A well-designed website should feel like a brand’s home. Richelieu’s new ‘digital brand home’ delivers on this and more by letting you walk through the virtual cellar, lounge, terrace and casino. You may recognise the setting from the Richelieu TV commercial, where the leading man chases the woman of his dreams through a hotel – now you get to follow his footsteps through the website’s innovative interactive multimedia experience.
But the best part is that you’re not simply ‘pressing play’ and running through the same online experience as everyone else. Instead, you decide where you go by playing along through your smartphone – everything from which rooms you enter to where to place your bet on the roulette wheel.
Marthinus van Loggerenberg, senior strategic planner at FCB, Richelieu’s ATL agency and Terri-Anne de Sousa, creative director at Liquorice, which handled the digital aspects, explain the concept of the virtual tour and why it was a good fit for Richelieu…
The experience hinged on mobile integration, which was crucial to the Virtual Tour coming to life as the experience is an immersive dual-screen experience. That’s because the experience focuses on the use of your computer and smartphone in conjunction to bring the journey to life. So to begin the experience, you pair your computer and smartphone using a unique code which starts the journey.
Further explaining this innovation, they say the accelerometer technology within the mobile recreates specific movements from the TVC, such as raising and swirling your glass. The mobile was also used to capture all users’ details such as name, phone number and email address throughout the experience.
That’s how users interact with various touch points throughout the experience, thus influencing the decisions of the leading man, making each journey unique to the user. Fitting, as the ultimate goal was to offer the consumer an interactive glimpse into the “rich, rewarding Richelieu life”. By making them part of the experience, this luxurious, aspirational lifestyle seems all the more attainable, as users feel what it’s like to take the lead in an exciting adventure that is dualistically aimed to invigorate the brand as consumers experience each ‘room’ of the Hotel de Richelieu.
More than this, the Virtual Tour is a unique way to stimulate sign-ups into the Richelieu RM Programme or Café de Richelieu. Not just playing along or completing a set online interaction, by completing each step of the experience, the user’s data is seamlessly captured as part of the user journey. So, once the experience is complete, the user is opted into the database, with a personalised email triggered to welcome them to the Café De Richelieu society, which provides Richelieu with an innovative way to interact with their consumers and increase awareness of the brand and also growing the database.
The ‘digital brand home’ for the campaign also ties in with the existing TVC that followed a through-the-line approach as it dramatizes that ‘rich, rewarding life’ in an European hotel setting. Van Loggerenberg and De Sousa explain that the hotel setting let them showcase the different Richelieu variants within the perfect environment to enjoy them, displayed in the different rooms or areas of the hotel. For example, you’ll see Richelieu International at the bar with friends, Richelieu 10, a vintage brandy in a more sophisticated and intimate setting and Richelieu XO in the lounge.
This experience was then taken online, where the Richelieu website took the form of “Hotel de Richelieu” with the virtual tour giving consumers the opportunity to explore this virtual brand home and experience the story for themselves.
On the back of the recent Pokémon Go trend, we’ll likely see more smartphone and virtual online campaign interaction as technology progresses further. Van Loggerenberg and De Sousa explain that virtual reality offers a chance for the early adopters to experience real interactive experiences. Smartphones make this experience almost instantly accessible, with most actually surprised by their smartphone’s capability to do so.
As a result, virtual reality is changing the way games are played and how movies are watched. Brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s have realised this and utilised this technology very successfully with Coca-Cola’s Santa’s Virtual Reality Sleigh Ride and McDonald’s Happy Meal VR Headset and Ski App.
They add that brands like Samsung are playing along by making virtual reality headsets affordable, and predict that as technology progresses and improves, there’ll be more interactive games and movies where entertainment takes the lead. Brands are seeing the opportunity to facilitate these entertainment experiences, which offers the potential for brands to achieve a sense of resonance because of that authentic intent to entertain as opposed to those brands existing just to “sell” and boost their own bottom line.
That’s how it’s done. Watch the video embedded below for more, and click here to ‘check in’ through your desktop or smartphone and experience the tour yourself.
