Create experience marketing campaigns for virtual worlds that resonate long-term

Augmented reality (AR) continues transforming industries, spawning specialized sectors like industrial AR, consumer VR, and AR shopping. A key player in this ecosystem is AR marketing, a field with immense growth potential.

AR marketing offers unique and immersive experiences, including sponsored AR lenses that allow consumers to interact with and visualize products in their environments. This powerful approach translates to impressive growth forecasts. According to ARtillery Intelligence, the AR marketing sector is expected to surge from $3.4 billion in 2022 to a projected $14.5 billion by 2027. This potential return on investment makes AR marketing an attractive field for marketers.

Marketers are increasingly drawn to AR's ability to boost brand engagement and deliver compelling results. Compared to traditional 2D advertising, AR marketing campaigns consistently demonstrate superior performance metrics.

Corporate associations of brands

Brand associations are various expressions related to the brand that contain the brand's meaning for consumers and are connected to the brand knowledge area in their minds. Brand associations can also be defined as everything associated with the brand in the consumer's mind.

Brand associations are important for both brand experts and consumers. Brand managers use brand associations to convert neutral attitudes towards the brand into positive ones, reinforce positive attitudes while determining brand positioning strategies, and emphasize the functional and emotional benefits consumers will gain from using the brand.

Consumers use brand associations to recall information and experiences related to the brand in their minds and then seek support in their purchasing decisions. Therefore, corporate associations are very effective in helping consumers choose among many similar brands that meet their needs.

When determining brand associations, references should be made to qualities demanded and valued by consumers. The appeal of these references to consumers depends on three factors:

1. The importance consumers attach to brand associations,
2. Consumers' perception of brand associations as distinct from other associations,
3. Consumers' belief in the credibility of brand associations.

Differentiating a brand within a competitive environment depends on being unique. The brand's target market and audience should be considered when determining brand associations, and the strong points that differentiate it from competitors should be highlighted. Associations convey the brand's functional and emotional qualities to target audiences differently.

Perceived quality

Perceived quality has been formulated as a subset of brand equity. It is one of the most critical dimensions of brand equity. Perceived quality influences parameters that constitute brand value, affecting market share, pricing, and profitability, directly impacting a company's financial performance and competitive strength.

Moreover, perceived quality adds value to organizations by providing consumers with a reason to purchase, securing a distinct position, offering a price advantage over competitors, attracting the interest of investors among other competitors in the category, and creating new brand expansion opportunities.

Perceived quality is one of the most significant factors in nearly every customer's purchase decision. According to the definition by the European Quality Control Association, it encompasses all the characteristics that demonstrate a product or service's ability to meet a specific need.

Quality elements can claim that a brand's product or service features are superior to those of competitors. These claims can be analyzed under the following categories: Product quality elements include performance, safety, suitability, durability, service visibility, and aesthetics.

Service quality elements include reliability, responsiveness, competence, accessibility, courtesy, communication, reputation, security, understanding and knowing the customer, and physical assets (facilities, staff appearance, equipment, etc.). These elements, if supported by labels, certificates, and documents issued by authorities relevant to the brand's field of activity, will contribute to the brand's preference.

When creating the desired "perceived quality" claim about a brand, using corporate associations focuses more on the institution that creates the brand than on the product features. This is because many organizations are committed to "quality" and being "the best" in their sectoral communication activities.

On the other hand, perceived quality is the brand's quality perception among consumers, which may be even more important than the actual quality. No matter how high the quality goals a brand achieves, the quality attributed to it by consumers should not be overlooked.

Experience marketing

The steps taken by companies to establish a presence among different consumer groups and to increase their market share have evolved, with changing digital marketing strategies, to now offering consumers an experience. Providing exceptional experiences in the process of converting consumers into customers can distinguish brands from their competitors and alter purchase preferences.

This evolving marketing process is referred to as experience marketing in literature. Experience marketing can be defined as making the marketing communication process perceptible to the senses by adding imagination, movement, smell, and sound to the experience.

It is a marketing communication approach focusing on the emotional and rational behaviors in the decision-making processes leading to a purchase, viewing consumption as a holistic experience.

Consumers are exposed to numerous marketing messages through their smart devices. In this endless sea of content, products, and services that offer a unique experience stand out in the competition. For brands, appealing to the senses and delivering a memorable message is crucial in the context of experience marketing.

In the experience marketing process, consumers can form an opinion about a product before purchasing it. Additionally, offering an experience that triggers other consumers to talk about the product leverages word-of-mouth marketing strategies. The organization, design, and presentation of experiences in the marketing process can be discussed in terms of five principles: creating the main idea, aligning demonstrations with positive signs, eliminating negative signs, making experiences tangible for recollection, and ensuring the experience combines all five senses.

The opportunities

Experience marketing offers much broader freedom in implementing these principles in technological experiences. Since the experience occurs in a virtual environment, distinct from the external world, negative signs can be eliminated more easily compared to tangible products, and positive signs reinforcing the main idea can be emphasized more effectively.

The tools offered by technology, as in many fields, make a significant difference in experience marketing. Particularly, the collection and processing of user data with artificial intelligence tools like İnnovAI have accelerated considerably compared to traditional methods. Insights gained from optimizing data provide extensive opportunities for designing new and individual user experiences.

Personalized experience marketing will be able to reach many more people with the advancement of technology and the acceleration of instant data processing. Virtual spaces like the metaverse offer more opportunities for individualizing and personalizing experiences than physical stores.

Brands also take advantage of virtual spaces for data collection and, accordingly, develop marketing campaigns. It is anticipated that brands will invest more in experience marketing in the near future to stand out from their competitors.