Barron's writer Tiernan Ray, on why the Apple Watch hasn't taken off with the
fashionistas [bold added]:
The company made an all-out push to court fashion critics and watch aficionados: This turns out to have been a terrible mistake.
Just last week, the New York Times’s fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, said she was “breaking up” with her watch after a month and a half of wear. Friedman had many valid points about the whole category of smartwatches—including questioning the whole notion of the “quantified self” and the need to constantly monitor your pulse, potassium intake, or how many steps you’ve taken.
More telling, though, was her reaction to being the focus of a marketing phenomenon: People who saw her wearing the watch “made certain assumptions about me”—exactly what she herself does for a living.
Fashion editors don’t want to be courted, they want to discover and anoint, to be the excavators of style. Pandering to them is just asking for rejection.
The mistake begins with the name of the product. The Apple Watch is not about you, Apple. An "iWatch" would have focused attention on what's paramount in the world of
haute couture....me, myself, and I.
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| However, the Apple Watch campaign in China shows promise. |
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