More Apple Watch Sales Strategies Revealed: Trouble In Cupertino?
Although many people expect next week’s media event to focus on new selling points for the Apple Watch, the pitch interestingly focuses on promoting “3 Key Features” previously highlighted by Apple during the first Apple Watch reveal in September 2014. These features are “Health and Fitness,” “New Ways to Connect” [with people] and “Timekeeping.”
According to Jay Yarow at Business Insider, this makes sense, “because these are the top three things Apple highlights on its Apple Watch page.” And I’ll be the first one to cosign the first two, albeit not in that order (at least for the first-generation device).
But if the third pillar of Apple Watch is, in fact, “Timekeeping,” Apple is in for rude awakening from that little wrist-based alarm clock. (Hey, let’s call it what Apple says it is, right?) Custom watch faces are great and all, and they’ll be a big boon to the fashion push, but timekeeping itself, for the vast majority, is utterly mundane. Apple is trying to sell Apple Watch to folks who don’t wear watches, to people who aren’t so preoccupied by the hours and minutes of the day that they’d figure it’s a really good idea to have a clock literally on hand at all times. Most of us have any number of alternative means to quickly and easily ascertain the time, and I doubt that “checking the clock” plays much of a part in the inherent friction of the smartphone experience.
There is, of course, an alternative to this depressing line of thinking, and that is that Apple is simply leaning on an existing, familiar paradigm in order to promote a brand new, unfamiliar one.
A more ancient marketing trick there surely ain’t.