Hi, my name is Rafael Ospina and I am a Master student at Universidad Icesi in Colombia.
I will introduce some results from our research project called Augmented Reality Game for
Brand Recognition and Recall.
First, Imagine you are in a supermarket.
You are walking through all the corridors and have thousand of products one followed
by the other.
The experience is usually boring and the presentation of the packages and brand names is the only
thing that changes.
It is very hard for a company to make an impact on you, the customer, to highlight their products.
But,
How can we change the customer experience in a retail context?
And, how can we close the gap between the physical and online shops?
One answer is to use Augmented Reality technology which mixes the best characteristics of the
physical world and the digital one.
Different researchers have measured the quality of the user’s experience through AR.
However, here we focused also on the impact of AR on brand recall and recognition.
Brand recall is when the consumer recognizes a brand using only information
from its own memory.
And brand recognition is when consumers recognize and discriminate the brand when any of its
elements is shown.
To test the impact of AR, we selected a coffee brand called Giosma as our target brand.
We designed an AR mobile app which allowed users to have three different experiences:
when looking at the front of the package, people could see different pictures showing
the coffee production process.
When looking at the label, a video showed a farmer talking about the history of Giosma.
And then, when looking at the back, people could play an interactive game.
Thus, we created 3 test groups.
The first one is a traditional retail context called BASE where a user looks three different
coffee products including our target brand.
In the second context, called AR, a user interacts with our target brand using our AR mobile app.
The last context called CONTROL presents a non common scenario where the user spends
all the time looking only at our target brand.
We assigned participants randomly to one of the three groups.
During the interaction, users were recorded to make a post analysis of their reactions.
At the end of the test, participants should answer a UES form about their experience with
the test, and they got a coffee sample with a QR code.
After they left, we measured who explored the qr code.
Also, 24 hours after the test, we sent them a survey to test brand recall and brand recognition.
For brand recall people had to remember the brand name.
After that, for brand recognition, people could select the brand name among four options.
Our participants, were recruited in Universidad Icesi.
They were 35 women and 55 men.
All of them were regular coffee consumers and were experienced mobile users.
After analysing our data, we found the following results.
First, a very important finding is that in comparison to a usual retail experience, AR
interaction improved brand recall and brand recognition, going from 0% in the base group
to 25% when recalling the name and from 38% to 70% for brand recognition.
Second, we found that for brand recall and recognition, AR experience is similar to the
Control group.
However, being focused only in one product during 3 minutes in a retail context is not
a common scene.
On the other hand, AR experience created a less frustrating environment with more engagement
to participants.
Third, with a confidence of 80% we found a relation between the times you see the brand
name and the succes to recall it.
This result favors the AR context which is the scenario with a median of 14 brand views
against 2.5 views for the base group.
Finally, we realized that AR awoke more interest in people to do an omnichannel activity, which
increased 20% in AR compared to the base group.
Additionally, people having the AR experience decided to participate in the omnichannel
activity even 7 days after the test in comparison to 8 hours for the control group and no one
for the base group.
To sum up, experimental results revealed that AR improved brand recall and recognition by
creating an engaging environment.
Also, the AR experience motivated people to participate in an omnichannel activity based
on a QR interaction.
These results show the influence of well-designed AR experiences on brand recall and recognition,
opening the possibility for new technology in retail environments.