"We Build Immersive Experiences" is not a value proposition - Digital Explorers' Diary #65

Welcome to the Digital Explorers’ Diary, a curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

"We Build Immersive Experiences" is not a value proposition!

For us working in Immersive Experiences, it’s sometimes difficult to grasp what Value Proposition really means. Most of us are initially passionate about technology for its own sake. Let’s face it: Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality are fantastic by themselves, and we can spend hours discussing their history, current trends, and future evolution.

That’s all amazing. My point is that defining a business as “We build Immersive Experiences“ is not a value proposition. Yes, it describes what we do, but not our actual impact. Working on our value proposition statement can do wonders for our businesses!

What’s a value proposition?

The essential difference that makes a good value proposition is simple–on paper, at least: yes, it must describe who we are and what we do, but it must also very efficiently state our added value. What problem do we solve? What is the cost-benefit for our customers?

By having a high-value proposition, we can move away from the endless sales and price battle. The discussion with our customers moves away from the basic business level to a higher goal. We are moving from an expense to an investment with effective KPIs and return on investment.

How do we build a value proposition in Immersive Experience businesses?

• It’s not a description of our work. If our Value Proposition describes what we do, what leverage do we have except pricing? We might do quality work, but who doesn’t say that on their website?
• Move from We Are to We Provide. Let’s face it: companies that can build immersive experiences are widespread in the current landscape. It’s not enough anymore to be able to create such applications; we need to develop experiences that provide something. Drive customer to store? Reduce training time? Make customers feel what they will feel once they have your product?
• Know your customers (and theirs). What we do can appeal to many people. But what we provide must appeal to our customers, and maybe to their customers as well, as B2B2C is very common in our field.
• Don’t follow the latest shiny objects. Yes, as leaders in the field, we need to stay up-to-date on the latest innovations. But not everyone is a tech geek or expert. At the end of the day, we need to swallow our pride and enthusiasm to push for the latest high-tech when some old-school solutions might be the best fit for a specific project.

Our Value Proposition is essential to raise our industry from a level often seen as hype or very nerdy to a driver of business growth!

Want to discuss this? Reach out here or on LinkedIn to brainstorm with me!

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week, we explore:

🧑‍🏫 Education is one of the areas where VR has the most applications, and Meta is currently teasing a new software offering targeted at educators, schools, and teachers. It seems to be some device management system where a teacher could remotely load the same application on all the student’s devices. We wonder if it will also work remotely. For us, the best use-case is for remote classrooms, so in addition to learning, students also get a sense of presence and collaboration with their peers.

🤖 How does AI understand the world as seen through a camera lens? It's not great, apparently, according to a recent paper by Meta Research. They offer a dataset and benchmark of situations where a human would ask questions such as “Where did I leave my keys?” while wearing AR glasses or a request to a robot, “Did I leave the fridge door open?”. It seems that LLMs with vision, such as GPT4V, only slightly outperform text-based LLMs and are vastly outperformed by humans. Still, a long way to go… until when?

🛫 At the Laval Virtual event last week, Seb had the opportunity to test the MotionXP VR Simulator. In addition to the traditional hydraulic system, their innovation resides in adding force feedback on the torso belt, and it seems to be very efficient in tricking the brain!

📜 OpenXR is an initiative to promote a common software standard on all XR platforms, and a new edition was released last week. A lot of big players already support it… Will this help bring more cross-platform apps to the ecosystem?

🎵 Currently in beta, the Udio platform is an extremely impressive song-generation AI. You can choose the genre and even the lyrics! Definitely worth a try.

Watch the podcast below, and tune in at 10 am UTC on Tuesdays on Twitch, and listen to the podcasts on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Amazon!

Did this newsletter spark some ideas? There are a lot of ways we can work together:

• A quick-fire, 30-minute brainstorm with me - book it here!
• We can ideate, prototype, and build your experiences - contact us here!