Part III - Plans for the future: Did you enjoy your ad? Your smartwatch knows!

While a couple of benefits of this wearable technologies are not something new for the marketing industry, there are still some very interesting opportunities provided by the functionality of them. One major forté is visibility. A gadget sitting on the hand of an individual has way more visibility than the smartphone from his pocket in the dark. The fact that the wearable is in plain sight instantly rises the chances for an ad to be seen, crucially at the desired time to attract a purchase.

Monitoring location is already a well-used practice nowadays, but imagine how fascinating and engaging it would be to actually know what the customer feels when seeing an ad? This technological achievement would not only ensure the creation of relevant offers and content, but also solve problems and create convenience, as in making users' lives easier and offering the right service at the right time. Emotion-based marketing is still in trials, but it might enable marketers a whole new level of accuracy for future strategies and approaches. When encountering targeted advertisements, small-scale sensors embedded could process users’ biological responses and send back signals.

Due to the evolution of technologies, people's emotions have started to become more measurable and quantifiable. Even though these advances are still in elementary forms, because emotions are extremely complex (due to their subjectivity), if used correctly, this emotion-based tech can totally alter humanity's wellness by helping users deeper understand, monitor and regulate their feelings.

COVID-19 related: While the world is facing some unprecedented times of health and economic crises, there is also a concerning mental health issue. Researchers have started to explore innovative ways to monitor and regulate individuals' emotions. As a case study example, members of Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) created an app which monitors people's well-being. It analyzes data such as sleep patterns, voice records and heart rate (Fortune, 2020). Some examples of companies which provide an inspirational point of view regarding emotion-based technology are Healium, Reflect Innovation, Inner Balance, Sonde Health, Feel.

Healium - uses AR, VR and wearable technology to allow users to "visualize" their feelings; their concept helps keep calm and manage anxiety and stress; one of the most important customers of Healium is the U.S. Navy (Fortune, 2020);

Feel - combines cognitive behaviour therapies with a digitalized wristband which analyzes people's emotional state using biomarkers. It provides users a connection with real-life therapists, as well as insights and breathing exercises; the app's usage has spiked during the COVID-19 crisis, with users having spent on the app 50% more time/week (Sentio Solutions, 2020);

Inner Balance - their sensors measure heart rhythms and provide estimates of one's frame of mind with their app, which also has meditation tutorials and life-coaching advice. Inner Balance take care of one's mental health to achieve a state of "coherence" (minimized stress levels, high psychological resilience) (Fortune, 2020);

Sonde Health - their invention uses human voice as the main sign of someone's health issues such as depression, sleepiness, hypertension and breathing problems. Their sensors can be installed in most smart gadgets nowadays (Fortune, 2020);

Reflect Innovation - company of Joy Ventures, they created an electronic textile which raises people's awareness about their inner emotional state using biofeedback; the textile changes its colour in coordination with a person's body signals, enabling them to have control of their emotions (Fortune, 2020);

While these companies are extremly futuristic, they suggest only a fraction of what emotion-based technology could become. Some other groundbreaking inventions, which not long ago were just science fiction, are now in the making; for example, prototypes of robots capable of analyzing the emotional aspect of dreams, technology that scans and analyzes facial expressions or detects sexual attraction.

Recommendations

The fact that wearables generate massive amounts of data is already acknowledged by consumers, let alone by marketers. The more people embrace wearables into their lives, the more data becomes available about them, thus leading to serious privacy concerns. In my opinion, marketers need to work extensively in collaboration with software engineers in order to assess a safe place for people's sensitive information.

While tech companies were relatively in a race to find as many objects capable of being converted into wearable technologies, they sometimes did not in-depth think about whether their inventions are actually useful (for example Google Glasses). Marketers and product developers should really consider a simple but vital question, “if I were to buy this product, would it help me?”. Study shows that 1 in 10 users abandon their wearable, with one third of these owners abandoning them within a couple of weeks of purchase (Ericsson, 2015), so it is imperative that marketers consider people's needs and feedback, while easing their lives with innovation.

Moreover, 6 out of 10 smartphone users believe that wearables have strong uses linked to health and wellness (Ericsson, 2015). I, as a future marketer, observe an opportunity related to awereness. Why not make 7, 8 or even 10 out of 10 users aware of all the benefits included in incorporating wearable technologies into one's life? I strongly believe that marketers are putting great amounts of effort into developing highly innovative products, but they often lack at a very basic step of promoting, which is reaching as many potential customers as possible and raising awareness about their products’ capabilities.

It seems like wearables are gaining ground over smartphones in the future, so they might as well be designed as so. I would recommend marketers to think about how a wearable will literally act as a smartphone, perform complex tasks, excel at being manoeuvrable. As wearables get smarter, the smartphone may become a secondary screen, with the possibility of being left at home, depending on the wearables’ evolution. With tech giants already designing wearables capable of replacing usual objects like home/car keys and identification documents, there is a big pressure on marketers to come up with all-in-one devices which ease people’s lives.

In conclusion, wearable technology is just one of many disruptive technologies already setting new ideals in terms of scientific evolution, besides Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, AR and VR, 3D printing, Blockchain and so on. Humanity is eager to keep expanding and refining the disruptiveness, to radically reconfigure businesses by implementing always newer and newer technologies, but for how long? The challenges that arise from being a disruption in technology are yet to be fully discovered. What is sure is that we still have a lot to learn, and these disruptive technologies prove that the future we once dreamed of is now.

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