Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Low conversion rates are generally expected in online marketing campaigns these days. But the rise of wearables may change that - do you have a wearables marketing strategy in place?

In any publishing house, you will hear cheers and applause when a marketing campaign is working - the thrill of awareness-induced sales, online buzz, viral chatter, and click-throughs that turn into sales. It's a celebratory event.When the fanfare dies down, however, the ugly reality of the world we have become accustomed to shows its face. We celebrate the fact that we sold 80,000 items from our publishing catalog. That is fantastic. But, we also then have to face the 99 percent reality. 

This reality reminds us that we are celebrating 0.2 percent of our population responding to our campaign. We reached out 1 billion times, and left 999,999,920 opportunities untapped....

...Given how quickly the wearables market is developing, Snodgrass believes marketers need to carve out a small amount of budget now to do what he calls micro-tests. “Focus half of your mobile team on trying to understand and explore how this new market works. At the least, the market share for mobile will flow naturally into the market share for wearables.

”Schonfeld concurs, saying marketing teams will benefit from some wearables-spurred experimentation — even if it doesn’t yet lead to integrating wearables in the marketing strategy. “For quantified-self wearables, it’s all about the data. How can brands tap into that data or enhance it to actually deliver value to consumers? Glass is more experimental, but thinking about ways to market on a heads-up screen could lead to broader insights about mobile marketing in general.”...

This is why Google's launch yesterday of Android Wear, its wearable platform,  is likely to see so much interest. Developers still need to build the "killer app" designed uniquely for wearables that will make the devices compelling for still-skeptical mainstream consumers. Now, with Android Wear, they have a major platform to build for

.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we make sense of the current wearable apps landscape, look at why app ecosystems are currently so minimally stocked, explore the types of wearables that are likeliest to take off, and try to pinpoint a few "killer apps" that could make the devices truly compelling. We also look at the strong potential for Google or Apple to instantly take over the app market....

Though the Internet of Things era has only just started, it may already be broken.

Like generals fighting the last war instead of the next one, many companies working to build the Internet of Things seem to be stuck in the smartphone and tablet era, embracing approaches that will soon be obsolete, if they aren’t already.

Today, smartphones are powerful hubs surrounded by less intelligent objects. Each device is managed and operated from a few centralized data centers. This is not yet a major issue as devices currently last only a year or two before being decommissioned. The cost of managing data centers is limited in duration and underwritten by a constant flood of replacement devices with short lives.

Not so in the Internet of Things era: an LED lightbulb has an expected life of 20+ years; aircraft are expected to remain in service for decades; the average car on the road in the US is now more than a decade old.

Applying a centralized cloud-based business model to these devices will mean decades of expense without decades of associated revenue. At IBM we already see clients that are struggling with device-related services that have failed to meet revenue targets, but cannot be switched off for fear of angering an installed base....

A recent, widely circulated study found that one-third of Americans who bought a wearable tech product ditched it within six months.

On one recent morning, I counted 960 items listed in a search for Jawbone UP on eBay. There were 242 for UP24s. And for Fitbit Flex, it was even worse: a whopping 1,356 items, many deeply discounted. (Yes, it should be noted that most of these were accessories, with only 584 full-fledged trackers.)

These numbers underscore a larger potentially dispiriting trend for makers of wearable technology: according to fresh findings from Endeavor Partners, one-third of Americans who bought a wearable product ditched it within six months. Moreover, while one in 10 American adults own a Fitbit or Jawbone or some other fitness and activity tracker, half of those products now do little more than collect dust.

So what's going on here? Is wearable tech really a (no longer walking) dead market before its had much time to live?...