My 30 year old son, a ‘gamer’ from way back, bought himself one of the new Playstation Virtual Reality units last week.
We have all heard about VR for ages, or it seems that way, always just about to be commercialised, then suddenly, a consumer retail level product that is just astonishing, for a few hundred bucks.
Fiddling with it during the week, moving through the scenarios, in between being amazed, and gobsmacked, it occurred to me that this was the future of consumer research.
Over the last 40 years I have commissioned enough consumer research to keep several firms in business, both as an employee and more recently as an advisor. Almost all of it has been aimed at identifying the choices consumers will make between various options, price, packaging, shelf positioning, value add offers, and all the other things in the marketers toolbox.
Here is a tool that will do it all, and give a much higher degree of reliability than the methods to date.
Consider being a marketing person in a big FMCG supplier selling to the supermarkets.
Instead of the techniques used to date, gear up a virtual supermarket, and get people representing your target markets to wander the isles, making their choices as they would on a Thursday evening for their families.
This is real research in real time, and is right there to be used, right now.
