Potential of the “Smart” Watch

Nowadays with the upcoming portable wearable devices such as the google glass, and wearable gadgets such as fitbits (fitness bands) which offers the user with biometric data such as distance travelled, sleeping patterns and etc. 

Smartwatches offers the convenience of answering phone calls, taking photos and messaging, together with 4G internet access as well as GPS. It just opens up more avenues for digital marketers to access data about the user using the watch or to promote their products through this platform. 

Like mobiles, smartwatches will travel with their users thus this makes it a great device for location-based marketing.  With all the data accumulated from the biometrics or the location tracking functionality, the data can be catered and analyzed on what the user’s habits are and perhaps the digital marketers can make use of the data from that to send messages to their phones or the smart phone as a reminder when they are near a certain location and consumers could check into a location using their smartwatches, and have mobile-marketing messages, coupons and offers delivered to them that will be only made available for the person using the smart watch for example. 

That perhaps is a opportunity on how the data obtained can allow the marketers to understand how to increase the user wants to buy the product or use the product in the first place.

To spread relevant messages across more effectively, marketers have to think how they can make use of the space constraint on the smart watch to their advantage is one of the factors to think about. Whether the use of QR codes or NFC function can in turn compensate the lack of space and how the message can be transferred to another mobile platform or desktop through the watch is something to be considered. 

Functions like the fingerprint scanning from iPhone 5, could also be used on the smartwatch if purchasing of single item or payment is needed. By including NFC capabilities, the smartwatch could then be used by consumers to redeem coupons or loyalty points at an NFC terminal in any brick-and-mortar store.

Its not surprising that there will be more and more apps pertaining to the use on smartwatches or functions that would be further explored like motion / gesture control and others, like games for example.  Imagine playing candy crush on your watch. The potential of introducing adverts through the games for example?

playing candy crush on your watch? 

With the emergence of smartwatches from Samsung, Sony, Pebble from kickstarter, big giants like HTC and Apple are all coming up with smartwatches of their own. Nissan is also coming out with smartwatches for car drivers with biometric tracking and accessibility to the internet to name a few. Smartwatches are getting more and more vesatile as technology improves by leaps and bounds. Seeing the trend that it is going, I’m sure there will be more exciting features  coming out very soon and great opportunities for digital marketing so as to speak.