Intriguing Insights: What is a Virtual Brand Experience Center, and Why Should Companies Embrace It?
If geographical confines still constrain your brand, you’re probably not optimizing your market potential. Whatever you’re building, selling, optimizing, measuring, or advising on, your audience could exist anywhere. However, if prospective customers cannot engage with your brand, chances of conversion are low. This translates to missed opportunities.
So how can you avoid missing out on opportunities, wherever they may exist geographically? How can you break out of your geographical shackles, showcase your brand to prospects anywhere in the world, and widen your sales net?
Enter the virtual brand experience center—a digital platform where brands and customers meet in a virtual yet highly personalized environment.
Virtual brand experience centers tap into virtual and augmented reality to bring authenticity, and engagement to brand experiences that are remote without allowing a sense of feeling removed or distant.
In this blog, we break down the concept of virtual brand experience centers and discuss their benefits. We’ll also take a deeper dive and look at examples from early movers across automobiles, fashion retail, events, and manufacturing.
Benefits of virtual brand experience centers
Flexible
Not limited by physical space, weather conditions, personal schedules, and differing time zones, virtual experience centers break free from traditional constraints, allowing events to happen anytime, anywhere. Available 24/7, virtual brand experience centers also enable visitors to engage with your brand on their terms at any time that suits their schedule.
Cost-effective/ ROI-friendly
Why split your resources? Virtual spaces allow companies to focus solely on creating immersive experiences without worrying about the costs of physical venues and logistics.
Immersive
With VR technology, virtual experience centers mirror the real world—offering interactive and lifelike environments where visitors can engage as if they were there in person. One-of-a-kind brand experience that captivates and resonates with visitors through custom, interactive features that go beyond a standard online meeting.
Limitless Formats
Brands can get creative and break the mold. With no physical constraints, you can find unique and interesting ways to engage your audience and promote connection and recall. Read on to learn about Balenciaga’s gamified promotions and stores in a “strange city.”
Sustainable
Your virtual brand experience center leaves a lower carbon footprint in its creation and operation. Additionally, prospects and customers experiencing your brand virtually (versus traveling to a physical location) leave behind a lower carbon footprint from their visit.
Examples and case studies of virtual brand experience ‘centers’
Your virtual brand experience ‘center’ need not be a virtual set of rooms exactly like a physical location. As discussed in our list of benefits in the previous section, you are no longer constrained by real-life laws. Your virtual experience center can be anything—a game, a film, a set of places on a magical street, or in an otherworldly city. Let’s look at how brands across sectors are breaking all boundaries to create ground-breaking virtual experiences:
FASHION/ RETAIL
Balenciaga
Balenciaga’s idea of offering customers a virtual experience of their brand was to partner with the popular game Fortnite. In a collaboration that pushed the boundaries of branding, they created a virtual collection of Balenciaga items inside Fortnite. This allowed players to not only purchase digital Balenciaga outfits for their in-game avatars but also explore immersive Balenciaga-themed spaces within the game, including billboards and a virtual store. The brand also created buzz by “dressing up” characters that players encounter in the game in Balenciaga outfits, some of which were actually available in its real-world collection.
Gucci
A few weeks after the premiere of the documentary Who Is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story, the brand celebrated the film’s release by offering a new immersive experience on the Vision Pro. As users enter the Gucci app on Apple’s virtual reality goggles, they can watch the documentary, plus about 20 minutes of immersive bonus content. This includes 3-D products and other special features from being transported to Milan.
In another virtual brand experience, Gucci offered a digital version of their Gucci Garden, where users could interact with products, explore creative environments, and experience the brand’s aesthetics in a way that mirrors their physical installations. This virtual brand experience lets users engage with Gucci in a 360-degree digital setting, extending their reach and enhancing brand engagement through cutting-edge technology.
AUTOMOBILES
Hyundai and Nissan
Hyundai and Nissan both launched virtual showrooms on the VR platform VRChat, offering a fully immersive, 3D experience for users to explore their latest vehicles. In these virtual experience centers, potential buyers can interact with vehicles in a realistic, digital environment—taking test drives, checking out car features, and even engaging with brand ambassadors or other users in real-time. This was an amazing way to drive convenience: prospective buyers could learn about vehicles and shortlist options without needing to visit a physical dealership.
