When most people think about the internet of things, they don’t think about smart bottles, but if you are a water bottle manufacturer maybe you should. Smart bottles have the power to boost business revenue and change the game overnight. Paying attention now? Smart bottles are the next logical step in water bottle manufacturing. 20 years ago people would have never believed there was a market for bottled water, but now bottled water is the number one selling beverage in America.
Smart bottles are poised to be the next, so the question is do you want to boost your company’s revenues, or stay in the wings and watch other companies harvest the results. While bottled water has certainly experienced success, environmentally minded people are leaning towards reusable water bottles to help reduce plastic waste. These same people tend to be health-minded as well as environmentally minded, and that is exactly why the idea of a water bottle that utilizes the IoT to record, track, and measure daily water usage will appeal to them.
Today people track their blood pressure, daily steps, heart rate, and sleep rhythms on a daily basis, why not track their water usage as well? It’s an easy bridge to cross, and the potential profits waiting on the other side for savvy battle manufacturers are quite attractive. Here are just a few of the many ways that smart bottles can improve your sales.
Smart Bottles Have the Potential to Boost Revenue
One of the clearest ways that smart bottles can boost revenue is because of their high-profit margin. The more expensive an item is, the more revenue is usually produced. Take for example the smartwatch that is probably on your wrist if you are a consumer of IoT like most of the world. Before smartwatches, most people paid between $30-60 for their watch, maybe more if you were after a designer watch. Now it is not unusual for the average consumer to spend $300-$600 on a smartwatch, and what is even more impressive, is that consumers who never would have spent money on a watch now proudly own smartwatches.
Why? Because now a smartwatch is the IoT gadget we didn’t know we needed. This is one of many examples. Smart TVs cost more than regular TVs, smartphones cost more than mobile phones, smart thermostats cost more than traditional thermostats, etc.
The bottom line here is you stand to make a lot more money off of a smart bottle versus a regular water bottle. Even if you sell less, your overall revenue will probably still be higher.
Smart Bottles Help Back Your Brand Loyalty Efforts
It’s pretty easy to get attached to things. People naturally get attached to inanimate objects all the time- just think how you feel when you leave your smartphone at home. That same feeling can be cultivated and created for a smart bottle. Your average consumer won’t miss their water bottle too much if they misplace it, but they will miss a personalized water bottle that interacts with them and acts as their hydration coach.
The IoT within the smart bottle harvests quite a bit of information about you to provide customization support including your age, height, gender, weight, the average weather in your area, and how much physical activity you are taking part in. It then uses this information to provide you with the perfect hydration goals and monitors your intake to see if you are hitting them.
That positive experience builds customers’ trust and reliance, and after a while checking in with your smart bottle app will become second nature. Something you do at the end of the day or periodically when you have a moment to kill. This creates a partnership with your bottle that turns into a solid relationship, and like any good relationship, once you value the other party you won’t stray. The next time you go to buy a water bottle for a spouse, parent, friend, etc you will look for the exact same bottle and brand.
These days it is becoming increasingly harder to differentiate between bottles, but smart bottles have the potential to take a brand to the next level. In addition, the IoT features enable a brand to connect reliably with their consumers which creates open communication and builds an even more valuable relationship. Valued customers are twice as likely to return to a brand, and adopting a smart bottle might be the easiest way to reach customers who need the extra validation.
Smart Bottles Can Be Used to Harvest Data
Finally, at the end of the day adopting smart bottle technology is just smart business for water bottle manufacturers. The more information you have on a regular basis about your product, its performance, and your customers the easier it is to adapt to your industry’s shifting needs. Smart bottles offer you a plethora of information you can mine including customer data, product usage data, and the average product lifecycle.
IoT makes it easy to collect all of this information and more so that you can then create personalized marketing campaigns directed at key target audiences. Even better, you can continue to use the IoT to see if your marketing campaigns are having the effect you want so you can differentiate tactics by target groups and/or revise and relaunch if necessary.
Unlike other campaigns, the IoT allows you to collect information for the entire life of the product, so you can see how and when a person’s interest in their water bottle starts to wane, and then use that information to create innovative solutions that revitalize your product.
Smart bottles are on the horizon, so now as a bottled water manufacturer, you have to decide whether you want to ride that wave or stay in more comfortable waters. If revenues, IoT, and strong marketing campaigns get you excited, then the answer should be clear.
