Can’t leave home without it
72% would turn back home to retrieve their Apple Watch
Wristly Apple Watch Insider’s Report #33 — N=1,412
December 16th , 2015
Our research partner Ben Bajarin was discussing consumer adoption trends with colleagues at a recent industry event when the topic of how to measure true satisfaction came up. This was the inspiration for our first question for the week: would you turn around and head back home after realizing you forgot to put on Apple Watch?
Where only 4% of our respondents stated they would not be bothered by it, an aggregate of 72% would likely turn back to retrieve it (the 61% stated “It would bother me and I would turn back unless at risk of being late for an important appointment”) and the balance of 24% would be somewhat bothered but not enough for the hassle of the trip back. This high number reflects some of our other data points in overall satisfaction with Apple Watch and relatively much lower “abandonment” rate vs activity bands and other wearables.
To get more color on the relative importance of Apple Watch vs other “critical” objects, we asked the cohort who stated that they wouldn’t turn back what their behavior would be for other objects. Their feedback is very insightful to relativize where Apple Watch fits today in the overall pecking order of “very personal objects”.
1st Wallet. 2nd iPhone. 3rd Keys.
Apple Watch for these users is not yet as critical as their wallet, keys and iPhone.
However, putting this in context of the vision for Apple Watch (and wearables) and with the growing availability and usage of Apple Pay and other home iOT devices such as the smartlock by August or the connected lights by Philips Hue, one can easily assess that very soon Apple Watch will top this chart and most if not all of us will have to turn back for it — eventually!
Presenting the new “Bandistas”
The remainder of our weekly research focused on the topic of bands, Apple Watch and its users behaviors and habits in owning/buying and swapping/changing the ones they own.
Once again, we were able to decipher a unique new (unpublished anywhere else) insight. There are three distinct “personas” when it comes to Apple Watch and bands. Each “personas” represents approximately one third of the total Apple Watch population and we can define them as follows:
- The “Band-less”: — for those who don’t care much about bands and typically are satisfied with the first and only band they bought.
- The “middle” — for those who often have somehow wandered into purchasing a second band but do not regularly or frequently change theirs.
- And the band lovers or shall I say “bandistas”: — those who stated that being able to swap and change bands was core to their original buying decision and their forming habits sustain the claim!
How many is the obvious first question?
The first table of results below shows the distribution of the population when it comes to bands ownership with an average of 2.27 per owner. But further analysis sheds a ton more insights in terms of which type of user buys so many bands and why.
As one would expect, the respondents who cited “important or very important” to the prior question show significant higher averages in band ownership.
And while our results show that women on average have more bands than men, what is much more interesting is to look at the extremes. While less women have only one band, as many as 14% of women have six or more bands versus only 4% of the men population. If one were to design and sell 3rd party bands, one would obviously benefit to target these cohort of users specifically.
There are a few other insights when looking at the data by income, age and length of ownership of Apple Watch but we reserve that analysis for our premium Wristly Pro subscribers. If you’re interested you can read about it and subscribe here.
The first band purchased is a telltale of behavior
While we have previously reported that the Sport band followed by the Milanese loop and the Link bracelet were the top sellers, today we’re publishing a different take on the data when looking at it in contrast to the number of bands purchased. What’s most notable (looking at the extremes of 1 and 5+) is that the more bands someone intends to own, the most likely that person is to chose one of the more expensive models first. In other words, one doesn’t become a bandista but is one at inception.
Other data insights we can share this week include:
- 25% of our respondents already own a band from a third-party manufacturers
- With the upcoming gifting/holidays, 40% intend to acquire at least one more band by the end of the year and half of those state they will get a band from a third party then.
Frequency is consistent
First we can report that the frequency with which one user changes his/her band is highly correlated to the number of bands owned, but is not gender-specific. This means men and women behave consistently across the dimension, with 80%+ of our “bandistas” swapping bands weekly if not daily.
But key reasons for changing bands are gender-specific
Coordinating her outfit for women versus the more utilitarian male approach to changing it when exercising are the two notable insights on behavior when it comes to changing bands.
Introducing Wristly Pro
If you are in the industry or if you expect that your business will be impacted by Apple Watch, you should consider to subscribe to our new Wristly Pro research. Only Wristly Pro gives you the unique (and unpublished) insights from analyzing all of our data over time and across multiple dimensions (demographic/geo/behavioral and more).
Subscribers also gain access and influence over upcoming research discussions and several other benefits.
Wristly Pro is available for pre-orders at $995/year. That’s less than $85/month but for our first 25 subscribers only! Our first issue comes out in January 2016. All the details here.
