Does the Apple Watch Have a Future in Marketing?

What are so many marketers doing at this year’s Mobile World Congress? I think Chris Heine over at Adweek said it best: “It’s not just about beautiful Barcelona.”

Marketers are in Spain hoping to identify the upcoming trends in mobile that will help us more effectively reach and engage with consumers on the devices they carry throughout the day. Proving that it wasn’t just a fad last year, the trend everyone continues to talk about is wearables.

I get asked all the time what I think about the marketing potential of wearables, and this week’s Apple event provides the perfect opportunity to share my thoughts. I should clarify that my ideas come from a performance marketing perspective, which tends to focus further down the sales funnel than overall brand or awareness marketing.

As a lower-funnel tactic, performance marketing is most effective on devices where consumers can browse for and purchase products. To use the simplest example – a consumer might check out a pair of shoes on a retailers’ site, see those same shoes in a targeted ad the next day, and then click through to the checkout page where the sale is completed. If we test the Apple Watch against this simple example, it clearly fails.

As long as consumers use their Apple Watches for monitoring and communications purposes – fitness and health tracking, texting, scanning notifications – there’s not much to work with for performance marketers.

Of course, MWC isn’t about working within existing boundaries. We understand that the Apple Watch’s true potential lies in uses that we’ve only just started to identify. We’ve seen hints over the past couple weeks that the watch will include shopping features that allow it to be used as a payment vehicle, which Tim Cook confirmed at his event.

Payment is where I see a future for performance marketing and wearables. Imagine if, after researching that pair of shoes in my example, the consumer received a location-triggered ad on her smartwatch as she walked past a retail location where she could then scan the watch to purchase the shoes (perhaps with a discount contained in the ad). In this scenario, the Apple Watch serves as a link between the digital and physical realms – allowing performance marketers to influence and measure offline behavior.

Of course, we’re some time away from wearable payment becoming reality, but I think it serves as a useful example of how marketers approach events like MWC. It’s not just about understanding the current landscape, but uncovering future use cases that we can start working towards today.

So, in the coming days and weeks, take anything you read that dismisses the wearable marketing opportunity with a grain of salt. It’s easy to write off any new device as long as we’re looking at just the existing uses, but it’s our job as marketers to go beyond the present and look into the future.