The Common Ground for Virtual Reality and Destination Marketing

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Marketers are always looking for the next best thing - the new shiny tech that will inevitably somehow change the we we market products to consumers

The question is always one of, how we can leverage the new tech to create compelling marketing experiences, get people excited about products, and make more money.

When VR dropped onto the scene, the same old question was asked and then, rather unceremoniously, shelved for the near future. None of us could quite figure out how this thing fit into our world.

However, as the virtual and augmented reality scene has continued to successfully mature, innovative marketers started to discover more and more ways that VR tech could make an impact. Though the tremors of VR can be felt wide and far, one sector in particular really lends itself to the VR experience and as a result, is garnering a lot of traction - destination marketing.

Given destination marketing and VR are both focused on moving the user from their day-to-day lives to a completely new place, their successful wedded future comes as no surprise. Even when the audience can’t touch or interact with their virtual world, VR’s immersive experience has that much more power than a photograph and a few lines of copy. It has the power to transport users to a new place.

Several destinations have already used virtual reality to great effect in their marketing campaigns. The challenge for destination marketing has always been that of making the intangible tangible – making audiences feel the destination before they go.

Travel Australia uses VR successfully as a way to bridge that gap, giving users an immersive experience to help them ‘try’ before they buy. Their videos capture the beauty of the Great Ocean Road or the Barrier Reef with a panoramic quality that images simply don’t have.

England’s Heritage Cities has recently launched a new app that uses a variety of rich media paired with augmented reality that allowed users to bring history to life through this new app.

As consumers become increasingly resistant to the usual format of ad communications, these immersive technologies seem like the next logical step in the evolution of our channels. Marketing works best when users feel like they already own the product, and VR enables destination marketers to give audiences that exact experience.

Yet, despite the obvious benefits to using new tech like VR in campaigns, there are some drawbacks. It is quite clearly expensive, and VR headsets are unwieldy, odd-looking, and a long way from replacing magazines as the world’s favourite coffee-table media format.

Moreover, it seems that VR invites another of those most dangerous of marketing blunders – channel obsession. For now, the novelty of VR makes it a compelling experience for users. But, as we all know, novelty eventually wears thin, and the risk remains that users could increasingly see engagement with VR as a chore rather than an exciting new prospect.

As with any new shiny tech, we need to make sure we are focusing on the medium and the message in order to tell truly compelling human stories that pique consumer interest. And we would do well to remember that while VR may be immersive, it will never be as powerful as our most visceral, emotional asset – the human imagination.