“Sports sells gatorade, and sports sells sneakers, and sports sells clothing and hats and TV trays and bottle openers and anything that has enough surface area to hold a logo,” Darrell Etherington writes for Techcrunch. “But can sports sell the concept of the smartwatch? That’s what Apple might find out beginning in October, the rumored launch date of the iWatch, according to a new report from 9to5Mac. The blog’s sources say Apple is working with professional athletes to test the fitness tracking features of the upcoming device, and it’s only logical that if they’re helping inform product design, Apple should tap them for promotion, too.”
“Building wearables so far has proven a challenge, at least in terms of making something that sells with the kind of volume that makes them worthwhile for a company like Apple,” Etherington writes. “The top-selling smartwatches to date are the Samsung Gear line, and 2 million total smartwatch devices were sold last year according to Strategy Analytics, of which 1.2 million were Android powered.”
MacDailyNews Take: And 1.99 million of them were either promptly returned or sit in a drawer somewhere today, unused.
“Apple, by contrast, is shooting for first year sales of between 50 and 60 million units for its device alone, according to reports from media outlets including WSJ and Reuters,” Etherington writes. “To sell the devices, turning to the age-old marketing machine that is professional sports is a logical path. Apple is said to be packing a heap of sensors into this device (10 to be exact) and working with Nike on the fitness features… Apple hasn’t leaned too heavily on the celebrity angle for promoting its past products… But it has acquired a company recently that could help with this kind of market positioning: Beats.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Whatever it take to get the ignorati to adopt quality devices and quality platforms instead of half-assed, insecure knockoffs of original, revolutionary, paradigm-smashing devices and platforms.
If being slapped on Sharapova and Ronaldo wrists will do the trick, slap away, Apple.
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