In a famous speech he gave not long after returning triumphantly to Apple after being pushed out over a decade earlier, Steve Jobs explained to his new team that, to him, marketing is about values. It’s the way companies explain to their customers, stakeholders, employees, and anyone else who is paying attention to what they stand for and why they are relevant.

Brands are symbols of the values an organization stands for. They give a few short words or a basic image the power to transmit giant and far reaching messages of competence, integrity, speed, ambition, and innumerable other desirable and differentiating characteristics.

Build Value with Your Values

Too often, however, companies direct all their branding resources externally, and in doing so fail to recognize that the capacity of brands to motivate people, further their goals, and create strong and beneficial associations is just as useful when applied internally.

A highly-engaged workforce is associated with a 21 percent increase in profitability.

Branded environments, whether in a retail space, a corporate office, or any other physical touchpoint, take the core values of a company and extend them into the real world. They make their mission and vision real, touchable, and impossible to ignore.

Through interior design, lighting, graphics, and navigational aids, a branded space becomes a functional and beautiful embodiment of their personality and culture.

A Shared Mission

The modern workspace is undergoing a change. Employees aren’t siloed in closed offices, but are increasingly working in shared spaces conducive to collaboration.

This development presents new challenges, such as finding ways to make large, open office plans communal but with opportunities for privacy as well. But it also creates a wonderful chance to build bright, airy, and bustling hubs of activity where the feeling of a shared mission energizes all that enter the space.

More than just a lofty goal, an attractive, efficient, and clean work environment that aligns with and extends an organization’s values makes a major impact on the engagement levels of employees.

Branded Environments: The New Must-Have Investment in Employee Productivity

A study by market researchers Ipsos for coworking company WeWork found that even more than better hours, higher pay, and more vacation, employees reported a well designed workspace would most improve their job satisfaction.

Satisfied employees are productive employees, and Gallup’s 2018 State of the Global Workforce report backs that claim up, finding that a highly-engaged workforce is associated with a 21 percent increase in profitability.

Inform, Engage, and Inspire

Branded environments are a potent means of fulfilling several important objectives. They perform basic wayfinding tasks that get people efficiently where they need to go, energize and synchronize internal teams, and instill trust and confidence in visitors.

Every brand has unique and compelling values to share. Make those intangible qualities real and you magnify their power.

Talk to us today about how your brand story can be integrated into your physical spaces.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology already built into smartphones that overlays digital information right onto the real world. Traditional retail environments can be unintuitive and unengaging, and today’s consumer is demanding more. To compete with a growing ecommerce marketplace, smart brands are merging the digital and physical worlds, bringing the best of both to their customers. Augmented reality had a breakout year in 2017, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s to come.

All it takes is a few clicks on a smartphone and your products and signage will animate right before your customers’ eyes. Onlookers will gasp with delight and amazement as static images spring into motion to explain their own features and deliver valuable promotions right at the point of purchase.

Reasons/Ideas: AR brings the advantages of efficient and adaptable digital platforms to physical spaces in a captivating and memorable interactive format:

  1. Create Moving Brand Experiences: Products come alive right on the shelf to speak to customers, explain their benefits, and make the case for purchase.
  2. Connect with Your Customer: Retail chains can leverage a powerful new way to interact with their customers, while simultaneously gaining valuable metrics to study engagement levels — information that is vital to refining and improving the sales process.
  3. Drive Conversions with Differentiation: When engaging with AR, potential customers linger longer at the point of purchase and experience an increase in moments and types of interaction, improving the likelihood of a sale.

Our Approach

Every successful project starts with significant research and preplanning. Our team reviews the space, the trigger (or product placement), and the desired interaction before we dive into creation. We investigate the optimal AR staging to achieve your goals and always consider the need to build data collection into the system from the start. We also examine opportunities for coupon and/or click-through option for all AR experiences, both to provide an incentive to the user and to collect consumer insights that help sharpen your strategy.

The AR revolution is happening and it’s already proving to be an incredible tool for creating meaningful interactions that traditional advertising deliverables can’t. It is quickly becoming the hottest technology in marketing for creating memorable, data-rich experiences that reliably convert sales. Don’t sit on the sidelines and let your retail space slowly become obsolete, augment it and activate your brand experience!