Depending on what you read, the advent of wearable devices is either New Year’s Day 1984 or the start of a meaningless fad like Cleggmania. It’s safe to say wearable devices won’t be a passing fashion, simply because they have such practical applications and are getting more affordable and diverse. To the question on whether wearable devices will become a terrifying agent of social control – the answer is no. Privacy concerns, although legitimate, are largely overblown. Consumers wield a lot of power in relation to how data from wearable devices is used. A backlash directed against a business that misuses wearable data is likely to have an industry-wide chilling effect. If it doesn’t, consumer pressure will cause wearable device makers to think twice about how data collected from their devices can be used. With this in mind, the question for marketers is what can they actually do with wearable data?
Wearable data by itself doesn’t tell you much more than information collected from other devices or platforms. Location, demographic and activity information alone isn’t enough to profoundly change how marketing campaigns work. However, when you combine this information with other datasets and use data science techniques to uncover underlying trends, behaviour and patterns, wearable data suddenly becomes a very powerful tool.
By using data science, specific ‘types’ of people can be targeted by marketers. This goes way beyond social preferences and demographics, but encompasses the implied preferences of individuals based on thousands of seemingly disparate factors. Consumers could be clustered by factors such as race, gender, age, location, movement, marital status, alcohol intake and health, to enable incredibly targeted marketing campaigns. Conceivably, brands could eventually know customers so well that they can target products at them before they even know that they need or want them.
For example, say a combination of wearable data and other information revealed that every Saturday evening a woman visited a shop at a certain time, went back to her home with her friends, then went out to an area known for clubs, her heart rate went up as she danced and then she usually left around 2am via a taxi. A drinks or food brand could send her targeted ads with special offers around the time she usually goes to the shop, take away companies could contact her when she returns to her house with her friends or after she leaves the club, and taxi companies could contact her around 2am.
That’s of course a very basic example, the use of wearable data gets much more interesting for marketers when it is applied to complex behaviour. At the moment, some TV content producers are using focus groups monitored by wearable devices to ascertain how programmes affect emotional state. Using this information they edit the TV programme accordingly. If wearable devices are worn en masse, the data could be used to tailor content across any platform almost in real time, based on what the viewer is feeling or likely to feel.
With the emergence of any new technology there is an immediate competitive advantage to be had from being either the first to market or the first to create value. If marketers can incorporate insight from wearable devices on a customer level and develop a better understanding than their competitors then it will be a very powerful tool to demonstrate that they know customers and can provide them with brilliant service, perfectly timed ads and compelling messages.
By Simon Farthing, Head of Consultancy at Profusion.
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