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The Role of VR in Insight Activation
Virtual reality has the potential to be an "empathy machine" by allowing users to experience different perspectives through virtual environments. It can cultivate empathy by transporting users into immersive experiences through memory, empathy, interaction, and observation. Successfully staging experiences in VR requires understanding what it takes to design for these realms and cultivate empathy in users.
The Role of VR in Insight Activation
- 1. VR: THE ULTIMATE empathyMACHINE Tom De Ruyck InSites Consulting
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- 6. DISTILLING GREAT INSIGHT IS THEstartAND NOT THE END
- 8. Premium ValueMarket Value UndifferentiatedDifferentiated Adaptedfrom Pine and Gilmore, 2011
- 10. THE CAPACITY TO PLACEONESELF IN ANOTHER'S POSITION
- 12. MEMORY EMPATHY INTERACTOBSERVE 4 REALMS OF ANexperience Adapted from Pine and Gilmore, 2011
- 14. MEMORY EMPATHY INTERACTOBSERVE 4 REALMS OF ANexperience Adapted from Pine and Gilmore, 2011
- 15. WHAT IT TAKESTO STAGE AN experience
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Editor's Notes
- #2 Hi everyone! How are you?
- #3 I’m excited to be here as well. I really like the promise of this NEXT event: triggering new ideas and exploring new technology and thinking. Personally I’m passionate about all three. I especially like to try out and experiment with new tech.
- #4 One of these new technologies that’s on our radar is VR. But before talking about applications, let’s see if there is even a problem in market research that VR could provide a solution to.
- #5 Our research among market research users shows that only half of the MR studies are successful in driving change.
- #6 When digging deeper we learned that the lack of impact isn’t due to a lack of insight. 4 out of 5 research users stated that the insights were actionable and readily usable for their marketing teams. So if it’s not about the quality of the insight, what is it about?
- #7 Its about the way in which insights are communicated. Coming up with the insight is the start and not the end of the project!
- #8 In my experience, it is about delivering these insights in a way that is memorable and that generates empathy. So what type of deliverables do you think succeed in this ambitious goal? Making insights memorable and generating true empathy.
- #9 Is it this type of deliverable? Raw data like this table report or a transcript? No A fully designed PowerPoint Presentation with conclusions and recommendations ? Probably not A Workshop to turn insights into ideas and actions? Maybe Pine and Gilmore developed this great framework on the Progression of Value. Let’s take a look where our research deliverables would go. Raw data is what we would call a COMMODITY. This is not differentiating and the value it provides is limited. When these results are turned into a PowerPoint presentation we call it a GOOD. Only by adding workshops and consulting, we can refer to research as a service. This is more differentiating and is also perceived to add more value. But is this SERVICE level enough to drive change?
- #10 To answer this question, I explored the extremes of the service level in a study for Philips Sonicare. We carefully mapped out and designed the touchpoints to engage the client throughout the project. We presented the team with immersive consumer data, developed custom models, used out of category cases to inspire, hosted a workshop and even handed out postcards. Every member of the team could write their future self a postcard on actions they plan to take. We send the postcards back to them 3 months later as a reminder. When we tested the impact of study, we scored well on making the insights memorable, but their was room for improvement on the EMPATHY-level. And you need both to drive change.
- #11 Rigorous evidence-based compassion, rather than trying to feel people’s pain.
- #12 Luckily Pine & Gilmore feature a 4th type of offering: EXPERIENCE. An experience is a series of events that stimulates the senses and activates an audience to pay full attention. It evokes emotions which are crucial in creating memories. How can we deliver MR as an experiences?
- #13 A first dimension to take into account is the participation level. Do we want people to interact with the flow of events or just observe. Active participation is easier for smaller audiences. Then we should think about the objectives we want to achieve. Do we want people to absorb insights and make them memorable? Or do we want to immerse them in the lives of their consumers and generate empathy? I’ve been playing around with EXPERIENCE for a while now and looking back, I mostly have “experience” on the right side of the spectrum. Actively engaging a smaller audience. For Air France KLM for example where we shared results of a concept test as a concept casino where people could place their bet on the concept that scored highest on a specific KPI. Truly making the results stick. For Heineken we wanted to increase empathy with the target group of party people, so we took the team on a lounge tour and gave them empathy cards with activities to perform to relive the journey of the target group. For experience examples on the left side, I had to look outside my own projects. When Skype wanted to introduce a new metric in the organization - the user ‘pulse’ –, they also tapped into experience. They built an installation with data-points represented by physical balls. An airstream shoots the balls in the air to the correct, corresponding height to show if the score goes up or down. And yes, people go wild when the balls go up. Last but not least, technology can provide a solution to also make immersion more scalable to a bigger audience. Instead of limiting the experience of an in-home ethnography to the happy few, VR could make this experience accessible to a whole organization. Thinking back about the Philips Sonicare project, I realized later that there was room for improvement on the empathy level. So I’d like to show you what I would do if I could do the project again – staging an experience – right here – right now - using technology that most of you have in your pocket.
- #14 If you didn’t get it up on your own phone, this is how it works. So you can swipe to center the view on where the action is. You can look around by moving your phone, by following me for example. You can look up and down in the bathroom, You can even turn around. And with a simple pair of VR googles or Google Cardboard, it gets even better. For the true observers among you, you’ll notice some interesting behaviors in this routine. And you get fully immersed in the CONTEXT of the consumer.
- #15 This experience is part of the bottom left quadrant. But in staging experiences, you can actually include more than 1 realm to increase the impact.
- #16 So what are the implications for us to make this work? It can require a unique type of data that is not typically part of how we do research – think about 360 footage that can be collected afterwards to emphasize key conclusions. We can tap into emerging technologies To keep the costs down, a whole lot of creativity is required to stage these experiences. It’s funny, but this 360 experiment actually costed me less than 360 dollars in hardware. And last but not least, it shouldn’t be a gimmick – each experience should have a clear purpose. Is this something for every project? No, for a simple logo test I wouldn’t recommend it. For a strategic project that requires a TRANSFORMATION, I truly believe that this is the way to go.
- #17 Hi everyone! In the next 10 minutes I will talk about HOW we can WOW our audience as researchers, and WHY we should.