Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The tech world is abuzz with interesting possibilities for the Internet of Things (IoT) lately, but regular folks haven’t caught up yet. Why the enthusiasm gap? That’s the question that Affinnova, a Nielsen company, set out to answer in a recent study of nearly 4,000 consumers.

First, it’s worth noting that while people have great faith in technology to come, even early adopters have trouble articulating what they would want from smart products. While 57 percent of all consumers who responded to this study strongly agree that the IoT will be “just as revolutionary as the smartphone” for our culture, they can’t explain how or why. Furthermore, 92 percent say that it’s very difficult to pinpoint what they’d want from smart objects, but they’ll know it when they see it.

Given this blind spot, the study presented nearly 4,000 consumers with different “smart” product concepts, giving them the opportunity to choose which actual features and items they might be interested in.

...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.”...