Technology on the Go

Wearable technology is on the rise in both personal and business use. Consumer spending on wearable devices is growing faster than in any segment in the global consumer electronics market, as devices more than tripled in 2014 from a year earlier, reaching a total of 21 million units shipped, according to International Data Corporation.  The five main fitness wearable form factors are smart wristbands, sports watches, other fitness monitors, heart rate monitor chest straps and smart garments. For the present, however, smart wristbands and other fitness monitors are the most popular form factors.

Wearable devices represent technology that humans can wear on-the-go. They are a pioneering approach to integrating smarter and more practical gadgets into daily life.  Initially focused on communications, applications, content and commerce, wearables will ultimately be involved in many other aspects of life, presenting the potential for massive transformation in many industries. The more obvious ones include consumer electronics and communications. Early adopter industries include clothing, healthcare, sports and fitness. However, we see many industries adopting wearable technologies as computing and wireless communications integrate wearable into virtually every aspect of products and services.

Top mobile executives see wearable computing devices as the next big thing in the mobile industry. In a recent survey, 22 percent of the respondents said wearables would be the next big thing, while 17 percent chose the mobile wallet, and 19 percent chose “everything as a service” (i.e.; cloud-powered software and computing).

Marketing research is no exception. Questionnaires are often long and laborious. What if there was a better way to acquire some of the data in a permission-based passive way and save the questions for data that cannot be acquired passively? By being able to avoid some of the preliminary questions, because we already know the answers, we could more directly target those who fit our desired profile and go right to asking the key questions we want answered. With the help of wearables that access location data, we can figure out exactly where someone spent time and how much time they spent there. Healthcare devices such as Fitbit provide data that shows how active someone is on a day-to-day basis. While wearables are still a niche product used by only a small percentage of the population, their use is definitely on the rise. It will be exciting to see how this impacts research.

Bullets

• As of April 2015, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan.
  searchengineland.com

• Approximately 91 percent of companies with revenues over 500 million, are using digital video, making it the top form of digital advertising among organizations of this size.
  forbes.com

• Four times as many online consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
  prnewswire.com

• The marketing technology landscape has basically doubled in vendor size, having grown to as many as 2,000 potential vendors, across over 40 technology categories, in the past year.
  chiefmartec.com

• 31 percent of senior marketers claimed that marketing automation was their biggest challenge to date.
  goexperian.com