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Unpredictable path of sales: Virtual Reality

Success of a company depends on the Success of a new product . Not only Sales and marketing team hooked on number for new product sale even production capacity , supply chain and working capital estimation for new product are quite crucial . There are traditional Methods like cojoint analysis are available to test market adoption for new product , However to get exact forecast for new product sales volume still a big challenge .

VR Game Changer :-

We have seen examples of some great products when they were launched looked very promising . However, they could not get the great success . for example TATA Nano , Google Glasses and Apple Newton (( personal digital assistant ) . Probably they were ahead of their times or simply they could not assess consumers interest in product features and attribute . Times have changed now we have Virtual Reality tools available which can help us to get consumers insight in a product much more accurate than traditional methods to predict product adoption . Now research by Harz and team recommends a novel solution : having potential customer interact with planned product using Virtual Reality . Combined with right statics model , VR based interactions yield more reliable data for product analytics and improvement . Now with VR consumers can experience product in much immersive way and interact with computer to generate seamless information flow . These are much more accurate than traditional Methods

Hurdles for implementation :-

The biggest hurdle is designing a very immersive VR system for product testing . A three dimensional , 360 degree VR can cost as much as $10000 per minute . But a less immersive VR system can cost fraction of this . The price of a popular VR system ranges from $10 Display that can be integrated to a smartphone to few hundred Us dollars . Though the cost may be roadblock but benefits accrued are immense . The result obtained product testing by VR is of gold standard compared to tradition market research techniques . In product testing in some scenarios it has been observed that VR bases outcomes are accurate more than 50% compared to traditional test . The error in projecting post launch sale was only 2 % in VR based models . which is much less than 40% - 60% success in traditional methods of product testing .

When to use VR Decision :-

It is important to understand when to use VR based models for predicting sales of a product compared to tradition methods . For example for FMCG product it is much cheaper to test market product sales by interacting with consumers in reality .Proctor and Gamble and Unilever of the world where cost of product is much less can afford to have real life interactions with consumers . However as we go up towards consumer durables and more so costly product like Automobiles , where cost of producing a prototype is much higher VR Based product testing will be much useful . for complex products where different attributes of product hold different value for consumers VR based product techniques . Proper Analysis of VR based Product testing and sales prediction will also help in minimizing cost of establishing Product line , Distribution . This will help in customization of various product features also .

In nutshell .. Virtual is becoming real !! At least in Arena of product testing .