Haleon uses VR to unlock customer insights

Panadol parent company Haleon uses the power of virtual reality to unlock customer insights and better its customer experience.

John Sawicki, head of commercial excellence ANZ at Haleon told Digital Nation about how its Science and Shopper Lab (SSL) uses VR to get insights on its customers.

“The science and shopper lab effectively gives us the ability to understand insights from our consumer and shopper behaviour perspective. That allows us to really unlock category growth, as well as to drive customer collaboration, that's all facilitated through state-of-the-art technology that we have,” he explained.

While insights are important, it is all about how you translate that information, Sawicki explained.

“It's strongly linked to our purpose of delivering every day your health with humanity because we're a vast array of consumer healthcare products. We want to be true to the purpose of our organisation And SSL gives us the ability to unlock that as well.”

Sawicki explained why Haleon decided to use VR technology to obtain these insights.

“The beauty about VR is that you can have the engagement with your trade customers in an office scenario, you can do it face to face, or you can do it virtually as well. You’re not locked into physical meetings, you've got the virtual scenario,” he explained.

“I could share that with you as a part of this conversation and it can have a strategic discussion around a particular concept or a principle as well. The interesting thing is you don't have to disrupt the operations of any particular store and you can make timely changes, as you're discussing it in a meeting, whether it's virtual or in person.”

Sawicki pointed out that in a physical store, you need the associated labour in the store to change things, whether it's point of sale or product placement.

“With VR, you can do it in a virtual scenario and you can create different scenarios with different options as a part of a collaborative workshop, which makes it much more powerful than necessarily going out in the store and physically implementing something,” he added.