By Bennet Holmes on Friday, February 20 2009, 11:08 - Blog - Permalink
The birth of virtual Test Shoppers
Once upon a time...
A recurring issue in retail distribution and industry is how to evaluate in-store marketing for large-scale commercial operations and be certain that it will have the desired impact on sales. It is just such a typical, yet crucial question facing marketing and business departments that launched a project called “ActiSKU” 4 years ago. “SKU” is mass distribution jargon for a “product type”. In 2006, a manager with Carlsberg, a brewer present in more than thirty countries, met with ACTIPLAY, a company specialised in the production of 2D and 3D, real-time advergames… that is, video games and advertising sites!
What was the link between these two? Only that the brewer had an idea in mind, and specific needs, and ACTIPLAY mastered 3D technology. Nothing more was needed to launch an effective project between ambitious, visionary partners.
The meeting that started it all …
Carlsberg’s request was concise and might be summarised as follows: “Given advances in 3D technology and your own specialty (i.e. at ACTIPLAY), could software be designed that would allow Carlsberg to quickly and economically test the impact of advertising before a large-scale deployment?”
In other words: “let panellists located anywhere in the world visit a virtual 3D store in order to observe their purchasing behaviour and how it is influenced by in-store advertising created to boost sales.” This was asking quite a bit!
The need to observe and analyse customer facts and behaviour has been around forever. It is the very basis of marketing.
The methods used to measure these “facts and behaviours” are always the same in modern business: qualitative and/or quantitative consumer surveys, using real tests in actual stores that are set up for this purpose.
This does work, but the organisational effort and cost are prohibitive and many stores cannot (or will not) accommodate this.
The idea of creating online testing software using virtual stores was revolutionary – but much remained to be done because no one had yet figured out how to do it.
In the preceding years there had been some attempts to represent stores in 3D and have customers push a virtual shopping cart through virtual aisles – but never online. And having been on the other side as a manager in retail distribution, I can confirm that none of it was very exciting. Not much was out there – cumbersome, not very user-friendly solutions, unattractive 3D images and 2D photo simulation of shelves, prohibitive load times, ineffective tracking tools, etc.
Premature attempts? Certainly, and as a result, major players in the mid-2000s (agro-food and retail multinationals) who actively wished to see this type of tool on the market, if only to reduce their research costs, remained dubious… possibly for some time. At the beginning of 2007, a manager in charge of one of the major French distribution giants told me nothing different.
And after him, many others. It is a well-known fact that truly revolutionary technologies must often overcome the errors of the past in order to gain a decent foothold!
This is not the fault of companies who tried their hand in the early 2000’s, it is just that technology had not yet reached its 2007 levels! ACTIPLAY is certainly very talented, but was also one of the first to take another look at this market – because we believed in it and a large company expressed a specific demand!
Challenge as a business principle
“Real-time 3D” is ACTIPLAY’s specialty, so we were given the go ahead!
ACTIPLAY recognised from the outset that one of the most critical factors for success was to create sufficiently realistic online stores to ensure that the panellist experience be as close as possible to what it would be in a real, physical store – otherwise, the results would not be accurate. An ambitious challenge, but if we could succeed…
Some months later, the first versions were available. Based on globally recognised 3D development software from Dassault Système (3DVIA Virtools), ACTIPLAY proposed a set of applications that could be used to create 3D stores with an “online test shopper” function. As soon as first-half 2007, Carlsberg began tests using custom 3D store models. Their products were arranged using highly realistic virtual planograms; in-store advertising created by its agency was placed appropriately, and all other store decor and furnishings were included.
To observe how customers would react in this little scenario, panellists with “ad hoc” profiles were recruited and given “missions”, which they would carry out from their own homes. ActiSku took care of everything and recorded thousands of data points in real-time, which Carlsberg could analyse only a few minutes later through a back-office function.
The first results seem encouraging, but to validate ActiSKU technology and to give it the credit it deserves for these “virtual tests”, Carlsberg also conducted traditional tests (duplicates of the virtual tests). The results indicate a correlation rate between the two methods ranging from 80 to 85%, which Carlsberg views as an excellent performance (today, this figure appears in a Carlsberg Group PowerPoint presentation posted on the internet). From then on, ActiSKU virtual testing had proven its effectiveness, but the software could still develop further. ACTIPLAY has no intention of resting on its laurels!
A dash of gaming, a pinch of imagination…
ActiSKU works and it provides conclusive results! In spite of this success, all the stores created for Carlsberg were custom creations, which made its research group dependent. But ACTIPLAY is a gaming specialist, let us not forget, expert at the art of facilitating player-interaction in virtual reality.
