Let The North Face be your Sherpa

Another example of a brand leveraging virtual reality: The North Face.

As this article describes, The North Face has taken its consumers to Yosemite, Moab Desert, and Nepal via 360-degree virtual reality video experiences.  Anyone with a smartphone can experience the movies, and they also have incorporated them into retail locations in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and London. In November The North Face distributed 75,000 Google Cardboard VR viewers to subscribers of Outside magazine and encouraged them to take part in the experience.

As Eric Oliver, The North Face’s director of digital marketing explains, the company is trying to build “empathy for the outdoors” and encourage people to experience the natural world. 

Of course, the goal really is to sell more North Face clothing, and as Oliver admits, it is hard to pin down exactly how much VR has contributed to sales but it certainly seems like a compelling and on-point brand-building tactic that engages the consumer with the brand in an entirely new way.