Iterating on luck.
The Apple Airpods Health play is about Health, but the mainstream consumer.
“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you sit like that,” your AirPods say.
The WSJ recently reported that Apple is studying ways to make AirPods a “health device”. It’s hard not to instantly imagine how that kind of seamless smart assistance might lead to behavioral regulation.
This isn’t necessarily a surprising move for Apple, as the company has been publicly and actively expanding its footprint from the smart home to the smart out-of-home. It’s also commonly reported (speculated) that Apple is on track to produce an electric smart car. If there’s one thing Apple is consistently good at, it’s focusing on their core offer, in this case ‘smart devices’, and iterating on them. Hence, it’s not really a surprise. But it is still impressive. And it shows a sliver of Apple’s plan to expand its footprint in a bigger market – not the Health market, but the mainstream consumer market.
It wasn’t that long ago that the common conversation about Apple was around its slowing innovation engine. Apple was still charging premiums for tiny iterations of the same phone previously released. In 2016 Apple’s earnings started to decline and in June 2019, with iPhone sales stalling, Forbes asked if Apple was simply no longer innovative. The fact that ‘innovation iteration’ has formed a part of their strategy for a decade isn’t unique to them; like in most big companies, the word innovation is overused with most product launches being merely product changes. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, particularly for consumers who might not need a slightly different version of the same product. Nor the same consumer who is quite happy with the look, feel, functionality – foundationally - of the product they’ve been using for years. Even better, when brands are able to find new uses for the same product that serves an existing need, the benefits are even greater for the consumer, and expand the brand’s reach across a greater variety of occasions. In other words, the one product serves multiple jobs to be done.
Apple’s exploration in “health” is a starting point for a greater venture into a space of mainstream consumable goods. From the office (Mac) to connection (iPhone) to home (HomePod) to entertainment (AirPods) to finally, health and wellness (Apple Watch), Apple has been consistently inching its reach further to where, and in which occasions, its products can play a role across the entire daily consumer journey.
Health connected devices globally reached $16.3B in 2020 and while they’re projected to more than double within the next four years, seeing as the AirPods current market size is $12B, comparatively it’s clear the growth projection isn’t what’s attractive. The appeal is in adjacent expansion.
WSJ reported the ‘new’ Apple AirPods could “enhance hearing, read body temperature and monitor posture”. This links to a longer term trend of devices moving up, physically that is – from something we hold in our hands, to something we wear on our arm, to something that sits on our head.
Instantly brand owners around the world imagine the expanded possibilities. As motion sensors, face recognition and temperature tracking technology embeds into the every day actions people take, they provide a new avenue for brand integration and new consumer experiences.
The amplification of reach for the ‘new’ AirPods won’t be through chiropractors for spine adjustments, it will be to the every day consumer who is swapping an old desk for a sit/stand one. The same consumer who likes to have as many of their products as possible integrated, so they can check their ear health via the volume of their sound with a quick swipe on their phone. The consumer trying to make better choices for their health that don’t require any large adjustment to their behavior. (After all, putting an earbud in your ear is not that different to putting a headphone over your ear, and we’ve been doing that since 1910.)
All of this (iterative) innovation begs a question: will much of these ‘additional features’ be novel and unique (“hey I can quantify which meetings make me yawn more”) but unused? And ultimately, like a barrage of apps sitting unused in the cloud, outlive their novelty-usefulness by practical uselessness.
An alternative question naturally goes in the extreme opposite: if Apple were to partner with companies to boost ‘personalization’ of the product’s use, soon the nudges and prompts to do better could result in regression and blocking of things previously enjoyed.
Digital health devices have the potential both of a push top down by government and a bottom up pull from consumers. In Europe we see a push of regulatory tracking and restriction, particularly around food, with the public’s health goals in heart and mind. This has started a conversation of how fast and far the intent to make us act like better human beings (even to ourselves) will spread globally. The vaccines are a prime example of the rejection to conform to ‘good will’ advice, as much as cigarette taxes were to common sense around the consequences of bad behavior. If a person downloads an app to track their eating, in a bid to, for example, reduce sugar intake, the results will be more effective than a TV ad telling them to cut sugar out. Right? Maybe, at least for a little while. If the predictability of human behaviour tells us anything it’s that behavior is unpredictable, but it’s driven by consistent human needs. And those needs are contradictory; we often know what we need to do and want what is counter to that. The most successful ideas will be ones that can leverage that contradiction.
As with most health-aids the aim is to make people more aware of themselves and how those contradictions play out, not to force-change behavior. So as Apple invests in the health and wellness industry, and perhaps ventures further into consumer goods, they may need their winning strategy of iterative innovation as much as they’ll need luck.
