layar was part of it from the very start.

What inspired this campaign?
We wanted to be among the first in the food industry to use Layar on packaging. We also wanted to add some more info to our products that we can change every season or every month.

What are the challenges for interactive packaging?
I think the majority of smartphone or tablet users don’t think about a houmous cup being “Layared,” but we are still convinced that this is the future of on-package communication.

Interactive print continues to grow in popularity and it’s incredible to see these kinds of campaigns - campaigns which would have previously required weeks of planning and AR development - quickly launched with ease. It’s a testament to the ease and versatility of the Layar Creator.

As for Maza, the company says it will be enhancing all of their product packaging with Layar going forward.