Virtually Real

A very interesting article by Ellen Brown was featured in Wall Street Journal on Kimberly Clark and other CPG companies investing in building virtual reality studios to test store display concepts and how consumers would respond to them. The idea is that rather than testing a concept in a store which takes longer time and is more costly, virtual reality prototypes can assist the manufacturers and retailers to gauge consumer responses. The article talks about a test where a customer is made to walk virtually in a store and pick up a pack of Huggies diapers. Now if the idea is to determine how easy it is to locate the product with the new display then probably this might work. Also it may give a good 3-D visualization for executives considering ideas. But what is not intuitive to me is how does this enable them to determine a consumer's choice. Now when we walk into a store, its an overload of stimulus in all forms - visual, audio, olfactory etc. Add to that group dynamics of a collection of people in a store. So just by having a sample consumer do a virtual reality walk through an isolated display and checking the eye movement would not be sufficient. There is no other display to attract the consumer's attention. There is no nagging baby on the cart diverting mommy towards the candy aisle. Human mind and its interaction with the surrounding is much more complex so I wonder how much a virtual reality gizmo will help.