Apple Vision Pro: An impressive flag bearer of XR tech and its marketing promise

Well, well, Apple's Vision Pro has hit the market. This $3500-bet was announced at Apple's developer conference in June last year. Since then, a lot has been said about it, and as always, it has divided people into zealots, skeptics, and naysayers. Whichever category you may choose to sit in, the product is out in the market for its buyers.

As a marketer, I'm excited. Not just because it's an Apple product (which is true because I have been an Apple fan for many years), also because of all the marketing promises it holds. So without a further ado, turn up the volume of your earphones, headphones or bluetooth speakers and explore this new product category by Apple.

Let's meet the Apple Vision Pro again!

Vision Pro is a mixed reality or MR headset by Apple. Apple has spent an estimated $20bn for adding this new product to its long list of products, and stepping into an early-stage technology. Remaining true to its approach to introducing new products, Apple is not the first company to launch such a product. The market has already seen products from companies like Microsoft, Meta, Bytedance, Sony, and XReal over the past few years. All of them offer a product that uses extended reality or XR technology which is an umbrella term used for immersive technology products which covers VR, AR and MR technologies.

Vision Pro is a spatial computing headset that can be used to consume digital content using a spatial environment that blends with your physical space. It offers a UI that you can interact with using your eyes, hands and voice. You can use this product for productivity, entertainment and communication purposes. Basically, it takes your current experience of the Apple ecosystem and makes it more immersive.

Its dedicated spatial operating system, VisionOS, provides an infinite digital canvas that you can customize to create your own workspace which has the familiar apps available on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. It has its own App Store which, of course, needs many more applications especially created for this device. It also allows you to have a 360-degree view of 3D objects, becomes a virtual display for your Mac, and connects to your keyboard and mouse via bluetooth.

Of course, you can watch movies, play games, listen to music, view your photos and videos, and communicate with people through voice calls, chat, messaging, and e-mail. It also allows you to create your own 3D avatar which is near-realistic compared to pixelated avatars we find on other apps and platforms. And you can share your screen in video calls.

It seems to do a lot, which it does, and the headset is like wearing two 4K TVs on your head with surround sound system, and highly accurate eye-tracking system. It also has high-res cameras that precisely track your head and hand movement to capture getures from a wide range of movements.

It has an Optic ID feature will scan your iris for authentication purposes. And Apple promises lag-free, real-time view of the world without compromising on your privacy.

Why marketing organizations need to keep an eye on this piece of tech?

As is the case with every new tech, businesses and marketers tend to stand on the fence and watch keenly. XR technology, most particularly, VR and AR have been around for a while and has found place in the marketing strategies in the B2C space with measurable benefits. With growing productization of their services, B2B businesses are also quite well-placed to adopt the technology.

In B2C, immersive marketing is gradually becoming quite popular. There are two broad use cases in the B2C space - product demos and virtual try-ons. Let's take a look at a few examples. Snap had partnered with Amazon to provide eyewear products from brands like Oakley and Ray-Ban into its social media app, Snapchat. You could discover and virtually try the products, and purchase them if you liked them. This entire seamless experience helped bring Amazon Fashion into Snapchat's environment with the use of AR.

Last year, Amazon partnered with the 3D visualization platform, Hexa. Hexa's low-friction 3D modeling technology allows businesses to stitch 2D photos into a 3D model. With this feature you could do a 360-degree zoom and rotation of the product, as well as use AR to try it on virtually using your smartphone camera.

In the fashion products space, Tommy Hilfiger and Coach made successful activation of AR mirrors by the AR fashion company, ZERO10. These AR mirrors could be placed inside the shop or in the shop windows. You could dynamically swipe through the products and virtually try them on. For you, it simplifies and accelerates your buying decision. For the business, it means better inventory management and higher in-store sales.

IKEA had introduced an AR app that allows you to see how the new furniture would look like in your home. You could also use to assemble the products you bought from the store. These apps using the XR technology are growingly becoming common now.

The Dutch company, Holoconnects, created buzz at CES 2024 by showcasing its life-size hologram technology powered by AI. Holobox, its range of modular products, can create 3D holographic visualization of people, products or logos. The company has gained huge amount of interest from businesses across hospitality, advertising, education and entertainment industries. The products only need electricity and Internet connection to project holograms of virtual hosts or pre-recorded holograms of speakers, celebrities or experts.

In the B2B space, XR technology can play an important role by creating immersive marketing experiences for product demos, customer research, hyper-personalized customer engagement, hyper-personalized ad placement, and training.

For B2B product companies, say in manufacturing or healthcare space, the infinite digital canvas available in VisionOS could be used to create seamless product demos. This could help move your customers down the funnel faster, driving up conversions.