Nissan Sakura Driving Experience
After the popular Nissan Crossing experience, the brand extended its virtual presence in VRChat by creating Nissan Sakura Driving Island, where users can step into the driver’s seat of the Nissan Sakura. While users don’t actually control the car, they are treated to a scenic drive around a beautiful island, encouraging them to admire the detailed car interior. The picturesque surroundings elevate the whole virtual brand experience.
BMW
BMW’s virtual brand experience has people wear a VR headset and drive a real BMW M2 the brand’s M Driving Academy in Maisach, Germany. The virtual component is that they navigate an entirely digital racetrack projected through the VR headset. This virtual brand experience, which BMW refers to as “M Mixed Reality,” allows drivers to feel the car’s performance on an actual road while seeing and interacting with a virtual racetrack.
INTERIORS
Ikea
Ikea’s virtual reality app, available on the gaming platform Steam, lets users step into a fully immersive virtual kitchen environment. Within this gamified virtual experience center, users can explore the space by interacting with everyday kitchen tasks, such as making and frying pancakes. One feature highlights the ability to multitask, requiring users to manage frying pancakes in four pans simultaneously. The whole idea of the virtual brand experience is to help customers visualize their dream kitchens and feel more confident in their purchasing decisions.
Meanwhile, Ikea retailer Ingka Group launched a virtual brand experience called Ikea Kreativ where customers design and visualize their living space right from their smartphones and computers, using AR.
Ingka Group’s initiative seems to be the virtual version of another Ikea brand experience known as the Virtual Home Experience. This is an “interior lab” where the brand encourages store visitors to visualize different combinations of interior design items.
Ikea also has a virtual version of their interior lab, known as Ikea Virtual Interior Designer. The app, available on the Oculus Store, allows customers to explore and visualize products in a hyper-realistic virtual reality environment. Buyers can experiment with different fabrics, wall colors, and room layouts while experiencing realistic sound and movement. This immersive experience is aimed at customer engagement, but also to foster greater confidence in decision-making. It is part of Ikea’s omnichannel marketing strategy and also part of the POS customer experience.
MANUFACTURING
Doosan
Manufacturing machinery and solutions provider Doosan showcases its product range to potential manufacturer customers with a virtual factory tour that showcases various processes and underscores state-of-the-art manufacturing practices.
This virtual brand experience helps potential customers gauge quality by viewing the processes and practices that go into the production of the machinery and equipment that will drive their manufacturing processes. Given the ticket size of such investments, it’s easy to see how this type of virtual experience center can help cement deals and drive them to closure.
EVENTS
Coachella
Coachella has been building its VR capabilities since back in 2016 when it enhanced its festival experience by launching a VR app. The app offered fans a virtual walkthrough of the festival grounds, including campsites and concert stages. Ticket holders received a cardboard VR headset as part of their concert kit, encouraging them to download the app. This immersive experience provided exclusive content and attendee information while allowing fans who couldn’t physically attend to experience the event virtually.
If you’re an event planner or marketer, the interesting thing to note is this: By using VR, Coachella widened its audience. The virtual experience was also ticketed and created the foundation for future VR-based opportunities.
Coachella didn’t stop there, building further on its branded VR experiences in 2022. After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the festival returned in 2022, welcoming fans back with the “Coachellaverse,” a global augmented reality experience. Millions of fans participated.
GADGETS
Dyson
Dyson targets customers as well as institutional buyers, i.e., salons. It is highly trusted in the B2B space. To showcase product attributes and how-to’s (that are important to both its customer segments), Dyson launched the Dyson Demo Store. Although it isn’t documented publicly, it’s easy to imagine how the reach of Dyson’s institutional selling efforts could be augmented with the Demo Store.
Conclusion
Designing a physical brand experience center comes with a range of complexities, often requiring expert support. At magineu, we’ve helped numerous brands create these centers, honing our hands-on experience with the process.
When translating this into a virtual experience center, those complexities increase, especially when incorporating gamification. Even brands like Hyundai and Nissan sometimes face challenges in striking the right balance with their virtual showrooms and sometimes draw less-than-desirable feedback.
That said, many brands get it right. Hyundai and Nissan’s target audiences likely enjoy exploring cars in VR. The key to success is nailing your virtual brand experience center’s elements, ensuring a superior user experience (UX), and aligning everything with your goals while keeping ROI in mind.
Partner with us to get it right. Contact us to brainstorm ideas today.