Augmented Reality Strategy: When the Tech Earns Its Place

Augmented reality strategy is the discipline of deciding when, where, and how AR creates genuine commercial value for a business, rather than simply generating attention. Done well, it changes how customers experience a product before they buy it. Done badly, it is an expensive demo that nobody asked for.

The honest question every marketer should ask before committing budget to AR is not “can we do this?” but “does this solve a real problem in our customer’s path to purchase?” The answer shapes everything that follows.

I judged the Effie Awards and one thing that becomes clear very quickly when you read hundreds of effectiveness cases is how rarely the technology is the story. The story is always the behaviour change. AR is no different. The brands that have built lasting AR programmes did not start with a technology roadmap. They started with a conversion problem they could not solve any other way.

What Is Augmented Reality Strategy, Really?

Strip away the vendor language and AR strategy is about one thing: reducing the gap between imagining a product and owning it. That gap is where purchase hesitation lives. For a sofa that costs £2,000, the hesitation is whether it will fit the room and look right. For a pair of glasses, it is whether they suit your face. For a skincare product, it is whether the shade matches your skin tone.

AR addresses these problems by giving customers a version of physical trial that works at scale. The strategic question is whether the problem is significant enough, and the friction real enough, to justify the investment in building the experience well.

I spent years managing performance budgets across retail and e-commerce accounts, and the pattern I kept seeing was that lower-funnel spend was capturing intent that already existed. Customers who were going to buy were finding their way there anyway. What genuinely moved the needle was anything that created new confidence in customers who were on the fence. AR, when it is well executed, does exactly that. It is a confidence tool, not a traffic tool.

If you are thinking about where AR fits within a broader commercial growth approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider framework for connecting marketing investment to measurable business outcomes.

Where AR Actually Works: The Categories That Justify the Investment

Not every category benefits from AR in the same way. The strongest commercial case exists where physical trial has historically been the primary driver of purchase confidence and where that trial is either inconvenient, expensive, or impossible to replicate at scale.

Home furnishings and interiors. The decision to buy a piece of furniture is almost always delayed by uncertainty about scale, colour, and fit. Placing a virtual version of the product in a real room, using a phone camera, removes a significant portion of that uncertainty. IKEA built this into their app years ago and it remains one of the most cited examples of AR delivering measurable commercial value, because it directly addresses the reason customers abandon the purchase.

Eyewear. Virtual try-on for glasses and sunglasses is now table stakes for premium eyewear brands. The technology has matured to the point where face-mapping is accurate enough to give customers genuine confidence about fit and proportion. Brands that have integrated this into their e-commerce experience consistently report lower return rates, which is the commercial metric that actually matters.

Beauty and cosmetics. Shade matching for foundation, lipstick, and eyeshadow has always been the primary conversion barrier in online beauty. AR try-on does not fully replace the in-store experience, but it closes the gap enough to move customers from browse to buy. The data from brands that have implemented this well points consistently toward higher average order values, because customers try more products when the risk of getting it wrong feels lower.

Footwear. Fit and proportion are the core concerns. AR applications that allow customers to visualise shoes on their own feet have shown meaningful impact on purchase intent, particularly for statement or fashion-led styles where aesthetic fit matters as much as physical fit.

Outside these categories, the commercial case becomes harder to make. AR in FMCG, financial services, or B2B contexts tends to produce interesting demonstrations but limited evidence of downstream commercial impact. That does not mean it cannot work, but it means the strategy needs to be much sharper about what specific behaviour it is trying to change and how that behaviour connects to revenue.

Why Most AR Campaigns Fail to Scale

The graveyard of AR activations is enormous. Brands have spent significant sums on AR experiences that generated impressive press coverage, reasonable engagement during the campaign window, and then quietly disappeared from the roadmap. There are a few consistent reasons why.

The first is that they were built as campaigns, not capabilities. A Snapchat filter for a product launch is a campaign. An AR try-on integrated into the product detail page is a capability. Campaigns end. Capabilities compound. The brands that have extracted lasting value from AR have treated it as infrastructure, not theatre.

The second is that the experience was built for the press release, not the customer. I have seen this pattern across agency pitches throughout my career. A technology partner brings an impressive demo, the client gets excited about the novelty, and the brief becomes “build something that looks like that demo.” Nobody asks what problem it solves for someone who is actually trying to decide whether to buy. The result is technically impressive and commercially inert.

The third is poor integration with the purchase path. AR experiences that exist on a standalone microsite, or that require a separate app download, face massive drop-off before customers ever reach the experience. The friction of accessing the AR has to be lower than the friction it is trying to remove. If it is not, customers will not bother.

Early in my career I would have been seduced by the demo. I was drawn to lower-funnel mechanics and measurable short-term signals. What I learned, managing growth across dozens of accounts, is that the most important question is always: what does this do to the customer’s confidence at the moment it matters? An AR experience that is hard to reach, slow to load, or visually unconvincing does not improve confidence. It damages it.

How to Build an AR Strategy That Is Commercially Grounded

A credible AR strategy follows the same logic as any other marketing investment decision. It starts with the problem, not the solution.

Step one: identify the specific friction point. Where in the customer experience does uncertainty about the product cause the most purchase abandonment? This should come from data, not intuition. Exit surveys, session recordings, and return rate analysis will tell you more than a technology brief. Tools like Crazy Egg’s session analysis and behavioural analytics platforms can surface the exact moments where customers hesitate.

Step two: determine whether AR is the right solution to that friction. Sometimes the friction is about product information, not product visualisation. Sometimes it is about price confidence, or delivery uncertainty, or returns policy. AR solves a specific type of problem: the inability to physically interact with a product before buying. If the friction is something else, AR is not the answer.

