Mixed Reality in High Street Retail

Immersive Reality tech (VR, AR, MR) isn’t anywhere near the public consciousness. It’s not mainstream. We hear that all the time. It’s not ready, it’s too expensive, etc (read my blog from a few months ago https://lnkd.in/eWVzwV5)

So imagine my surprise when an advert popped up on my browser — for Windows MR (Acer) of all things, IN ARGOS of all places. For those not in the UK, Argos is a “catalogue store”. You go into a high street (or out-of-town) bricks and mortar store, browse a several-hundred page catalogue, write your product code down, go to the checkout & pay, and then collect from a glorified warehouse. It’s renowned for being broad in scope, and cheap on price.

The product is advertised at £370 (a little over $520 at the time of writing). So my question & fascination is — who is this advert designed for ?

Argos is not the place that springs to mind for early adopters, far-from-it. The general populus who will drop into Argos for some towels or a CD rack or perhaps the latest must-have christmas present will be tripped as soon as they see the advert and the only technical detail is “Simply plug the device into a compatible PC”.

Argos do not offer direct customer service or support for this kind of product. Their help page simply points to a phone number for Acer. The product page itself offers no clues as to what you actually need to get this hardware running (other than a Windows 10 PC). So even if someone decides to buy this kind of hardware from this kind of retailer, the likelihood of it being returned is probably incredibly high.

My interest is that someone, somewhere, decided to spend some marketing budget on promoting a product that is very unlikely to be suited to the target demographic of this retailer. Whilst it’s a very positive move forward in terms of pushing this technology to a broader customer base, the potential impact from a customer experience standpoint could do far more damage than good.

I applaud the initiative, but…. why ? Marketing incentives I suspect.

Originally published at www.threedotzerostudios.com on January 29, 2018.