Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Forget trying to design your deck, patio or porch with a drawing. Wayfair LLC is setting up outdoor furniture in another dimension.

The home furnishings retailer launched a virtual reality app to let consumers design an outdoor patio area. Wayfair debuted the app, Patio Playground, last week for consumers with the Oculus Rift 3-D gaming headset.In the app consumers can arrange patio furniture in a virtual setting, see how it looks from different angles and in various types of daylight. Wayfair has 85 products for consumers to place in the patio scene, and they can place up to 15 items in the setting at one time, says Mike Festa, head of Wayfair's research and development lab.

Consumers wearing an Oculus Rift headset can select a pre-configured patio, such as two chairs and a table with an umbrella, and then switch out the products, or they can build their patio layout from scratch, Festa says. ...

At CES this week, marketers were buzzing about the potential of virtual assistants.

“Marketing is much more about providing a great experience or a product that makes a consumer’s life easier and one of the most interesting developments for our business is the virtual assistant,” said Kristin Lemkau, CMO of J.P. Morgan Chase.

Most of the attention at was on Alexa, the voice-activated assistant for Amazon’s Echo. Alexa is being described as a potential operating system for the Internet of Things, in competition with Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.

LG announced a smart fridge partnership with Alexa that will let consumers buy groceries via voice. A flurry of Alexa-enabled applications are on the way, with one pundit predicting a launch of 700 new applications in the next week alone....