Alexandre de Vigan, CEO of Nfinite believes CGI is an opportunity for garden retailers. When it comes to online retailing, garden centres have a distinct set of priorities and requirements than many other industries. Imagery is essential, but so is context.
When people go to a garden centre, they want to see how products look in the environment they are meant to be in, during the season they are in. But how can you recreate this online without spending your entire marketing budget on photography?
Visuals that reflect products in situ
Online interactions play a fundamental role in influencing the ultimate purchase decisions. However, when it comes to buying, it is easy for consumers to become overwhelmed by the abundance of alternatives and choices, particularly if all they can see are generic product visuals from one specific angle with a white background. Context-rich product visuals will bring garden centre products to life online.
When looking for plants and other garden products online, consumers tend not to buy via product data but through emotional triggers, where contextual visuals can recall a positive memory or thought.
Moreover, with many of us being exposed to hundreds or even thousands of visuals daily, fighting for attention is more critical than ever.
Your e-merchandising may only have a few seconds (if you’re lucky) to grab attention and show that it is relevant and memorable.
Making compelling, personalised, and immersive content is key in today’s competitive garden centre market.
You need more visuals that are increasingly efficient at improving sales. However, many will believe achieving this will require more resources and budget, which is hard to come by. Luckily, next-generation technologies are being built to help solve this exact challenge.
Revolutionising and digitising product visuals using CGI
Online retailing has become a crucial sales channel for all garden centres. And if images are a key part of online sales, then the production process of product visuals should make the leap as well.
If you are going to effectively address the growing number of product catalogues (scale) and a greater need to personalise visual content (creativity), digitization is the only way forward.
Digitisation is not just having a digital file of traditional photography. It means creating a digital model (often in 3D) of a product that your online content producers and digital marketers can insert and embed seamlessly into seasonal, contextual backgrounds with ease and purpose.
This will make the product more eye-catching and tailored to your target audience at specific times of the year, thus increasing desirability that translates into sales.
Traditional photography will not get you to scaling personalisation. Imagine the hassle of shooting the same product naturally embedded in various seasonal or contextual scenes.
The planning, costs and time associated with this would be astronomical! Thankfully, there are now turnkey solutions like Nfinite that use CGI technology to create, display, and manage unlimited product visuals, resolving the scaling issue faced by modern marketers.
We achieve this by creating a digital model (CGI/ 3D) of a product, where content producers can easily create infinite product images seamlessly with a few simple clicks of a button that can be tailored for different audiences, seasonal campaigns, and different digital formats.
Nfinite allows you to display contextual visuals on your garden centre’s e-commerce site that were previously impossible to create in a fraction of the time of a traditional photo shoot.
