The relevance to marketing of the IoT revolution is data, lots and lots of customer data. To Marketing collecting, storing, and making available for analysis all this customer data is a dream come true. All those connected IoT devices constantly collecting data and forwarding it back to cloud storage without any human interaction to slow the process down is ideal. Moreover, this is big data, whereby all the data is collected, stored and analyzed as a whole dataset rather than by the traditional methods of selectively filtering and storing, only what data deemed of value. This is another key differentiator with IoT, the use of Big Data (which we will discuss later). However, what will suffice just now is to note that big data storage will facilitate the creation of more accurate and informed market strategies with the potential for improved ROI on future sales. This is because we are not just talking here about collecting and storing customer sales data. Rather, this is about the analysis of data from the complete sales and product lifecycle. There will be instant feedback from not just the customer, but from the device itself. The device or product can send back data on how it is being used, how often, and with what success. Furthermore, smart devices perform self-diagnosis; it is one of the requirements and a benefit of having a highly available redundant design. Consequently, smart devices know when they are failing and when a replacement part will be required. This in its self is a wonderful opportunity to capture that data and turn it into a sales lead. Clever product design might even have the smart device autonomously place orders for replacement parts or at the very least arrange a service call in advance of any component failure.
Social media is another potentially lucrative arena for IoT as it is already optimized for devices automatically generating their own posts and re-shares. The potential here is for automatically generating communities of individuals who own particular devices. These communities are valuable sources when identifying trends. However, more importantly communities can now have real focus for advertising. The hope is that interruptive, blanket advertising based on information stored in a browsers cookie will become a thing
of the past. Instead, future advertising can align itself with the interests, behaviors and the IoT devices customers already own. This has the potential to save millions of dollars in wasteful inefficient advertising.

So how is this possible?

The way it will work is that products will be built with embedded sensors – these sensors are already available, tiny and cheap – this will give the product the ability to communicate through networks of other devices to the internet. These IoT products, and we are not talking just about smart cars, TVs and wearable technology such as watches and wristbands, but light bulbs, clothing, shoes, even socks, will be constantly sending
back data to the manufacturer or consumer on their condition and usage. The product manufacturers can distill this data to identify when a replacement will be required or an upgrade would be beneficial to the consumer.

The key here is that miniaturized sensors will be constantly sending back data regarding their environment and their own condition. This is when we can see that the smart refrigerator scenario where it manages the inventory and reorders groceries is not such a ridiculous scenario as first thought. IoT food products will have sensors attached costing only a few cents. The sensors will be aware that they require a refill or replacement, and they can alert the consumer to this fact via text or email or they can be empowered to handle the transaction themselves. The technology is already here, it is only the lack of a consumer roadmap – whereby IoT products can be gradually, introduced incrementally with compound value to the consumer- that is holding IoT back from leaping the chasm from being a futuristic vision into everyday life.