The gaze and gesture-tracking could be used to heatmap the new features of your B2B SaaS product to enhance overall user experience. You could share a beta version with your existing customers to get their valuable feedback and prime them for early adoption of the new version.

As it is a usual B2B sales cycle is quite long and for some of the businesses it goes into months. It is hard for the sales and marketing teams to sustain the warmth created in the first meeting throughout the sales cycle. This challenge is further amplified with the growing fragmentation in the online user journeys. I will drop in a link to the episode where I covered this in detail. Adopting XR technologies to tell immersive stories and create interactive experiences could be a game-changing strategy to engage your customers. Marketers could also use them during their offline events to offer engaging online-to-offline integration.

Apple Vision Pro is full of sensors and high-res cameras that capture users' gestures, expressions and even their emotions. B2B marketers can dip into the valuable data and gain precious insights into consumer behaviour. They could come up with hyper-personalized, alternative storylines that align with the customer's business needs and keep them engaged right up to the decision-making stage.

The valuable data captured during product demos and hyper-personalized storytelling could also help deliver hyper-personalized ads. You can use the XR technology to deliver immersive ad experiences that drive customers to actively engage with the brand content through gestures, voice commands or physical movements. With such experiences you could elevate user experience and push them towards conversion.

Products like Vision Pro can capture so much of customer data and generate deep insights into customer's behaviour and preferences. Marketers can use this data to collaborate with their learning team to create specialized training for the sales and delivery teams. This can drive up the overall customer experience, provide a cohesive brand experience, and deepen customer's trust in your brand.

But, there's a catch!

Now, whether you are a Apple Vision Pro zealot, skeptic or naysayer, the excitement around the product and the promise it holds for immersive marketing is quite real. Still, there are a few creases that marketing organizations need to iron out before taking the plunge.

First and foremost, is the use case. What do you want to achieve with the XR technology? Is it creating an immersive brand experience? Or is it to help them make better decision about your product or service? Or is it to drive conversion?

Then, how will you measure the outcomes? Traditional metrics like impressions, likes and shares will not necessarily suffice proper measurement of performance. According to the AR/VR advertising agency, OmniVirt, KPIs like click through rate, engagement rate and video completion rate seem to be more relevant. The data thrown up by the Vision Pro's headset like movement and eye patterns, gaze time etc. could be the new KPIs.

Any business, B2C or B2B, that has been around for a while has legacy content that has helped them build and optimize customer journeys, and lead them to conversion. How do you take that content to the immersive environment offered by VisionOS? Is it through an app? Or a simple web-link accessed through the Safari browser? It is most likely, that the best performing content would need to be adapted to the mixed reality environment.

There is also a practical consideration of how all of the content is managed at the back-end and delivered to customers through prevailing digital media and immersive environment offered by Vision Pro.

Now, adoption this new medium of reaching customers is likely to further complicate the user journeys. It is important to keep in mind that the Apple ecosystem has high garden walls. Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have similarly high walls to keep users within their ecosystem. That might make a customer data platform or CDP even more important.

And let's not forget, privacy. Privacy has increasingly become a prominent pillar in Apple's pitch for all of its products. Apple has privacy built into its hardware and software architecture. This is likely going to limit the extent to which your hyper-personalized ads can be served and the customer data that you can capture through those immersive interactions.

Easing into the immersive world of Vision Pro and XR technology

Tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Apple have been pushing the boundaries to take XR technologies like AR, VR and MR to the businesses and masses. Microsoft has been focused more on the business side with its HoloLens targeting healthcare, manufacturing and education sectors.

Meta launched smart glasses in collaboration with Ray-Ban recently. These are focused on mass consumers and digital creators who are keen on livestreaming content to Instagram and Facebook, and listen to music.

Apple's Vision Pro sits somewhere between the two offering use cases in productivity, communication, and entertainment arenas.

Like AI is changing the way we search and discover information, XR technologies are likely to change the way we consume that information through immersive and interactive applications. Those marketing organizations that carry the view that XR is just another wave that might subside, they may be setting themselves up for disappointment.

The most common example skeptics and naysayers cite is the lacklustre adoption of the metaverse by Meta. What they do tend to ignore is the fact that like the metaverse, XR technologies are a new medium for customer outreach, engagement, brand building, and selling. Understanding what adopting such technologies would mean for use cases specific to their business needs time. That will be followed by implementation, A/B testing, and optimizations that can lead to successful activations.

It's best to test out simplest of use cases that may not have direct sales implications and keep building upon it. This will enable better understanding, lower cost of adoption, and increased chances of better ROI as the technology matures and becomes mainstream.

Remember, XR technologies, and ecosystems like Apple Vision Pro are likely to be the 'and' to your marketing strategies, not an 'or'.