Is 2017 the year for VR and AR marketing?

Marketers face a vast new challenges, or is it perhaps the same challenge as always: Stay on the cutting edge of technological advancements, reach the target market and provide a product that can be easily identified amidst the competition.

Textbooks may teach the objectives, however, now more than ever, staying abreast of the competition and technological advancements provide a far more challenging task that must be done at a lightening pace. The changing face of augmented reality and the rapidly emergent virtual reality are key to survival for marketers.

The main question is how? As technologies so rapidly advance, staying at the forefront of various industry’s developments and emergent trends is instrumental for a product or company to remain present in their consumers’ awareness. With the vast wealth of data available, the accurate interpretation and use of this information is detrimental to ensuring streamlined purchases, foresight into consumers’ questions and finding ways to instill customer loyalty across various virtual landscapes.

With mobile applications that allow gamers to be in transit and geo-location based applications to block ads in the real world and replace them with virtual ads, knowing how and where to find your target audience and provide them with a novel experience, unique product placement and interaction and ensure visibility in both the real and the virtual world is a constant challenge.

The exponentially increasing potential possibilities to reach consumers provided by both augmented and virtual reality paired with the increase of AI projected in 2017 means marketers need to ascertain the necessary technological and visionary teams and funding to remain competitive, side by side with product developers, unilaterally across various platforms with emergent technologies. It seems the pace of the shift may mean that your product or service, needs to be rethought in so far as how it will take a stake in the claim to the new frontiers of changing realities.

Where the industry once was able to use reliable variables to predict marketing trends, looking into the future, marketers need to rely on their technological teams and UX/UI designers to place the proper protocols in place, now, in the present, to remain on the cusp of change in a generation that moves as predictably as a moving school of fish. Looking forward, companies will need to establish relationships and partner with companies that are evolving to reach their target market in virtual and augmented reality.

It’s time to ask, how can your product fit into a new world of gamers who once never left their homes and are now out in the real world?

What product innovation will brand your product and ensure it has a place in both the 3-D world and the virtual spaces?

What demographic variables or data provides you with insight that defines the customers you truly want to target?

What new product or novel product feature can provide your customer with a “wowing” novel interaction that will increase brand image and loyalty?

there a new way to find a place in your customers’ hand, car, office or home?

Where do you envision your product that differentiates your brand and creates memorable experiences across social media in a fast-paced generation with decreased attention spans and the increased demands of multi-tasking?

The changing face of augmented reality provides unique opportunities, mind-boggling numbers of opportunities. It is critical to prepare, as best you can by thinking innovatively and building design teams that envision and can expand upon, reinvent and redesign the future of your product in the expanding eyes of your customer.

Also, it is time to leap past your own website and create liaisons with companies that are innovatively changing the face of the world around us all. Remain abreast of your customers’ needs in upcoming technologies and accurately offer relevant insights in their multidimensional world, as their needs arise. Its time to expand, products into other realities and the challenges that face marketers now are in simplifying the complexity in a world were every click counts and a marketers success is in the visionary ability of marketers’ design teams.

On your mark, get set, Go!