“Nobody will pay $10,000 for an Apple Watch” and other reasons you can’t sell | Hacker News Reader

“Nobody will pay $10,000 for an Apple Watch” and other reasons you can’t sell

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36 pointscoldcode15 comments

The author makes decent points, but uses a very flawed method of arguing to get to those points. First of all, she is arguing against a faceless hyperbole. Who is the person that actually said the words, "Nobody will pay $10,000 for an Apple Watch"? Does she really believe that the person was insisting that absolutely zero people were going to buy this product? It is an exaggerated and unsourced claim.

The bigger mistake in the author's argument is that she uses examples of previous success as a harbinger of the Apple Watch's future success. Yes, some people will spend money on Ferraris, a company that has been making cars for over 50 years. Some people will buy a Birkin bag from Hermes, a company that has been making handbags for about 150 years. These examples in no way indicate the success of the Apple Watch, the first watch made by a computer company.

What the author is describing is conspicuous consumption, a purchasing pattern identified by Thorstein Veblen. The Apple Watch is a Veblen good: it is a status item that people will buy solely because it's expensive and trendy. The high price is a selling point because it's a luxury good. Will people buy the $10,000 Apple Watch? Yes. But not because of the success of other Apple products, not because of plane ticket prices, and especially not because people heat their homes. These are straw man arguments.

1. I linked to hundreds of people saying exactly that thing, plus it's all over Twitter, the op-ed-osphere, in-person conversations, etc.

2. I argued very clearly: Apple Watch is not a watch. It occupies a similar spot on the wrist and it has a time keeping app. That's where the similarities actually end, digital crown or no.

3. My point was never that "People buy Ferraris because they've been in business forever." That's irrelevant. My point is: There are plenty of very wealthy people who don't fret about $10k, or that it might be a "waste," because they're wealthy enough it doesn't matter. F Scott Fitzgerald and all that.

4. I think it's funny that you don't believe in the idea of "track records." Which invalidates skill, experience, customer loyalty, brand recognition, platform lock-in… all the things that drive sales. Apple products are not randomly generated in a vacuum.

5. Nope, it's not about conspicuous consumption. Never claimed it was. It only came up in my quoting that article about the "basic bitch" Birkin. Very wealthy people who are inclined to drop $10k on a whim could buy something much rarer and more impressive than a mass-produced electronic device. Which isn't to say there aren't stratified status layers inside the Watch editions/brands.

6. I never claimed "People will buy Apple Watch as a causal outcome of plane tickets." You missed the entire point of the article.

7. You probably should brush up on the definition of "straw man argument," since you made several. I didn't make any; straw man requires you to set up a false premise in order to knock it down. I made an argument by analogy.

8. You didn't cite any sources for your claims, or even quote the parts of my essay you were refuting, but you used a lot of Classic Style so it sounds impressive.

And this, Amy, is why you're my hero.

Well, she did prove one point though. She's not a customer for these things and doesn't have first hand understanding of that market. So she's got that going... :P

Remember the $100 diamond app? Status products work.

Also what if the whole point of the watch was to get hype.

"Pfft. $10,000 apple watch, what a rip off"

... 3 months later...

"Oh, An apple watch for $60? Why that is a much better price than that awful idea of the $10,000 watch"

Marketing win.

Of course status products work. The author does a horrible job of showing why a status product works. A year of gas heat for a home is not a status product.

Great points. Reminds me of this reddit response on what wealthy people buy and their perspective:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_in...

I thought 10k is insane too, I'm not their customer. Yes, the article sounds crass, fine by me. He'll lose readers that care more about how it's delivered that the actual message.

I enjoyed the article at first but she invalidated the positive experience with the pitch for her seminar at the end of the piece which just led me to discount the entire article as nothing but SEO bait for Google. Frankly it was irritating enough that I felt compelled to bitch about it in a comment...

Take this as an example of how not to do a sales pitch blog post in 2015.

seminar -> mailing list (aka newsletter, aka free)

SEO bait -> a thing I wrote on my blog with the words "Apple Watch" in it like a million other pieces, there is literally zero chance of SEO doing a damn thing which, if you work in SEO, you know

the barest whiff of commercial activity sending a person "bitching" to a comment box -> 6 years in business, I still don't understand this

That's exactly how you make a sales pitch. It doesn't matter what year it is, it matters who the customer is.

I'm going to disagree. I do SEO work and this format is dying. Readers are put off by it as it lacks sincerity, it's also soon to get penalized in upcoming indexing activities.

If she was doing this right she would leave the pitch off the end of the article and provide a simple hint over to her services that exist on a non-sensationalized pitch page.

The change would add a level of sincerity to her article and leave it conveying the sense of authority she's trying to project while showing a level or respect to the reader by making them the target or the piece. Ultimately this piece is clearly targeted to bots, not people and that is why it is poorly executed. At the end of the page when I realized I had been successfully bated to read the article there was zero percent chance of me clicking any other page on that site.

It's a sales pitch that appeals to a market you're not a part of. Get over it.

Interesting article with some great points. But wow. What a horribly condescending tone. I felt like I was being talked down to the entire time I was reading it.

Good on him/her for taking a "few minutes" to google handbags and ferraris so they could convey how superior they feel in their rhetoric. /s

What a load of rubbish. Of course there are plenty of rich folk who can easily afford $10K on a watch, plane tickets, car etc. That doesn't mean they will automatically shell out for an Apple Watch.

Tech is different from fashion. Apple makes a tech tool, announces that it does x, y, z that everyone needs it because it solves a, b, c and Apple will be quite correct in their advertisements. However Apple can make a fashion item and annouce that it is cool, luxurious, classy, the 'it' watch and so on and be completely wrong in their pronouncements. A product doesn't become a luxury item ipso facto because Apple says so. Apple doesn't have the cultural cachet of Hermes or Patek yet. Right now the Apple Watch looks like a basic ugly item for the novuea riche. There's no guarantee that rich people will buy one instead of another Rolex

Apple makes a tech tool? Uh, no. They make fashion tech and have for over a decade now. Yes it's functional for techies but it's fashion plane and simple, and yes people will shell out for it. I know people that were already planning out the buy on the $10K model the day it was introduced before it even had a solid price because the price doesn't matter.

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