Alex Meisl urges mobile marketers to take a long-term, strategic view of mobile technologies – including augmented reality

Alex Meisl urges mobile marketers to take a long-term, strategic view of mobile technologies – including augmented reality

Chairman of mobile marketing company Sponge, Alex Meisl, spends a lot of time urging any marketer who’s interested in mobile to take the strategic view.

“As always, it’s not about doing it ‘because you can’; it’s about finding effective and (ideally) arresting ways of satisfying your customers better than the competition, and doing so in a manner that complements your overall brand and communications plan,” he stated.

While 2010 has been a year of significant progress, he said retail’s adoption of mobile remains in its infancy. “Research we conducted in the summer found that 40% of retailers had yet to use mobile in any form whatsoever; while two-thirds had yet to optimise their website for mobile browsers. More recently, the iAB’s research indicated that 92% of retailers have yet to launch a transactional mobile site or app.”

Given that there are clearly a lot of foundations still to be put in place, he asked is there a role at the moment for augmented reality? Or is it simply a distraction?

“Let’s start with a definition,” he said. Augmented reality (AR) has been described as “the merging of real-world environments with useful information,” typically by pointing the camera in your smartphone at a place or object. If you haven’t seen it in action, spend five minutes googling: Stella Artois Le Bar; London Tube Stations AR; or Wikitude World Browser AR.

As such, it’s essentially another location-based service (LBS), he added. “Given its ability to connect a shopper with a shop, or a brand within a shop, LBS is a hot topic in retail and mobile right now,” Meisl continued.

Building brand awareness

“You may already have read about some of the stuff that’s going on: for instance, the location-based messaging that O2 is undertaking for Starbucks and L’Oreal; or Gap’s use of Foursquare to make its online activity location-aware.”

And, with 13.5 million people in the UK now accessing the internet via mobile – many of them looking for local information such as opening hours, film times, menus or prices – he added that mobile search is definitely another form of LBS.

“So the first and most obvious question to ask is: what could AR do for me that these other Location-Based Services couldn’t – especially since the alternatives are likely to be both quicker and cheaper to implement?” he questioned.

“Part of the answer is to do with breadth of context. It’s relatively easy to see the relevance of an AR solution that provides virtual wayfaring in a large shopping centre. Or World Duty Free doing something similar in airport terminals.

“By the same token, a supermarket, department store or a big shed retailer could use AR not just to help shoppers find products (in an evolution of Tesco’s Product Finder app), but also to discover relevant background information. This could range from product specs to stock availability, all the way to user-generated ratings and reviews. There’s clearly an appetite for these sorts of services. Research by Accenture shows that 73% of smartphone owners would rather use an app for such tasks than ask a member of staff.

“Or finally: imagine an online fashion retailer – ASOS perhaps – using AR to let people view a celeb picture in a magazine and then matching the clothes worn to similarly styled items. That would be more than just fun; it would be a very direct sales stimulus,” he said.

Set the strategy first

All of these examples have a strategic and a commercial validity. But in every instance, he also said an alternative exists: “Be that mobile search, or mapping, or barcode scanning, or QR codes. Many of which will have advantages in terms of either cost or speed to market.”

So, to return to our earlier question: is there a genuine role for AR, or is it more likely to be a distraction?

“Overall, it’s difficult to think of more than a handful of retail brands that currently have a fully coherent and excellently delivered mobile strategy,” Meisl explained. “For them, AR could well be a way of generating further customer engagement, stretching their lead over the competition, and generating valuable PR, as IBM did so well with its Wimbledon app.

“For the rest of the category, however, the requirement is to address the basics first,” he advised. “Do customers coming to your website via mobile get a good experience? Can they buy from you via mobile? Are you using the immediacy of mobile to support and enhance your CRM programme?”

He continued: “If you can’t say ‘yes’ to all of the above, I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about AR just yet.”