The next step was to create a new version of ActiSKU that gives research groups more autonomy. It would allow them to create test environments very quickly (complete stores, target areas, virtual show rooms) by using a 3D tool-box of basic objects and then customising them for particular stores: wall colours and textures, floors, ceilings, location and number of aisles, cash registers etc. Pre-fab elements to customise yourself. This would accelerate the pace of testing and make ActiSKU a true marketing management tool. Easy to say...
To create online software that is flexible, ergonomic, easy for marketing and artistic teams to use and doesn’t require in-depth IT skills, software that is capable of loading thousands of 3D objects within an acceptable time-frame, etc. – the technical challenges were immense. Few specialists in the world would even attempt such an ambitious project. In particular, one of the difficulties that no one had yet attempted to solve was that of displaying thousands of products in 3D!
Contact was made with OSEO to obtain financing for designing this ideal tool. Convinced of the validity of this technological approach and of the unique software that would result from it, OSEO offered a first R&D financial package in 2007, and a second followed in 2008. A lifeline for ACTIPLAY, which could now create the revolutionary software of its dreams.
And the genie is out of the box
Coming up with store templates that are pre-configured with objects such that clients can use them to create their own stores depends above all on having a list of “typical” costs that represent world business practices as faithfully as possible.
To address this need, in May 2008 ACTIPLAY hired a French expert familiar with designing sales spaces for mass retailers. He identified the ideal dimensions for furnishings, aisles widths, the number and configuration of shelves, etc. This work lasted several weeks, but was indispensable for creating stores that up close resemble “real” stores and comply with the standards which apply in the real world. The realism of the final store determines the extent to which panellists can “immerse” themselves, and as I said earlier is a constant challenge. Today, this expert continues to guide us through change at ActiSKU
For more than a year, engineers at ACTIPLAY have had a second obsession: coming up with technical innovations that will allow the thousands of generic products modelled in 3D on virtual shelves to load and display quickly. This involves making hundreds of colours, textures, and virtual objects available in a database that clients can use to customise their own sales spaces, a feat that requires us to pool and mobilise all of the company’s brain power!
Today, a 3D store with 1000m² of floor space takes less than one minute to load completely using a standard ADSL connection. Who can say that? This was THE sine qua non for “democratising” virtual testing and making it appealing to an larger number of manufacturers, wholesale and retail distributors, and research and survey groups.
A test to validate new packaging can be created in less than half a day. Because of Carlsberg’s demand for this capability, ActiSKU greatly extended its territory in 2006,. The capability can be used to determine the ideal selling price for new products relative to competitor pricing. Packaging design companies can more easily analyse the choices consumers make when presented with new packaging. ActiSKU can also trace the “customer path” through a sales space and identify the “hot spots” where customers linger in the aisles. And all this information is available at a single click!
I am reminded of an amusing anecdote. In 2002 or 2003, the distributor for which I was working wanted to remodel all signage in all stores. Can you imagine the investment required to make such a change in more than 200 hyperstores? Not to mention the financial risk if the change did not work? To explain to us the design principles and help us assess the visual impact of the proposed design, the advertising agency created a cardboard mock-up of the store. It featured scale versions of the shelf tags and the placards which mark off the various groups of shelves – Drinks, Breakfast Foods, CDs, etc.in short . all the signage as it would look in the final setup. As a final effort to persuade us, the agency made a short film using a miniature camera, to show what would be seen by a customer browsing the various shelves. It was the early years following 2000. People used – with ingenuity whatever was on hand. Today, with the emergence of software such as ActiSKU, we can trace the customer path and simplify the process of making effective marketing decisions.
We’re off on an adventure, a business adventure!
ActiSKU began its business adventure well before the current version saw the light of day. This gives ACTIPLAY marketing personnel a significant advantage. In our various discussions with manufacturers, major research groups, wholesale and retail distributors (in France and abroad, particularly in the United States) we always, without fail, discover new uses for ActiSKU. The software is licensed per country. Then, a flat rate is charged per panellist who completes an assignment. We have chosen a simple and flexible business model that reflects the spirit in which this unique software was first conceived.
A potential distributors for ACTIPLAY in the United States says that for a year he has searched throughout North America for a tool capable of doing what ActiSKU can do. Once again, ActiSKU, the revolutionary, 100% French-made product, is experiencing what other software solutions that came before did: a launch attended by fanfare … but in a land other than its country of birth!
''*The author of this article: Hervé Bonnard, is a former newspaper journalist and publication manager. He has also managed communication/marketing teams for mass retailers. He currently serves in a management capacity at ACTIPLAY."
