Bringing Dior to Your Own Front Door: Fashion Meets AR

Over the last 20 years, online behaviours have deeply modified people’s expectations when it comes to modes of fashion consumption. A recent report by [management consultancy] Bain & Company projects 70 per cent of luxury purchases are influenced by online interactions, but that 75 per cent of sales will still occur in physical stores until 2025. Meanwhile, online continues to outpace offline in terms of growth, but the dominant digital players of the age – Amazon, Uber, Airbnb – are the ones that have managed to bridge the gap between the physical and interactive worlds, leaving fashion brands trailing.

What has this got to do with advertising? We are living in a time where customer services, retail stores, e-commerce and social media are seen as a single entity by consumers; a result of shifting between the digital and physical realms of a brand daily. In this New World Order, marketers are leaning heavily on their agency partners to think about, if not map out entirely, the customer experience across all touchpoints. With all the decision-/desire-making happening online, campaigns can no longer start with a traditional above-the-line campaign, as they may have done in the past. So the creative industry needs to start with a rethink of the role of online, and how to craft consumers an ecosystem of experience. Why? Because consumers want experiences! What they want is the heritage, craftsmanship and prestige of a brand; what they want is the way it feels to buy a Mulberry handbag, a Chanel dress, a Céline purse, and they want to be shown it in the context of their own lives.  

When the online store is a crashing bore

Currently, when I go to ‘shop the finest designer brands curated by Parisian fashion experts’ at 24sevres.com (LVMH’s multi-brand e-commerce platform) or to net-a-porter.com, ‘the world’s leading online luxury fashion retailer’, why is my experience of both absolutely identical and dreary? I can search, scroll, add to my basket and checkout. Yawn. 

Conversely, if I go to a Mulberry store, the customer service and environment, the service and the decor would all be very different to a Louis Vuitton store. The retail experience is always carefully designed to help people understand how the brand fits into their life, to help them cross over from thinking about to deciding, ‘I’m a Mulberry person,’ or, ‘I’m a Louis Vuitton person’. What’s the point of spending all that money on differentiation in stores when the decision-making is happening way before they walk through the door? 

Louis Vuitton's storefront at Harrods

And this is my point. With increasing frequency agencies are being called upon to marry interactive touchpoints in considered and creative combinations both with each other and with physical shops. The brief, should you choose to accept it, is to deliver a seamless customer experience everywhere. So, how do you do it? 

If the success of a brand depends on the ability of advertising to help people understand what the essence of the product is, why it’s the right product for them to buy, then there is no better way than augmented reality. AR is a technology designed to display content in the context of the consumer’s life, making it ripe for immersion not only into a brand’s history and heritage, but into experiences that embrace audience’s individual tastes too. 

Bringing Dior to your own front door

Thanks to Apple, Google and co., there are now millions of consumers in possession of iPhones and Android devices able to support AR. Currently, the best quality experiences require an app, but don’t let that put you off; Google just announced imminent plans to bring AR to the web. Imagine that! Only months from now you’ll be able to launch and literally step inside the house of Dior, for example, right there in your own front room, all from a web page. 

 There is a saying that, ‘where luxury goes, the high street follows’, but it’s been high-street brands, such as New Look and ASOS, Nike and Gap blazing the trail with AR in the industry to date. The tide seemed to be turning at the end of last year though, with Burberry, Galeries Lafayette, W Magazine and Vogue being a few high-end names to dip their toes in interactive waters. 

Ad for the AR Vogue App

Ultimately, the aim of any brand is to offer a truly differentiated experience, but if fashion in particular has to sell experiences to keep customers interested, they’ll be happy to know that, as of now, they can invite audiences deep into the story – any story – on any surface.