Why Building Your Dream Boat Can Break Your Heart
The time has come. You have saved and planned to be able to finally buy your dream boat — the one you always wanted, with all of the features and the perfect color to cruise around to your favorite spots. You won’t be purchasing off the showroom floor this time; no, this will be your custom built baby.
You work with the manufacturer to select your options, you go through every catalog to pick the perfect shade and material for the seats, the deck materials, and of course the extra mountable speakers.
And now you wait for delivery day, which should be the most exciting part of the process, when you see your dream and vision come to life.
But what if it’s not? What if the finished product doesn’t match the vision?
For starters, one boat builder is probably getting an ear full, and one boat owner now has a tarnished view of the prize they’ve waited so long for. It is a sad day for all….
This is of course a very dramatic representation of what can go wrong when configuring a product, but while the wrong shade of paint is unlikely to change a buyer’s desire to own the boat, it can do irreparable damage to the brand/buyer relationship. As brands function in increasingly competitive markets, the buyer experience and perception of the brand’s comprehensive value proposition is imperative to staying afloat (pun intended).
Why Product Visualization Works
80% of buyers believe that the overall brand experience is as important as the product itself and 67% believe that product imagery is very important to making a purchase decision. Businesses no longer operate in a system where the best product is determined solely on product attributes — how the buyer is able to discover, engage with, and evaluate the product plays a critical role in which brand they choose to go with. Given that in a recent survey 76% of consumers indicated that it is easier than ever to switch brands, building a stellar experience is not something brands should be putting on the back burner.
Product Visualization brings products to life across the multitude of screens used by consumers every day. At the touch of a button buyers can view items in high fidelity 3D, often providing a closer look than even in store shopping can provide. Visualization experiences also offer brands the opportunity to educate consumers about features and benefits of their products versus competitors, adding callouts to specific areas of the digital experience.
The opportunities for more immersive experiences are not going unnoticed by shoppers either. Salesforce found that 51% of Americans prefer to shop online, but they are looking for more than a transactional experience. 88% said that they expect brands to accelerate digital initiatives, and 54% indicated that they were looking for brands to offer more product engagement tools. Product configuration software allows brands to deliver on these demands quickly and efficiently.
It is not only the customer who benefits from an improved digital experience; studies have shown that interactive content, such as product visualizers and configurators, drive conversions 70% of the time, as compared to 36% for passive content.
It is important to note that the key factor for success in deploying 3D visualization is dedication to image fidelity, which guarantees that there will be no sad boat owners on delivery day. A subpar interactive experience lowers the value of not only the overall brand experience, but the expectations of a product, and the likelihood of a purchase.
How To Add Product Configuration to Your Website
There are several approaches that brands can take to add 3D visualization or product configuration to their website. The first is to build an experience from scratch using internal or contracted resources. This allows for a great deal of customization, but also requires a great deal of time and resources, not only from the standpoint of building the models and platform, but also demands on product owners and marketers on determining how the experience should function.
The second option is to custom build the website experience, but outsource the model build — purchasing a pre built option that can be customized to the brand’s offerings. This requires less resources than a build from scratch, but still calls for experience design and the ability to smoothly integrate new assets within a brand’s existing site.
The third option is to use product visualization software, which brings much of the flexibility of built from scratch experiences, easy integration with existing tools, and fewer time and resources demands placed on the team.
Using product visualization software to build your 3D configurator means that you receive expertly designed 3D models and thoughtfully designed experiences meant to compliment and optimize your existing brand experience. As the research shows, brand experience is now considered as important as the product by the majority of consumers; leveraging product visualization software allows brands to quickly and efficiently deliver an upgraded, immersive experience tailored to how buyers want to do business with the brand.
Product visualization software from ATLATL further advances the benefits of 3D experiences with solutions that set the standard for best practices in building 3D configurators. At the core of our platform is a focus on fidelity and performance, consistently delivering the most accurate representation of products within a quick and responsive environment. Our dedication to these attributes mean that the digital shopping experience can be part of the thrill of purchase for the buyer, and sad delivery days will be a thing of the past.
Build your dream boat with our 3D configuration demo, and get in touch with one of our visual experts to see how fidelity and performance can bring your digital experience to life in a whole new way.
This post originally appeared on ATLATL.com
