Please be sure to reference your sources in appropriate Harvard formatting and to provide substantive evidence of any claims that you make. Where appropriate, include personal anecdotes, statistics, and references to additional reading or materials.

Take a virtual haircut!

This discussion question is based on two articles, which are included as sources of additional reading for this session.

The first is an interview with Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in The Independent. As CEO of a market leader and an organization that prides itself on its innovation, Mr. Cook is understandably upbeat about augmented reality.

Cook claims that shopping will be changed “entirely” by augmented reality, and says that he doesn’t think “anything will be untouched”. AR brings together the two difficult forms of shopping today, both brick and mortar and online, in a way that could let people see the entirety of a dress by walking around it, as if they were in a shop, but from the comfort of their own iPhones.

The second article, from Forbes, was penned by Andrew Stephen, an Associate Dean for Research, and L’Oréal Professor of Marketing and Head of the Marketing Faculty at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

He says that the AI revolution in marketing has been spurred by the influx of affordable and accessible advanced data analytics tools (typically based on machine learning methods), the availability of increasingly rich (albeit still noisy) and extensive datasets, and a growing acceptance among marketers of the potential power of data-driven approaches to marketing decision making.

Imagine that you are a digital marketing consultant who has been asked to help a leading hairdressing boutique based in London. The owner of the boutique prides herself in being seen as a cutting edge brand (forgive the pun) and is very positive about embracing new forms of marketing, although she acknowledges that she may not have the budget required to do everything she aspires to do and that a large chunk of her business arises from traditional marketing activities. In a report in two sections:

Advise the owner about how her industry could benefit from understanding and adopting AI, VR, and AR trends in the future;

For the benefit of your client, critically assess some of the benefits VR adoptions could have on her particular brand and evaluate whether you think that it’s realistic for her independent business to attempt to become an early adopter in the whole area of VR, given that she has a very limited budget to play with.

You should aim to develop a response of no more than 750 words.