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.

House of Fraser, one the U.K.’s largest premium department store chains, is now offering its customers a unique mobile shopping experience with Augmented Reality (AR) technology from Layar.

By integrating the powerful Layar SDK into its existing mobile app, House of Fraser now allows customers to “Scan to Explore” and shop for products directly from its catalogue through AR. Customers can quickly shop and access immersive content, like videos, music 3D product previews, recipes and lookbooks.

The Layar SDK allows for a seamless integration of AR technology into existing mobile applications. House of Fraser also used the app commerce platform Poq to quickly and easily create a customized mobile AR experience for their customers.

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^{Welcome to HTML Week here on the Layar blog where we’ll be taking a look at some of the great ways you can bring print alive with HTML widgets in the Layar Creator. We’ll provide a closer look at how each example was built, and provide you with some resources to add similar techniques to your own projects. Each example we feature can be found in the completely refreshed and updated LAYARED Magazine! Get yours today and see how interactive print is creating more engaging reader experiences!}

Today for HTML Week we are taking a look at one of our several ecommerce solutions found in LAYARED Magazine. Print is often advertising a product being sold, and now readers can buy items right off the page with interactive print!

We have multiple mobile shopping examples in LAYARED Magazine. On page 18, scanning the advertisement for a men’s briefcase brings up photos and information on similar products, and on page 22, you can interact with detailed information about the products found in the photo spread. But be sure to check out page 20 where things get really interesting!

Simple Shopping Cart

Everyone these days is familiar with an online shopping, and some may have even purchased an item from the mobile device via the web. In this example, we offer a way to bring the shopping cart experience in augmented reality with interactive print.

Essentially this example is a proof of concept, showing how the Layar App can handle “cookies” of information which can be translated into an actual shopping cart experience. On page 20 of LAYARED Magazine, you’ll see an ad for several products, including a wristwatch. Scanning with Layar displays two widgets – one for picking a color and adding the item to a cart, and one for viewing your cart info and proceeding to checkout.

When a user taps on one of the three color squares, the color of the watch in the magazine changes, much like in a traditional web-based shopping experience. This is accomplished with some simple jQuery code. There are many ways to accomplish this effect, but we chose the simplest route.

First we stacked the three different images of the watch on top of each other, but set two to be “hidden.” When a user taps on one of the colored swatches, the corresponding watch image is set from “hidden” to “visible,” and the watch which was previously “visible” is then made “hidden.” It’s a really simple, quick and easy way to showcase different colors of products with interactive print.

Tapping “Add to Cart” then stores the chosen product as a “cookie.” The top widget tracks the changes on this “cookie” and changes the number of items whenever a product is added to the cart. Readers can then tap the link to proceed to checkout with the shopping cart they have filled. In our case, it’s a dummy shopping cart so no product can actually be purchased, but it shows how a shopping cart experience can easily be implemented.

Layar behaves like a normal web browser, which means you can use normal HTML tactics to display different AR content based on user input, providing for a more personalized experience for readers. Here’s more about how this widget works:

• Uses jQuery and “cookies” to save information.
• Multiple “Add to Cart” buttons and widgets could be used.
• More features and options could be added: color, quantity, size, design, etc.
• The ultimate version of the shopping cart widget would allow one widget to be used throughout an entire campaign.

More: Photo Grid & Animated Ad

Of course, the shopping cart isn’t the only ecommerce example found in LAYARED Magazine. Check out page 18 for a dynamic photo grid and page 22 for an animated advertisement. Here’s a little more on how we made these great interactive items.

For the photo grid, we wanted to showcase some similar products to the one in the photo. Using similar jQuery tricks we mentioned yesterday with the Lonely Planet map, we created some slick animation effects and slideshows to provide more information about each product. Alternatively, you could add “Buy now!” buttons for each product and connect it with a shopping cart widget.

The animated ad on page 22 was created to show off the possibilities of simple animation with jQuery. Tapping the button which appears on the page animates more buttons which hover over the various products. Tapping these buttons triggers slick animated windows that provide the reader with added information about the product.

Like a lot of HTML examples, it seems complicated but is actually relatively simple to create using the jQuery tactics we’ve gone over so far in HTML Week.

That’s it for today’s examples! Be sure to keep it here tomorrow as well as we wrap up HTML Week with our final widget example!

Click here to read the Dutch press release!

Layar has teamed up with popular Dutch home decor catalogue vtwonen to help change the way readers make purchases.

With the latest vtwonen “magalogue” (a combination magazine/catalogue), readers can scan the pages and instantly buy the items they like.

Items for sale in the pictures appear with a button to purchase the items when scanned with Layar. The links take readers directly to vtwonen’s mobile shopping site where they can instantly purchase the items and pay with PayPal. It’s also easy to just add items to a shopping cart and save them for later.

Anita Beijl, marketing manager for vtwonen, calls the Layar implementation the “ultimate print shopping experience,” and adds that Layar makes it easy to quickly expand the brand to new platforms.

Try it yourself on the vtwonen magalogue, available today, or simply test one of the pages after the jump. Check out the video below to see the magalogue in action! And for those that speak Dutch, be sure to watch our interview with Martijn van der Neut of vtwonen!

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