Existential marketing

A lot has been written about the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, but it was just as much a lifestyle product as the iPod (“1,000 songs in your pocket”) or the iPhone (“this changes everything”) had been. Of course, it was Jony Ive and his billionaire friends’ lifestyle, but apart from that… The trio of ads that dropped on launch day was all about time management, health and fitness, and personal connection1. If the Apple Watch is still a lifestyle product, then it’s for a rather hypochondriac one. Recent ads frequently hinge on high-stakes survival. Apple’s strategy has shifted from lifestyle to lifeline. Its most memorable ad features snippets from emergency service calls — a driver trapped in a flipped car, a paddleboarder lost at sea, a farmer stuck in a pit with a broken leg. A few days before, just around Christmas, they’d proclaimed that “the future of health is on your wrist” while sharing the story of a mountain biker who was knocked unconscious in the forest and rescued…