"Apple Watch Skewed To Geeky Guys Risks Alienating Female Buyers"
Allison Prang and Lindsey Rupp, Bloomberg:
“It feels clearly skewed to the geeky men’s side of the population from a functionality point of view, and from a design point of view — it’s large and square,” Adamson said. Among members of the opposite sex, its target market is “the intense, athletic women, the fitness fanatics,” [Landor Associates’ Allen Adamson] said. …
When Apple Watch went on display in Paris last fall, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and designer Karl Lagerfeld posed with Apple’s head of design Jonathan Ive. Yet the event was attended largely by men, according to technology and media website The Verge.
“In the world of marketing, you’re better off making it more masculine, because some women will wear masculine things,” Landor’s Adamson said. “You typically err toward making it more masculine.”
While the article doesn’t really explain or offer much support for its premise, it suggests something I’ve thought about for a while, and its headlining conclusion is absolutely accurate. Apple does risk alienating female buyers with Apple Watch (at least at launch). But it’s a calculated risk that Cupertino couldn’t mitigate without cannibalizing one of the central strategies of the company’s future in wearables and beyond: the luxury market.
And it has nothing to do with shape or size. Apple nailed both of those parameters in their effort to maximize whatever unisex sensibilities are required in such a mass-production device. No, for Apple Watch to be immediately appealing to female buyers in large quantity, the choice of case materials would need to be expanded to an affordable gold option. That is, there would need to be a gold plated Apple Watch.
Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with that: It is exceedingly difficult to tell a gold plated piece of jewelry from an actual solid gold affair, particularly when the plating is applied at Apple-level manufactory standards. Sure, the weight would be way off, but nobody else would know whether you’re rocking an $800 Apple Watch Gold or a $10,000 Apple Watch Edition, and that would kill the interest from the upper class that the latter model requires. And without the celebrity buy-in that Apple’s banking on to help push the “cheaper” Apple Watches to the rest of us, the entire line could suffer tremendously.
So gold plate had to be shelved.
For now.
Because I really don’t think it’s going to be shelved permanently. To me, such an offering is a foregone conclusion for later on down the line, as a gold plated Apple Watch would cost about a dollar more to manufacture than its steel counterpart while commanding an extra few hundred in MSRP.
Of course, even after its new wearable is fully adopted by the general public, maybe Apple will still be compelled to solve the puzzle of how to make gold plated and solid gold versions immediately distinguishable to onlookers. Maybe they already have.
Maybe that explains those weirdly gaudy Digital Crown inserts.