The Perpetual NPD Motion Machine

Just a quick thought on the benefits of IoT-enabled products:

“We think that the amount of data that the 200 million users we have telling us how much they exercise, what they ate and giving us data that will help us learn more about them [to] ultimately help us sell more shirts and shoes is something important.”

Under Armour chief executive officer Kevin Plank made that statement during the company's earnings call on Tuesday. He's referring to the 200 million-odd consumers who have become members of Under Armour's "Connected Fitness" community, either by purchasing the brand's wearable devices (or device-enabled wearables) or by downloading one of its four health and fitness apps.

That impressive community now feeds Under Armour with a steady stream of consumer insights that can be used to spot trends and identify new product opportunities. So the information the company needs to drive both product innovation and consumer engagement is now being collected by the products themselves.

Welcome to the IoT.