How Augmented Reality Is Changing Custom Packaging

Introduction:

When it comes to attracting customers, the packaging is one of the biggest game-changers. With the right kind of packaging, you can attract a lot of customers, intrigue them to spend more time on your product and ultimately ensure increased sales. It is an underrated yet one of the important parts of marketing for a brand and can ‘make or break’ your entire campaign.

Brands have been looking to add different avenues and explore multiple options in order to enhance packaging and its final outcome. The use of technology in product packaging is not uncommon with multiple brands integrating modern-day tech to break the barriers and attain new heights. Augmented Reality, the new-age immersive tech has been a welcome sight for brands when it comes to packaging.

The Welcome Sight of Augmented Reality in Product Packaging

With the help of Augmented Reality, packaging can be taken to a whole new level. AR in product packaging has wide-scale applications and can be used to enhance product packaging, attain better engagement and interaction with the customers, improve brand loyalty, higher customer retention, and above all, provide your brand with an edge over the rest of the competition.

The whole AR experience in Retail Packaging is very easy to implement and can be experienced right from the shopper’s smartphone camera. All you need to do is deploy QR code which can act as trigger points for shoppers to get an immersive experience. Augmented reality presents a great opportunity for brands to integrate newer interaction points and scale up the experiences.

8 Advantages of Augmented Reality in Packaging

Augmented Packaging has several notable benefits and advantages. This immersive tech can help your brand attract new customers and retain the existing ones. Going by the numbers, 61% of the online shoppers prefer those sites that offer AR. Not only this, almost half (50%) of these shoppers are even willing to pay more for a product if it comes with an AR experience. Let us look at these advantages of AR In Packaging in detail.

1. Compliments and Enhances Packaging Design:

AR aims to enhance the traditional packaging by complementing it with a better and interactive customer experience. One of the major limitations with traditional packaging is that the information provided on the packaging is limited to the space available. This puts brands in a dilemma as to what all information they can share with the shoppers. With AR in Packaging, this conundrum is resolved. With Augmented packaging, brands can provide additional information like nutritional value, benefits and uses of the product, tutorials or recipe videos and so on. This also provides brands with an opportunity to further enhance customer engagement by using games or trivia to grab the customer’s unsolicited attention.

2. Aids in Gaining customer’s trust:

Given the current trends, a customer is more sceptical about buying your product. By being more transparent and giving all the required information, you can solve the problems of curious customers and gain their trust. By knowing what the product is made up of, how it is made and what makes your product special, you can make a lasting impact in the customer’s mind. This not only increases the current sales but also ensures higher customer retention.

3. Improves Brand Loyalty:

Did you know? There is a 14 times higher probability of selling a product to an existing customer as compared to a new customer.

This is a reason why attaining brand loyalty is one of the major goals of all the big brands because they know that in the long run, this can result in significant revenue. In times like today where a shopper is much more informed and learned and has numerous options to choose from, this herculean task becomes even more difficult. With the help of AR, this can be achieved too.

One of the best examples of AR-enhanced product packaging is 19 Crimes Wine. This wine company added AR-enabled QR codes to their wine bottles. Upon scanning the packaging labels/QR code, a customer can see the packaging come to life.

19 Crimes Wine used this lifelike technology to share interesting tales and experiences, their brands’ stories and more. This story-telling experience worked wonders for them and created a lasting bond between the brand and its loyal customers and increased sales.

4. Attracts More Customers:

The reason why brands spend tons of money on Product packaging is to widen their reach and attract more and more customers to their products. A user spends more time on products whose packaging is unique, attractive and in a way speaks to them. With AR this becomes even more realistic.

An AR-powered packaging can literally talk to the customer and interact and engage with them. It is found that 72% of the shoppers purchased a product that they did not even intend to buy solely because of the AR-based experience. AR has truly changed the product packaging game. So much so, that 86% of the shoppers are willing to pay extra to experience augmented reality.

5. Gives You an Edge Above Your Competitors:

In today’s competitive world, where every brand is fighting to increase its clientele, it is crucial to stand out from the rest of your competitors. You need to think that why would a customer, who has so many options available, choose my brand? This introspection can do wonders for you and your brand. Since AR is still fairly new, its application in your brands’ packaging can lend you a massive competitive advantage.

With AR, ‘the limits of reality are your own imagination. A great example of this is W-in-a-Box. They used AR to explain the benefits of drinking their brand’s water. This immersive experience provided them with an opportunity to expand their canvas and share more information with their customers. This unique way of interacting with the customers gave them an edge over their competitors and made this campaign a huge success.

6. Enables Enhanced Interaction and Engagement With the Customers:

With Augmented Packaging, a customer is no longer restricted to static text or images. With AR in product packaging, the packaging becomes dynamic and provides higher engagement and interaction points. By simply scanning a QR code on the product, a customer can view your product in hyper-reality, experience a complete 360-degree view, and get to know about the product in detail. With AR, you can have a customer interact with your product to understand their tastes and preferences, and much more.

This leads to enhanced customer engagement and allows for a higher rate of interaction with the customers. Another example of a brand that has experienced first-hand the advantages of using augmented reality in packaging is Nespresso. By simply hovering your phone over Nespresso’s label, you can enter this augmented experience. Upon label scanning, a video is played. Say the product is coffee. Upon scanning the label, the customer can see a video where they are told ‘How to prepare a perfect cup of coffee.

7. Saves You From the Trouble of Having to Repackage Everything

Often we see that even a minor change in the content of the product or any such detail leads to the complete repackaging of the product. This is not only expensive but can be a very tiring and time-taking process. With AR, you can update all this information without having to repackage at all since all the content exists virtually. This also keeps the packaging from becoming outdated and keeps you up-to-date with the ongoing trends. Updating and changing this virtual content is as easy as updating things on your website.

8. Gamify the Whole Shopping Experience:

Another way to make the shopping experience of a customer more impactful and enjoyable is by gamifying the whole process. With AR in packaging, several brands have created mini-games to create a unique experience for their customers. This can be used to earn promotions and collect information and data about the likes and dislikes of your customers. A customer can unlock discount coupons while playing these games that can be redeemed during checkout. This has led to almost 40% higher conversion rates.

How Will Augmented Reality Work for You?

With AR, you have endless possibilities to create interactive and unique product packaging. An AR experience gives customers higher confidence while buying, leads to increased satisfaction post-purchase and results in reduced return rates.

With practically a smartphone in each hand, AR actually fulfils the current needs of the customer to have detailed information and higher interaction with the product at their fingertips. AR packaging is the smart new way of doing things. It is an intelligent and innovative way of forging deeper customer relationships and creating a lasting impact on their minds.

Conclusion:

The perfect advert for AR can be found in what Ben Houston, the founder of ThreeKit said: "AR is going to become ubiquitous to the point of becoming an integrated expectation of the buying experience. Brands that want to connect with customers today and tomorrow need to move now on AR."

With AR, especially integrating AR in FMCG, you can help your customers during the decision-making stage. This augmented experience shows highly detailed 3D models of your products and creates an image in the customer’s mind. This compelling imagery and in-depth information and detail about a product enable a customer to choose what’s right for them.

The more efficient you are with your packaging and subsequent deployment of AR in it, the more you can build on existing customer relationships and create new ones. If you want to talk with a pro about the possibilities with your product packaging, contact us now!

Expoodle is one of the best AR & VR companies in India, that provides customised AR-based marketing solutions as per their client’s needs.