With the Internet of Things hailed a $19 trillion opportunity by Cisco, it’s clear that marketers need to familiarise themselves with this lucrative opportunity. Smart products – items that connect to the internet – are already entering homes and becoming an established part of consumers’ everyday lives.
For example, technology companies are working to create smart fridges, connected to the internet with unobtrusive smart tags that let consumers know if products are going out of date, or are running low, and will even be able to add items onto personal online shopping lists.
But smart technology isn’t just about making hi-tech products. This is about creating platforms that connect existing products to make them smarter, more user-friendly, interactive, and efficient. Whether Wi-Fi kettles or connected shoes, the increasing familiarity that consumers have with smart products presents marketers with a more personalised, targeted, and intimate advertising opportunity than ever before.
Upon purchase or set up, users can ‘check-in’ to the smart products to claim digital ownership and reveal the personalised content, services and apps that drive smart products. This ‘check-in’ provides a highly engaged and connected consumer touchpoint, providing marketers with the opportunity to deliver relevant and personalised messages to receptive and responsive audiences in real-time. It also enables brands to instantly engage with users and gain insight into consumer behaviour and how they interact with products.
This insight will enable marketers to better understand what consumers want, equipping them with the ability to target and react to consumers with relevant ads and messages. In turn, consumers can respond to ads, provide comments, make suggestions, ask questions and receive information or reviews through their personal mobile devices, all of which could potentially result in further purchases.
Niall Murphy, Co-Founder & CEO of EVRYTHNG, a software company that makes products smart by connecting them to the internet, said: “The concept of how the Internet of Things could work in the future is all well and good, but for it to be truly relevant, it needs to work in today’s environment […] we’re making the Web of Things happen today and enabling it via the smartphone […] a device that’s already so familiar to us. It’s all about making this happen now, rather than in the future”.
Smart products provide extensive opportunities for marketers to create interactive information channels with users through connected consumer touchpoints. These touchpoints will provide marketers with insight into consumer behaviour, enabling them to create relevant and intriguing ads for a more targeted and interactive audience. Smart products will do so much more than make consumers smarter – they will reimagine the advertising marketplace.