Amanda Manna's company hired science-fiction writers to imagine customer experience five to ten years ahead, then turned their ideas into comic-book stories. One 2012 comic showed a couple using AR headsets to preview home renovations. When Lowe's executives saw it, they stopped laughing and thought: if we don't do this, somebody else will.
So we hired a team of science fiction writers, professional published writers, and we sent them out into our stores with a very broad prompt. Think about how the customer experience might change in the next 5 to 10 years as a result of technology. And we gave them all of our market research data, all of our trends, any kind of data that we could dump on them, and left it up to them to synthesize and come back to us with stories. And so they did. They came back with comic books like this. And the first one is a really simple story about a couple that's renovating their home. It's a really terrible, painful process, like any home improvement project generally is. But in the story, they're able to go to Lowe's, and they're able to put on what we now recognize as a head-mounted display and visualize that home improvement project and the end result before it ever got started. But it was in 2012 when we presented this comic book book to the executive team, and nobody was really talking about AR and VR like they are today. And so when we handed out a comic book to a bunch of hardware store executives, that's not something that's ever happened to them before. So they kind of laugh, and they're ready to not take it seriously. But automatically, by not turning up a PowerPoint and facts and figures about where we thought VR was going to go, they have a different mindset. And so they read the story, and at the end of it, they say, oh, wow. If we don't do this, somebody else will.
