‘Research has shown that Marketing Managers have a tenure in any one position of around 18 months to 2 years. There are exceptions, of course, but that trend can work against the requirements of building an effective digital strategy and, ultimately, a productive online presence.’

Marketing planning is often based around a 12-month calendar, and managers of that plan are charged with increasing sales as a key metric. We understand, however, that success in digital is not just a case of ‘Build a website and they will come’. It takes strategic planning born of deep understanding of how digital is beneficial in your market and best appeals to your audience, and that understanding takes time to develop. Much of this development can be linked to backend digital infrastructure improvements too which, while critical to developing a platform that can deliver well into the future, probably won’t help you reach next week’s sales targets. Faced with that equation, it’s all too easy to view immediate sales results as the only goal.

‘A marketing plan is critical to success in any business,’ says Rhys, ‘but if a marketing plan is only being measured by quarterly or even 12-monthly deliverables then, with all the best intentions, the medium to long-term strategic opportunities of the business maybe sacrificed for short-term success. And this might work for a while, but as consumer behaviour changes and we see the current levels of online sales and other activity increase dramatically, your business will fall further and further behind the competition in terms of digital presence and development. Perhaps fatally so.’

Some of the questions related to medium and long-term digital goals that need to be addressed include:

How do we measure the health of our digital infrastructure? How do we measure the digital needs of our audience? How do we build what they require? And how do we measure the combined effect of all our digital tools?

Ideally, says Rhys, medium to long-term digital goals should be key goals for Marketing Managers along side achieving quarterly sales figures. This will create a proactive digital planning and implementation process within the organisation.

Before you write me off as a nutcase, I’m not talking about the ‘90s-style virtual reality that required you to wear bulky head gear and look like the top half of the robot from Lost In Space. Augmented Reality, known as ‘AR’, enables consumers to physically manipulate 3D objects as displayed on their existing computer and webcam, or a mobile phone, to present interactive overlays on the real world environment. Think Princess Leia’s hologram message in Star Wars and you are pretty close.

One of the most obvious applications for retail is a location-based service that tells you how close you are to the shop you need, or ratings and reviews for nearby restaurants along with instructions on how to get there, which is kind of like a pimped up GPS, where the instructions are superimposed over a real-time camera view of what you’re looking at. There are, however, a lot of other applications for this technology that are rapidly being taken up by both retailers and product manufacturers.

Packaging

In March 2009, Lego used image recognition technology on their packaging to allow consumers to see a final model in 3D prior to purchase. Consumers simply had to hold the Lego box up to an in-store kiosk to get a 3D hologram of the finished model.

In addition to providing powerful pre-purchase imagery, image recognition technology can also display associated information like specification sheets, nutritional information, recipe suggestions or even relevant in-store specials.

Whilst this data lets the consumer make smarter choices in the store and at the register, it requires the consumer to be already in-store considering a product.

Catalogues

In an attempt to capture shopper imagination before heading in-store, US retailer Best Buy added an AR component to its August 2009 weekly newspaper inserts.

The feature cover item of a Toshiba Satellite laptop included a glyph enabling users to see a 3D representation of the laptop when they visited the Best Buy 3D web site. The same site is being re-used for all ‘Best Buy in 3D’ promotions and has already been updated with more products.

Best Buy has gone on record with the impressive results:

• Despite zero promotion of the AR insert, about 6,500 people tried it out— more than double the company’s expectations
• 78 per cent of people who went to the site to see the experience had a webcam.
• The site experienced a high click-through rate of 12 per cent to other site pages from the core AR page.

Product brochures

In August 2008 at the Los Angeles International Auto Show, Nissan took run-of-the-mill car brochures to a much more engaging level to support the launch of the third-generation Nissan Cube. Visitors at the show were provided with a Nissan Cube brochure that was embedded with AR technology. When held up to a webcam, 3D models of the vehicle offer views of the car’s exterior and interior in real-time interaction with the brochure content. Users were able to interact with the 3D image by selecting configuration options, including colour and other accessories, and saw this immediately updated on the 3D model.

To emphasise the space and capacity of the Cube, and have some fun with AR, users were able to open a “magic space” showing a disco, a ‘70s lounge room with a lava lamp, and even a refrigerator in the boot space.

Virtual changing rooms

When it comes to shopping for clothes, a key component for a shopper is the ability to try on things on, checking not only for size but to see how various combinations of apparel can work together. No matter how convenient online shopping can be, selecting clothes via computer is a frustrating experience as it lacks this basic ability.

Combining AR and Motion Capture, the “Webcam Social Shopper” application allows users to hold a glyph up to their web cam and select from a variety of clothing items and styles that are overlayed on the webcam’s video. Motion capture tracks the user’s movements, allowing them to select options and interact with the application without having to use a keyboard and mouse.

With the in-built ability to share photos from within the application, and the potential to include live video steams, shoppers can also receive comments on the selected items from family and friends before making a purchase, bringing a social feedback component into online shopping. Additional features will allow users to enter their sizes to make the displayed articles look more realistic. This technology has yet to be deployed to a live web site, but the developers are ready for the beta version to be trialled now.

The bonus is virtual

In May 2009, Paramount Pictures created “Experience The Enterprise”, a 3D interactive version of the Starship Enterprise that you can hold in the palm of your hand. Promoted on the cover of DVD releases, the virtual experience adds an extra dimension to the usual bonus features packaged with and on DVDs.

