Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Welcome to Part 3 of our latest blog series giving you early access to the upcoming BrainXchange-Hewlett Packard Enterprise white paper. In Parts 1 and 2, we shared examples from the automotive and heavy equipment industries. Today, we will look at how a thread manufacturer could employ an advanced collaboration platform like HPE’s MyRoom/VRG along with wearable technology to better support and train the end users of its products....

Wearable tech will not only provide brands with more access to their ideal target audience but it will also produce vital communications information, allowing brands to customize their messaging, target audience individually based on the available rich data aggregated by these new devices.

Being this close is an advertiser’s sweetest dream, but it’s important to keep in mind that the conversation needs to change once again and to be consistently reminded of the need of user privacy. What wearable tech can do for your brand and how your advertising may need to change?...

While many companies, big and small, have been jumping into the wearables space in recent years, the use-cases for these devices often feels superficial — with fitness perhaps the most compelling scenario at this nascent stage. Yet smartwatches have far richer potential than merely performing a spot of sweat tracking.

The other problem with the current crop of smartwatches is the experience of using apps on wrist-mounted devices does not always live up to the promise of getting stuff done faster or more efficiently. Just having to load an app on this type of supplementary device can feel like an imposition.

If the primary selling point of a smartwatch is really convenience/glanceability the watch wearer really does not want to have to be squinting at lots of tiny icons and manually loading data to get the function they need in a given moment. A wearable needs to be a whole lot smarter to make it worth the wearing vs just using a smartphone.

At the same time, other connected devices populating the growing Internet of Things can feel pretty dumb right now — given the interface demands they also place on users. Such as, for example, connected lightbulbs like Philips Hue that require the user to open an app on their phone just in order to turn a lightbulb on or off, or change the colour of the light.

Which is pretty much the opposite of convenient, and why we’ve already seen startups trying to fix the problems IoT devices are creating via sensor-powered automation....

YouGov estimates that there will be 6.1 million wearable device owners in the UK by the end of 2015 and Juniper research predicts that wearable devices will generate $53.2 billion in global retail revenue by 2019. So what does this growing area of technology mean for marketers and their relationships with customers?

What’s interesting is that out of all of the wearable devices, smartwatches are expected to generate the highest adoption and spur the trend. Smartwatches are expected to replace fitness devices as the most purchased wearables category by 2017. Apple is the latest tech giant to make a play in this market and recently unveiled an update to its Apple Watch where third party apps can now be downloaded in isolation from the iPhone. Recently voted top of the ‘CoolBrands’ list, it’s likely that Apple’s foray into the smartwatch market will drive consumers to lust after the wearable tech trend....