For marketers still neck-deep in creating a mobilemarketing strategy, contemplating yet another hard-to-grasp, disruptive, and hyped-up technology may make their head pound. Regardless, welcome to wearables, declared the next big thing everywhere in the press — and by plenty of digital marketing heavyweights.
I’m no tech wallflower, but grappling with this one hurts. On the one hand, smart “everything” seems inevitable — a natural extension of existing trends like mobility, personalization, and location-based information. (Of course my coat will have embedded computers someday.) On the other hand, so much of what I’m hearing still seems like some distant sci-fi promise or is just plain ridiculous: Turn off the house lights just by thinking? Get diet help from my undergarments?
But with wearables seemingly bearing down on us all, how can we adopt a pragmatic but open frame of mind for this new category? To get some reasonable handle on it, I turned to someone closer to the front line — and far more comfortable with the current ambiguity of the market.
