Butterfly Hunt – Augmented Reality app for shopping centre

Citycon is a leading owner, manager and developer of urban, grocery-anchored shopping centres in the Nordic and Baltic region. For its Arabia shopping centre in Helsinki the company was looking for a new and fun way to engage its customers in digital interaction and to get them to extend their stay at the shopping centre.

The solution  – gamified customer experience with augmented reality

Stereoscape created an augmented reality game with virtual butterfly hunt utilizing the Bluetooth beacon network. The campaign solution – an application that the customers downloaded to their smartphones – showed a real-time view of the shopping centre, enhanced with augmented reality virtual butterflies. Shoppers could tap the screen of their smart phones when a butterfly was within reach. A progress bar kept track of the number of butterflies caught to allow customers to win prizes or receive promotions as they played. The solution also enabled collection of shopper data and insights.

The pilot project was created together with Citycon and it’s marketing partner that was in charge of promoting the campaign at the Arabia shopping centre.

The results – customer benefit

The gamified customer experience that Stereoscape created has the potential to engage shoppers in digital interaction, increase the time they spend in the shopping centre, entice them to visit the space more frequently and attract them also to the less-visited areas of the centre. It also opens up numerous opportunities to add brand-specific messages, promotions, rewards etc. to the experience. The application also allowed collection of data and insights of customer behavior during the pilot that took place fall 2015.

The power of gamified augmented reality solutions in engaging users has been seen in 2016 – a year after the Citycon pilot – with Pokemón-Go that stormed the world with a similar solution.

Watch video of shoppers’ reactions (in Finnish)