O2 retail VR POS study data more in line with actual sales data.

 

VR market research case study with O2

Challenge

O2 wanted to create a more eye-catching point of sale proposition in their stores. One which more clearly – and immediately – conveyed what the product is and what the benefits are. With limited space and a crowded environment, the challenge was to bring the retail environment to life for consumer research.

Showing respondents 2D images of a 3D space isn’t optimal and mocking up the physical retail environment would be too costly, time consuming and problematic to test at scale. Could Virtual Reality generate meaningful findings? We created the industry’s first VR panel to validate whether it added to the research experience and could be a new tool to address declining response rates in quantitative research.

Solution

Gorilla in the room worked with Populus and Populus Data Solutions to design an intuitive mobile solution which integrated VR into the survey. We filmed 360 video on location at one of the O2 stores trialling the product, with the 360 video camera in a fixed position, ensuring that the only variation between different executions were the representations of the bay. This approach ensured that factors with the store layout – such as other point of sale and messaging surrounding the product bay and the wider store environment – were consistent and did not bias the results in any way.

When respondents viewed 360 videos through a VR headset, the standard O2 radio station was playing, adding to the realistic atmosphere and immersive experience.Respondents were sent Google Cardboard headsets and invited to take part in the survey using their smartphone. A sample of 400 was split into five monadic cells with each cell exposed to a 360 video of the O2 store. Each 360 video variant had store assets digitally altered for different cells using CGI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outcome

VR brought the concepts to life, allowing respondents to feel fully engaged and involved with the study. This immersive approach provides a far more accurate portrayal compared to concepts tested in isolation, particularly for awareness and clarity. It provided real world context of being in a busy in-store environment.

This insight gave clear direction to O2 on the best performing concepts and better data on store set-up. The full case study will be published in Admap however key findings   include; VR more accurately reflected real world sales data and conventional research is over-claimed by 50%. We were also able to prove the practical application of VR in quantitative research – by scaling qual insight to a quant sample – and that respondent enjoyment increased by 68% compared to an online survey running at the same time.

“Thank you for a great experience. It was very cool to do something new. I’ll look forward to the next survey”

“Brilliant survey and very different”

“I liked the whole experience, enjoyed every second of it.”

Respondents reported that VR enhanced the experience of a survey with net enjoyability significantly higher than a comparable standard quant survey run over the same period.