“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” ~ Robert McKee
“The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.” ~Ronald Ross
ACT II - Products, Chapter II
PRODUCTS happen in time but they also happen in space, and how they happen in space affects how they do in time. Spatialized products can impact the entire life cycle of a product, from design collaboration and speed at the outset to launch success, returns reduction and customer loyalties. In fact, the spatial realm can lend a narrative to the entire cycle and turn product life cycles into product life stories. We must not be distracted by the song and dance of display holograms. Just as Greek theater originally consisted of only song and dance before Thespis introduced the first episode (literally, something ‘added in between’), so too will holographic song and dance emerge into storylines, storyboards and storyworlds. The episodes will interject and holographic proliferation won’t need to rely on its wow or eureka effects.
But first, when you look at the product world, what a gruesome business it is. There are hundreds of millions of companies in the world, and perhaps half a million brands. There are around fifty thousand big companies, but only a dozen or so truly global brands such as Pepsi or Coca-Cola. Approximately thirty thousand new products are launched every year, with estimates of failure ranging between forty and ninety-five percent. The majority, or almost all, products are failures – most, perhaps, before they even get delivered. E-commerce percentages rose during the lockdowns in the United States from ten to fifteen percent, and so too did product returns – from eighteen to twenty-one percent between 2020 and 2021 alone. In apparel and footwear, the percentage is at least forty percent, owing in large part to the so-called practice of consumer bracketing – hedging on color and size by purchasing multiple versions of the same item, mostly returned to sender. All of this is unnecessary, including the enormous burden on the environment. But just in case you think this is merely a be-kind-to-the-planet concept, consider the fact that cars are products too. In 2017, for instance, there were a million and a quarter road fatalities – over ninety percent as a direct result of human error. Like, distracted attention in-car, often as a result of sight shifting. As we shall see, holograms have something to say here too.
With so much failure at the fundamental level of production, hey, it’s a wonder we have good products and brands at all. We’re talking here about a colossal waste of human energy and activity – all that wasted design and development. All that incredible usage of raw materials, packaging and carbons. It’s like as if we really didn’t know what we were doing here. Now, maybe the majority of all human endeavor is a waste but that is a topic for another day. All we are worried about here is the waste of space. Not just the space all that failure took up, but all the space these failures failed to leverage. Because the space around these product misfires certainly could have helped, all along the line from conception to live birth and successful integration into the surrounding world.
Products fail in time because they often do not succeed in space. One of the possible exceptions here is the deployment of holography in product packaging. This is not about display and spectacle but safety and security, providing customer reassurance and shoring up the vast counterfeiting problem. Fake brands are a gigantic drain on corporate revenues, but they also damage the reputation of any brand and harm the integrity of customer relationships which is so at the core. Moving beyond holographic foils and wraps, future innovations in this space might consider not just the visuals but the immersive aspects and deploy narrative holographs. Packaging is a surety of origin and quality, but it can also become a deep differentiator, a provider of infotainment and edutainment that goes beyond mere display and promotion. As Tim Cook reminded an Oxford audience some time back, Augmented Reality has a profundity that Virtual Reality lacks. For profound read deep. Not just depth of field but depth of human connection, interaction, relationship and exchange.
Another area where holography is well established and advancing is the industrial space, where products are costly and complex, often needing serious education and simulation. Manufacturing and medical arenas will deploy holographic episodes in the spatial realm increasingly in the future to train newbies, acculturate new systems into the workforce and maximize resourcefulness across plants and hospital locations. There are multiple categories of industrial products – not just essential equipment but raw materials, capital products like the factories themselves, component materials and accessory products. Holographic applications can adapt to each type, optimizing visibility, shareability, efficiency and resilience. Even the services that product makers increasingly rely on for revenue streams and market protection lend themselves to holographic enactment and dramatization. Both products and services need to become experiences, and holography is an experiential medium far outdoing mere text, audio or visuals.
