Kaon Interactive
Interactive 3D Sales and Marketing Engagement Applications

How do you show, demonstrate and sell a product that is physically unavailable – either because it is too large, expensive or fragile to travel or because it has not yet launched?

A manufacturing company recently faced this challenge when its latest product was not production-ready for the industry’s largest trade show. Augmented reality, literally, filled the gap, enabling this company to announce and demonstrate their newest product to their global market, despite the product being physically unavailable. To achieve this, the company collaborated with Kaon Interactive, a Massachusetts-based B2B software company that offers interactive applications to help sales and marketing teams tell their complex product and solution stories in a visually engaging way. Through the power of Kaon’s High Velocity Marketing Platform^®, the company was able to “bring” a photo-realistic, fully interactive 3D version of their new product, as if it were physically at the show. Moreover, show attendees were able to use Kaon AR^® to interact with the product ‘at scale’ and explore its capabilities and understand its value – creating an engaging and memorable experience. Though it was physically impossible to bring the actual product, Kaon’s AR experience assisted the company in generating millions of dollars in pre-market sales opportunities at the industry’s premiere event.

“Interactive experiences allow customers to connect with a product more deeply, and augmented reality gives a whole new dimension to that experience,” says Gavin Finn, President and CEO, Kaon Interactive.

Realizing the potential of augmented reality early on, Kaon has been offering its Kaon AR solution to customers for almost a year with Google Tango. Finn explains that augmented reality has proved to be tremendously valuable to B2B marketing and sales teams as a way to demonstrate product value differentiation. Kaon AR places a realistic, interactive 3D product model into customers’ real-world business environments to show how that product looks and functions without having the physical product present.

This not only shortens sales cycles – such as in the example above – but it allows for faster sales on boarding, the elimination of shipping and drayage costs at trade shows, and the active engagement of prospects and customers in the sales process.

Many of Kaon’s customers are scientific and medical device companies that design and produce large laboratory equipment – the kind that analyzes thousands of test samples every day. It is nearly impossible to demonstrate these bulky, expensive machines in a customer’s lab and workflow, something that would be incredibly valuable in differentiating a product from the competitors’. Now, augmented reality makes that possible. A lab manager can have a discussion with a sales representative about the newest blood analyzer while seeing that equipment in their lab, learning how it works within the lab’s current workflow, and animating features and functions that set apart that product from the competition.

“Answering those questions is not easy; it’s a complex series of engagements, and our approach to augmented reality of placing the physical equipment in customers’ actual environment helps to convey information in a much more effective way,” states Finn.

Resolving problems for sales and marketing leaders, Kaon helps its customers(such as Cisco, GE, DELL, IBM, Abbott, and BD) tell their brand story in a way that emotionally and visually engages prospects while interactively demonstrating differentiated product value. Additionally, through Kaon’s marketing platform, these interactive product stories and catalogs are available anytime and anywhere a client wants them. Completely device-agnostic, Kaon applications are available online or offline; on the web or natively; on desktops, tablets, laptops, smartphones, or touch screen appliances. Kaon AR is currently enabled on devices running Google Tango, Apple ARKit and Google ARCore.

“We craft virtual interactive demonstrations for our clients’ products and solutions, giving them the ability to use these technologies as a facilitator of increased customer engagement and knowledge retention,” mentions Finn.

Finn believes that game-changing technologies like mixed reality and augmented reality will continue to evolve, and so Kaon works collaboratively with leading AR technology developers to maintain its market leadership position. For example, because of Kaon’s partnership with Apple, all of Kaon’s applications in the Apple App Store became AR-enabled as soon as Apple released iOS 11 – equating to roughly 340 million Apple devices in the enterprise. Similarly, Kaon has already provided platform support for Google’s ARCore, so that when ARCore is publically released, Kaon applications will be deployed immediately on these devices. The advancements of mixed reality and augmented reality devices like low-cost, high fidelity headsets have spurred the mainstream acceptance of this technology, and these advancements will continue. Kaon is looking forward to leveraging all of these innovative technologies and advanced devices moving forward.