Consumer Insights for Apple Smartwatches: Even the Best Have Blindspots | Episode 08

In this episode of Consumer Central, Toph shows that even the best marketers can improve. Here, he uses Consumer Insights data to identify growth opportunities for the smartwatch behemoth.

If you'd like to see one of these customer journey maps for your industry, click here.

Transcript:

Hello this is Toph. Welcome back to consumer central where we are showing businesses and marketers how to eliminate blind spots by revealing more of the customer journey than they could ever see before.

So today we are excited to talk about one of the world's greatest tech companies of all time - Apple. It's no doubt everybody is familiar with Apple smartwatches. They have been dominating the smartwatch space for years and they are putting heavy investment into it with new features to come.

However, we are seeing an interesting shift in the marketplace. Apple, we believe, is having trouble seeing and understanding consumer behavior and aligning to their customer's journey. We are seeing Samsung and Fitbit are actually starting to quadruple shipments. So let's take a look at how Apple can protect their market share.

We ran a consumer behavior map on the smartwatch space and we want to share this interesting data with you. When we look at the world of smartwatches, we know in 15 minutes the 11,274 websites that people visit in the awareness, consideration, in decision phase of the customer journey. We know the 15,000 videos that they are watching - all ranked in order of how powerful they are. We know the 1,000 questions that people are asking along their customer journey. And we know the 1,200 most important and powerful keywords that people are conducting searches for.

So let's jump right into it. We can automatically see that Google is outperforming in terms of market alignment to the customer journey. Google is outperforming Apple by over 30%. This is a massive number. And we can also see that Samsung is coming on strong when we take a quick peek at the top 20 advertisers. We can see that Apple is in last place. Very interesting. So next let's go look at those most powerful questions that people are asking a longer customer journey.

To start off, out of the gate customers are becoming much smarter when they are making purchasing decisions - especially for high end products such as smart watches.

Customer are now rethinking, "do I really need a smartwatch?" "Is it worth it?"

Look at these, "Is it worth it?" You know, "Do we really need a smartwatch?" "Are they worth it?"

It's actually very interesting how nobody is answering these questions. And Apple only aligns to one of the most powerful questions on the top 20. If I want to go download all of these 1,000 questions, I could click a button right here and learn even more about those customers.

So next, let's flip down to the searches that are being conducted. Out of the 1,200 most powerful searches that people are conducting right now, Apple doesn't even show up in the top five. They don't show up until position number six. So let's go see what the searches actually spawned

38
00:04:48.030 --> 00:05:06.390
Christopher Day: The most powerful search being conducted online right now we don't even see Apple showing up to the ball game. Let's go check out the third most powerful search being conducted online and again when we spawn that search, we don't see Apple even showing up for the smartwatch space. Really interesting data.

So what would we do with this right now? We would reshape our search strategy and paid search strategy to make sure that we are aligned with these 1,200 most powerful searches.

Let's go back and look at all the biggest players now that are in this space and see what websites are appearing - and how they rank for all of these queries in total.

Apple is ranked number six. They don't even show up in the top five. Tech Radar, the most powerful publishing site where people go to get information. Amazon, Samsung, smartgeewrist, BestBuy - all of these are far out ranking Apple's position.

So finally let's go take a quick peek at the customer journey. Let's look at the questions that are being asked in awareness, consideration, decision mode.

What we thought was interesting is, people are actually asking, "What watches are better than apple smart watches?"

When we clicked on the data and downloaded all of these questions being asked, we saw that same theme popping up again and again in the consideration phase.

Manufacturers are not answering the questions people are asking around the features and benefits of their Smartwatch versus the others. They're not answering these questions effectively.

And finally in decision mode, people are very cost conscious right now. They're asking, "What are the cheapest smartwatches?" "What are the best smart watches for the money?" Most of these questions being asked are around cost, "is it worth it?" "Is it worth buying?"

So what would we do if we were Apple and if we had all of this data around consumer behavior and the customer journey - specifically for smart watches? Well, if we were running display ads, we would run them on these 11,274 websites. If we were going to create content and videos, we would go focus on the videos that are ranked in the order of power and understand what people are actually watching. We would create content that answers these 929 questions that people are actually asking through the awareness, consideration, decision mode. And finally, we would align our paid search strategy to the 1,200 searches that people are actually conducting.

So that's it for today on Consumer Central. We just wanted to point out some data to help Apple protect their market lead if they would like to do that against players like Samsung and Fitbit.

If you find this data interesting or would like to see anything else, we can run consumer behavior maps for any industry, any product or service to provide some value for you.

Until next time, this is Toph with Consumer Central.