Back in the consumer space, products can be mere convenience ones relying on impulse or necessity – your toothpastes and your toilet rolls. Products can be shopping items, demanding shopping around and active decisions. Cars, phones, kitchen appliances. They can be speciality products, branded entities in a category of one, like luxury items and the iPhone itself. Woe unto the speciality product that slips back into being a mere shopping one again, and Augmented Reality might have something to do with stopping that happening. And then we have the so-called unsought products, utter necessities such as medical supplies we do not indulge in as retail therapy but purchase out of worry, fear, duty or dread. Yes, products lead forth a whole lot of human emotion – from ecstasy and delight to anxiety and relief. But mostly, it appears, products have elicited mere boredom and neglect.
If product recalls harm shopping and speciality items in the consumer world, product returns in the arena of digital commerce seriously undermine margins and sustainability. Products, essentially, are shots in the dark, often relying on accident or serendipity to find their role and purpose. Consider the fact that the toaster, for example, was invented in 1905 but had to wait until 1933 before sliced bread followed. Bubblewrap was designed originally as a textured wallpaper. Products stumble around in the dark until customers tell them what they are and do. In the words of advertising guru David Ogilvy, don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers. Start with the customer relationship and then work back to the nature of the customer experience, eh? The winner goes to the one who is the best conversationalist.
Multiple brands have already embraced holographic space, and indeed the world itself has over a billion Augmented Reality users in one form or another. Often these brands are luxury ones such as Burberry, Cartier, Lexus or Louis Vuitton. But they also include food and beverage leaders such as Coca-Cola, Diageo and Kellogg’s. They include fast-moving consumer brands such as Colgate-Palmolive and toy companies such as Hasbro. Dior Sauvage, for example, witnessed a fifty percent uptick in sales after deploying holography in its brand. Tech brands, naturally, are well to the fore in marketing holographically, including Apple and Samsung. And, of course, tech titans clash for competitive leadership in the space itself, notably Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet. Each pursue their version of blended reality, from Virtual to Augmented to Mixed. As we await the iPhone moment, it seems clear that gaming alone is not a start-off point for a complete consumer platform including digital. As we depend on technology to advance from headsets to glasses and eventual gear-free reality, it is also clear that open environments that include the natural world will trump closed ones that require removal from our current environment. Yes, we want to escape the confines of our real life for a while, but we also want the real world we leave behind to be better when we return to it. Games are metaphors, but we also need the tenor (the fundamental thing being compared) to improve, not just the vehicle (the imaginary comparison). Mixed reality may have a spectrum of virtual and augmented, closed and open modes, but what you don’t want is mixed-up reality.
Ideally, you want a space to play in but also work in. And you want this to be your actual habitat, your home, your store, your city quarter. It’s ironic that the first hologram was born in 1947, and the first computer itself in 1946. These technologies have travelled parallel lives ever since, but with AI now becoming mainstream, perhaps it’s time to bridge them. Spatializing products can form a bridge between them.
Mobile to immersive is a leap of faith, not just technology. Let’s consider the benefits of an augmented rather than virtual reality for products. The Significant Objects project some time ago revealed the enormous revaluations of ordinary objects such as old toys once narratives were attached. A toy with a name is no longer simply a commodity. A toy with a name and a backstory is a character waiting to perform. The virtual world has narratives but they are too often allied to advertising and gaming. It’s heavy on the Artificial, lighter on the Intelligence. Virtual space has been promoted essentially as a persuasive medium. Now it’s possible to be merely persuasive also in the augmented world of the spatial realm, but the live nature of the real world has a way of insisting on involvement. It’s nice to be ludic once in a while, but we are social beings essentially requiring connection and meaning. You can advertise products in the virtual world but you still have to lead people to the live products in the real-life one. And when your customers reach the real world again, they will still require similar inspiration, education and interaction.
Augmenting the real world may be the tougher call, but it is the long game for real. The digital environment alone is saturated, interrupted at every second by ads and agendas. The empty space all around customers and products is the agora, the marketplace where fiction meets fact and reality happens. You can explore a product to scale effect, for instance, in the virtual world, but this is nothing like scaling for effect in a natural environment. Life-size avatars for customer advice. Larger-than-life blow-ups and cut-aways to explore the inner intricacy and workings of shopping and speciality products. The spatial realm can sell the inside as well as the outside of your products. No more need for Intel Inside stickers. The invisible becomes tactile, the numinous becomes tangible.
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