
“Nobody will pay $10,000 for an Apple Watch” and other reasons you can’t sell - coldcode
https://unicornfree.com/2015/nobody-will-pay-10000-for-an-apple-watch-other-reasons-you-cant-sell-shit
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dmcginty
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.

~~~
amyhoy
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.

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

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withdavidli
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_insanely_wealthy_people_buy_that_ordinary/cnnmca8)

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.

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bcRIPster
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.

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

~~~
bcRIPster
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.

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

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autoreleasepool
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

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kalindamy
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

~~~
bcRIPster
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.