Step three: define the commercial metric before you build. Return rate reduction, conversion rate improvement, average order value increase, these are the metrics that justify AR investment. Engagement metrics like time spent in the AR experience or number of interactions are interesting but not sufficient. If you cannot draw a clear line from the AR experience to a commercial outcome, you do not have a strategy yet.

Step four: build for the path of least resistance. The experience needs to be accessible from the product page, on mobile, without requiring an app download. WebAR has made this significantly more achievable than it was five years ago. The technology should be invisible. Customers should not be thinking about the fact that they are using AR. They should be thinking about whether the product is right for them.

Step five: test, measure, and iterate with commercial intent. Run the AR experience against a control group and measure downstream behaviour, not just in-experience engagement. If the experience is not moving the commercial metric you defined in step three, it is not working. Optimise the experience or redirect the budget. Understanding market penetration dynamics can help you contextualise whether AR is expanding your addressable audience or simply improving conversion within it.

AR and the Upper Funnel: A More Honest Conversation

There is a version of AR strategy that is less about conversion and more about reach and awareness. Branded AR filters on social platforms, immersive experiences in out-of-home environments, AR-enhanced packaging. These are real and some of them have delivered genuine brand value. But the measurement challenge is significant and the temptation to dress up novelty as strategy is strong.

My view on upper-funnel AR is that it follows the same logic as any other brand investment. If it reaches new audiences who would not otherwise encounter the brand, and if it creates a memorable association that influences future purchase behaviour, it has value. If it is primarily reaching existing customers or people who were already in the market, it is capturing awareness that would have existed anyway.

Think about it the way you think about in-store experience. Someone who tries something on is significantly more likely to buy it than someone who only looks at it on a hanger. AR is the digital equivalent of that trial moment. But the trial has to be available to people who are genuinely undecided, not just people who have already made up their minds. That is where reach strategy and AR strategy intersect.

Scaling any marketing capability, including AR, requires organisational readiness that goes beyond the technology itself. BCG’s research on scaling agile capabilities is relevant here: the brands that successfully embed AR into their customer experience treat it as a cross-functional capability, not a marketing department project.

The Measurement Problem and How to Handle It Honestly

One of the reasons AR strategy often gets stuck at the pilot stage is that measurement is genuinely hard. Attribution models that work for paid search do not translate cleanly to an AR try-on experience. Customers may use the AR feature on a Tuesday and complete the purchase on a Friday through a different channel. The contribution of the AR experience to that purchase will be invisible in most attribution setups.

The honest answer is to use incrementality testing rather than last-click attribution. Run the AR experience for a randomly selected segment of your audience and compare downstream behaviour, including purchase rate, return rate, and average order value, against a matched control group that did not have access to the experience. This is not perfect, but it is honest. It gives you a defensible read on whether the AR is doing anything commercially useful.

I have sat in too many post-campaign reviews where the measurement framework was designed to make the campaign look good rather than to tell the truth about what happened. AR is expensive enough that you cannot afford that kind of self-deception. If the incrementality test does not show a meaningful commercial impact, the experience needs to be redesigned or the budget needs to go somewhere else.

Understanding how growth tools and experimentation frameworks work together is part of building a credible measurement approach. Semrush’s overview of growth tools covers some of the infrastructure that supports this kind of testing at scale.

B2B and AR: The Underexplored Opportunity

Most of the conversation about AR strategy is focused on consumer brands, and for good reason: the consumer use cases are more mature and the measurement is more straightforward. But there is a credible B2B case for AR that does not get enough attention.

Complex industrial equipment, architectural and construction visualisation, medical device demonstration, these are categories where AR can genuinely accelerate the sales cycle by giving buyers a clearer understanding of what they are purchasing before they commit. The sales cycle for a capital equipment purchase can run to 12 months or more. If AR can compress any part of that cycle by improving buyer confidence earlier in the process, the commercial case is straightforward.

The challenge in B2B is that the buying decision involves multiple stakeholders, and the AR experience needs to work for all of them. A technical buyer needs different information than a financial buyer. Building AR that serves both without becoming unwieldy is a real design challenge. But the brands that solve it are building a genuine competitive advantage in categories where complex visualisation has always been a barrier to faster decisions.

For healthcare and device categories specifically, the go-to-market challenges are distinct. Forrester’s analysis of healthcare go-to-market highlights the regulatory and stakeholder complexity that shapes how new technologies, including AR, get adopted in clinical and procurement contexts.

What a Mature AR Strategy Looks Like

A mature AR strategy is not defined by how sophisticated the technology is. It is defined by how consistently it delivers against a commercial objective that the business cares about.

Mature AR programmes have a clear owner, usually sitting across product and marketing rather than in either function alone. They have a defined set of commercial metrics that are reviewed regularly. They have a roadmap that is driven by customer feedback and conversion data, not by what the technology vendor is selling this quarter. And they have a honest view of where AR is contributing and where it is not.

The brands that have built this kind of maturity did not get there by being early adopters. They got there by being disciplined about what they were trying to achieve and patient enough to iterate until the experience actually worked. That is not a technology story. It is a strategy story.

I started my career being handed a whiteboard pen in a brainstorm I was not prepared for, and having to figure it out in real time. The lesson I took from that, and from 20 years of watching marketing investment succeed and fail, is that confidence without preparation is just noise. The same applies to AR. Launching an AR experience because the technology is available is not a strategy. Launching one because you have identified a specific commercial problem it solves, and you have built the measurement to know whether it is working, that is a strategy.

If you want to build AR into a broader growth framework rather than treating it as a standalone initiative, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial thinking that should sit underneath any significant marketing investment.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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