In Spain and Mexico, a company from the same holding, Analysis and Research (AeI), has already carried out research using this technology. Here, Carolina Pulido explains why they have decided to offer this research technique in Chile.
VíaCiencia, a partner company of AIM, is using its augmented and virtual reality tool, through the concept of neuromarketing, to carry out market research within immersive stores where the consumer can feel that they are in a real purchasing process. "Our goal is to make this state-of-the-art technology available to all our clients here in Chile," says Carolina Pulido, general manager of VíaCiencia.
“We have seen that many companies want to know the consumer better with new agile tools. We believe that virtual and augmented reality can allow us to know them in a deeper way. We are seeing the need in the market and we are going to start carrying out studies of this type here in Chile”, she maintains.
For that, VíaCiencia already has the example of two studies carried out by Veris Behavior, a Spanish startup that works together with the firm AeI: one in Spain and the other in Mexico. In Chile they are in the process of development with a first project.
Alekos Martínez, CEO of Veris Behavior, says that his commitment to a study with virtual reality is due to the fact that “there were many types of study that had a contextualization bias. One thing is what people say when they are in a certain research process, such as a focus group or a survey, another is what they actually do when they are inside the store, not because people want to lie, but because the purchasing processes they are subconscious and most of the decisions are made inside the store with the stimuli that are inside the store”. “So, virtual reality causes an effect called presence: people at a conscious level know that they are in a digital process, but at a subconscious level they don't and they respond naturally to all stimuli”, he adds.
Martínez says that in the study of Spain, for example, a company in the coffee sector had launched a packaging with certain hypotheses and they were not receiving the expected results. This consisted of three phases: one, with virtual reality in which the consumer had to buy what he most wanted in the store and asked himself a question within the virtual reality. The second, in which within virtual reality it was indicated that the consumer should take different packagings and express his opinion. The third, through a product survey, about what he thought, about the category, among other questions, in addition to validating the virtual experience.
“In addition to knowing what the consumer does, our glasses have eye tracking so we can know where the consumer's attention is all the time, we can visualize it with heat maps, we can make maps of the gaze sequence and we also know what products it took, for how long, and what product was finally added to the cart,” says Martínez.
This study concluded that although in the focus group process several people considered the packaging good, at the actual moment of purchase there were several brands doing practically the same thing and they chose not to select that specific coffee. “In addition, with younger consumers, who are interested in sustainability, it happened that the brand was not communicating how it was recycled in the packaging. And it was seen, in augmented reality, how the consumer was still in the aisle in search of something more ecological”, adds Martínez.
Opportunities for Chile
Carolina Pulido considers that there are a number of opportunities for brands in the Chilean market when implementing this type of study. In addition to agility, she comments that some research -like this one on coffee in Spain- could not be done inside a store, but through virtual reality.
Likewise, she comments that virtual reality makes it possible to automate a series of procedures that are not easy in a physical studio, such as the price-color variable. Martínez details that "we have the ability to have the consumer face the shelf, make a decision and automatically change the price, size or color and request that the consumer make a decision again, with that you can measure the different impacts of the different variables of a product”.
“I believe that this type of study has many advantages for different companies, for example the world of retail, supermarkets, pharmacies, telecommunications and the world of services. I think it will bring many advantages to these industries and that is where we want to be”, says Pulido.
"Companies are also starting to see what's going on in the metaverse and this is like a step in precisely that direction to look at what it would be like to understand this new immersive world a little bit and how through virtual reality I can have digital twins and look at how the different consumers behave and the performance of the commercial management of my products and services”, he concludes.
Article taken from aim.chile.cl