“This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me it’s a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom.” So said Sailor (Nicholas Cage) in David Lynch’s movie Wild at Heart. And while we may not all be wearing jackets that so blatantly display those beliefs, we all (or perhaps most of us) display a sense of individuality both in what we wear, drive and what prompts us to buy new products. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to most of our purchases.
A case in point are the purchase motivators that push us to buy a smartwatch. While it’s easy to point to fitness and exercise regimes as the most compelling use case, there are always going to be nuances to these motivators. For me, the driving requirement was tracking my windsurfing, which means my most important purchase requirements were support for a windsurf-specific app, as well as GPS, waterproof and shock resistance (because I fall off a lot). But friends who also windsurf influenced my decision as I wanted to track my speed against my friends (consider that “fitness challenges” if you will).
My needs are clearly way down in the weeds of nuance and can hardly be considered a guiding light for any sales and marketing campaign, at least in America where windsurfing is not popular (perhaps it’s a far stronger niche in Europe which still has a healthy windsurfing following?). But simply looking at purchase motivators based on age and income highlight key differences in why people look to buy a smartwatch. Brand, for example, is far less important for consumers making less money: only 23% of consumers making less than $45k say they care about a specific brand purchase, compared to 40% for consumers making more than $100k per year.
But the real fun comes when you consider the age of the consumer buying the smartwatch. To make this more interesting, I took the primary motivators and ranked them for each age group. Then I compared the ranking to the total base ranking to show the relative importance of each motivator. I should also note that to make the chart readable, I took the liberty of removing purchase motivators that showed little to no variance from the chart (but they are still in the total ranking list).
The 18-24 year old category shows the most interesting variance. They care far less about tracking their exercise (minus 9 from the norm) but far greater interest in fitness challenges (plus 10). The two data points almost seem contrarian. Obviously they do want to track their exercise, but not for their own interest, but rather as part of a “team sport”. I may be far from that age category, but it’s reminiscent of my main purchase use case I mentioned above. Steps, calorie burn, standing time? Nah. Team challenges (in my case, windsurf speed), definitely. Interestingly – and clearly related to how much this age group pushes itself competitively, recovering from an injury also over-indexes compared to the norm.
But sports and fitness are not the only keys here: this younger age group also over-indexes for interest in a cellular-enabled smartwatch as they look to stay in contact without always having a smartphone with them. That’s great news for the carriers looking to drive cellular subscriptions and our ownership data shows that 48% of 18–24-year-olds who own a smartwatch have a cellular-ready device. There’s a caveat though: Circana’s data shows that this age group is also the first to cut back on “unnecessary” expenditures when money is starting to look tight. Fortunately, the cellular desire in not just a “young person” thing. It also over-indexes for over 55-year-olds and this is key as this age group shows far lower adoption rates for smartwatches than other age groups: smartwatch ownership among the 55+ age group is 26%, compared to a total ownership penetration of 40% across all ages. Perhaps more targeted marketing of the benefits of a cellular device, as well as how the smartwatch can help with the diet/exercise your doctor is telling you to do, will help drive that category. It’s hardly a snakeskin jacket, but Nicolas Cage is now firmly in that age group. I wonder if he wears a smartwatch. If he does, I’m sure it has a snakeskin watch band to demonstrate his individuality and belief in personal freedom.
The Connected Intelligence Wearables service tracks the ownership and use of various smart wearable devices including activity trackers, smartwatches, rings, smart glasses and VR headsets.