Virtual store research - Why is 3D important?

2D Virtual Shelf Set

3D Virtual Shelf Set

You might ask why 3D is important or necessary in virtual store research? The reason is many of the shopper marketing levers we want to study are interacted with in three dimensions. These include free standing displays, end caps, coupon dispensers, signage such as shelf blades, aisle layouts, and many others are shopped from multiple angles and in different sequences in the real store and in order to fully capture how people will behave when faced with these 3D parts of the shopper environment requires a 3D interface.

While at General Mills I had the opportunity to do side-by-side research using 2D and 3D vendors. There are two additional areas were the results differ.

The first difference is on measures of awareness and purchase, usually the key measures for packaging or new product research. The reason for this difference is the 2D interface requires the respondent to scroll the shelf set to see products shelved down the aisle. As the products scroll onto the screen the respondent is forced to look at them to see if they are the product they are looking to buy. This forced exposure to the packages causes them to more often notice new products or packaging or signage in the shelf set. In a real store, or a 3D simulation of a store the shopper usually faces down the aisle and walks down the aisle until they reach a visual clue like the red of the boxes of Coca Cola or the Yellow of the boxes of Cheerios and finds their product from its relative location to the visual marker. This process takes just a few seconds and they usually don't look at the rest of the products in the aisle as they walk past them and consequently don't notice the new products, packages, or signage.

The second difference in the data between 2D and 3D is things shelved on the top and bottom shelves don't pay a penalty in a 2D shelf set as all items are shown in roughly the same view. In a real store and in a 3D virtual store it is much harder to see things that are not at eye level. This greatly impacts the purchases of items on the bottom or top shelf or in a bunker.

These differences mean that the data is less accurate for any of these situations. While the 2D interfaces will work for small categories with the products of interest being shelved at eye-level, many situations will cause the data to be less than ideal. This is why our platform is a fully 3D interactive environment to allow the shopper to shop as they would in a real store.