Promotion like this can be used as a teaser for upcoming movies and episodes, and can be adapted as plot lines are revealed or new characters are added.

Say goodbye to decoder rings

In-pack prizes have always inspired children’s imaginations. From decoder rings to pogs, the gifts have generated countless hours of fun.

Using AR, Topps 2009 baseballs cards have allowed American kids’ dreams to come true by bringing their favourite stars to life on their computer screens, with video games that allow them to interact with the players as each card is placed near a web cam, and the possibility of virtual players interacting with each other if multiple cards are placed in range of the camera.

Where to now?

Allowing the consumer to engage in lifelike 3D images holds an open-ended future for AR technology and we’re only at the start of this potential shift in consumer marketing and buying habits. Using future versions of the technology discussed above, it could even lead to the shrinking of retail store sizes. Imagine a clothing store that only needs one basic size of each garment on display – colours and prints could be virtual and stored in space-saving stockrooms rather than on individual hangers in the shopfront.

One thing is certain: in the next twelve months, the general public is going to be exposed to AR on a regular basis. In Australia, News Limited has signed a deal to roll out Augmented Reality content across all of its print publications. Joe Talcott, group marketing director for News Limited, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation said, “This incredible technology will allow advertising content on the page to come alive as moving pictures and sound – it will change the way advertisers think about newspapers.”

With this widespread integration of AR into trusted brands, this convergent technology promises to merge the online and offline experiences for both individual brands and retail stores.

Now is the time to ensure that your existing consumer-facing website offers a digital experience that builds trust and familiarity with your products and brands and to think about how Augmented Reality can enhance your business.

Initial ideas were based on the idea of evolution and how it relates taxonomy in biology. The theory was that sites had evolved over time into different forms that suited their audiences. The “best” forms lived and prospered; audience numbers and revenue raised measured success. Successful ones spawned multiples, variants or developed into similar formats independently, much like evolution. The unsuccessful died.

If the Internet behaved like the biological world then perhaps we could categorise websites like the Linnean taxonomy in biology (Kingdom>Phylum>Class>Order>Family>Genus>Species). However, a branching categorisation system didn’t work. There were no divisible characteristics that create categories in Biology, so it turned out to be a bit of a false start. And websites don’t breed so we can’t draw a clear relationship between them.

So starting again, I thought that the task seemed daunting because of the idea that a complicated thing like the Internet needs to be looked at in an equally complicated way. But what biology lends is not a categorisation system, but a guiding principle – that very simple rules lead to great complexity. In biology the theory of natural selection leads to evolution, the ultimate outcome being the complex natural world we live in. The hard part about a simple premise is figuring it out.

The first relevant thing that sprang to mind about the Internet is that it must have a reason to exist. History says it was because people wanted to share academic papers by publishing online. The good part about that was that other people wanted to read them.

This is a task-based way of looking at things – which is the way that I work as an information architect. To create a website you would create a list of tasks that need to be possible. Things like downloading a PFD or finding some content. This is used to create structure and functionality. If tasks define websites, and websites are small structures appear within the larger form of the Internet, then perhaps its reasonable to think that its structure is defined by the tasks that people want to do within it.

With this in mind, I started considering if you could define the most fundamental tasks; the ones that shaped what we see online today. I came up with six and then added one with the help of Simon Carter, our Consumer Researcher.

• Find
• Learn
• Trade
• Share
• Store
• Talk
• Play

These task names refer to specific things that make up a restricted vocabulary where each item has a definition and examples. This vocabulary covers off things from a scientific/methodological perspective – everything has a definition. It also ensures that we can talk to each other in a language that we all understand.

This restricted vocabulary also ignores a certain philosophical debate (for those of you who are unfamiliar with French post structuralist linguistic theory, please ignore the following). The debate is about the difference between the sign and the signified and whether or not meaning is being constantly deferred in an attempt to define it. I say, that’s fine and it’s a fun debate, but it doesn’t really affect our ability to make a definition in the sphere of working in the Internet biz.

The list also allows categories to be blurry. They are fuzzy as opposed to mutually exclusive. Strict categorisations that we keep trying to apply in things like biology and library categorisations keep failing because there are exceptions, or new things come along that won’t easily fit into a scheme. So in this case its best not to try. That’s a bit heretical in terms of “traditional” information architecture, but the rise of faceted categorisation and tagging systems show us how exclusivity, (at least in terms of categorising content) is flawed. A fuzzy categorisation allows us to see that websites serve multiple tasks and allows us to create a task matrix – which is how the following was developed.

The matrix is based on the idea of being able to develop a rating or ranking system for websites. It would be based on audience surveys with a particular question-set about a website and tasks. The results mapped to the diagram show us a “task-space” for specific websites. This would let us:

• Make comparisons between sites.
• See differences between what audiences want to do and what we let them to do (when we make websites or applications for them).
• See if an audiences’ wish to do certain tasks matches with existing digital properties (like Flickr or YouTube or Facebook) – in doing this it might be possible to locate the best destinations to create experiences for them.

The next step is to test our model and see how it works, much like the application of the scientific method – to put the hypothesis and try to disprove it. Figuring out whom to ask what questions is the next tricky part; although Simon does assure me that he has a theory about how we can make a system work.