The need states are:

• Flow, making everyday life easier and syncing with their lifestyle
• Reflection, learning more about ourselves through the data generated by these devices
• Affinity, connecting and sharing experiences remotely with family, friends or shared interest groups
• Performance, helping with specific tasks to improve performance, setting goals in our lives.
• Value exchange, allow tracking or data sharing for a consumer benefit and individuals may have the opportunity to exploit that commercial value.
• Self-expression, using wearables to look and feel good, so more about self-esteem and wearables as a modern fashionable commodity.

The research project aimed to identify how people will use and interact with wearables and the associated brand advertising opportunities. The findings from the qualitative study were presented at the IAB’s Mobile Engage 2015 conference yesterday.

The project involved 14 participants – half young teenagers and half adults, and all of them were technology enthusiasts. They were given the devices over four weeks – smartwatches, fitness trackers, jewellery, smart fabrics, as well as heads up display glass wear, and asked to carry out a series of experiments with them to understand how they would be used in real life.

The project ended with a storytelling workshop as part of a co-creation process to envision what the wearables future is.

James Chandler, global mobile director, Mindshare said: “There were two questions from the research: what need states can wearables fulfil and what role can brand communication play in wearables? How will clients behave in this brave new world?”

Chandler determined from the research that there were five key brand applications: Push notification – contextually aware messaging to the wearable; Paid search – extending the PPC model to wearables; Data-led personalisation – for example with biometric information; Brand utility – services created for the consumer operated on the wearable; and Brand experience – using wearables to enhance a real world brand experience.

Dr Chris Brauer, Goldsmiths University said of the project: “Researching the future in the present is a challenge but we found some remarkable transformations, the idea of flow and synced lifestyle and operating more fluidly with the environment around us.”