Are Women looking for a Safety Watch?

Wearable Technology (WT) is on the rise, with sales expected to reach upwards of USD 100 Billion by 2018.(1) Smart watches are at the forefront of this growth, and projected to account for 70% of total wearable device shipments by 2019.

The smart phone has been a true revolution of our age. It has not only killed the point and shoot camera market, it is busy substituting every other gadget for almost every other function that we need in our lives. So in the midst of this smart phone revolution is there place for other gadgets that people use like watches and cameras to innovate? There perhaps is, if the gadget talks to your smart phone. But in most cases the smart phone app creator has almost thought of everything possible. On a recent trip to Kumaon we were discussing how far we may be from Nanda Devi which we could see from our resort room with the naked eye. My friend just pulled out her smart phone, pointed it at the peak to tell us that we were exactly 97 kms as the crow flies from Nanda Devi. Not only that, she could point her smart phone to any peak, to know the height of the peak and the distance we were from it.

So in an age where the smart phone has taken over our lives, is there place for wearable technology to do a function already usurped by the smart phone? Interesting question. Titan recently introduced a safety watch for women called ACT under their Sonata range. The watch has a button which if double pressed will send distress alarms to a pre-inserted guardian list. An app that supports the programming of the watch enables the user to customise as per need. Priced between Rs 2,749 to Rs 2,999 the watch is available in three variants making it quite affordable for the average Indian woman.

The launch commercial for Titan is quite 'simple and hardworking', another phrase for not particularly creative. It portrays two women athletes late at night leaving for a national selection. They have an older couple for company and the commercial is a conversation between the two. The functional product story is then told by the women athletes.

According to Titan, most attackers would be inclined to grab the phone first from a woman before anything else, because they know that the phone could have safety apps, and therefore the watch would be something they wouldn't think of. Of course we have to assume that attackers are not watching the advertisement for Titan's Sonata Act watches and that they don't know that now the Titan watch is also their enemy.

In most security categories, its a cat and mouse game because over time, thieves, attackers, car hijackers and housebreakers wise up to the security features and find a way to disable them. In South Africa for example, cars over a certain price were forced to have satellite trackers placed in their boots to enable the car owner to get insurance. But car thieves got wise to the tracker very quickly and often their first point of entry happened to be the boot to get to the trackers quickly as possible to disable them.

So do women really need a watch in addition to a phone app that would do the same thing, is an interesting question and would determine the success of the new Titan watch. Titan says that every woman they met wanted a watch like this. And there in lies the paradox of what consumers really want.

“If you don’t listen to your customers you will fail. But if you only listen to your customers you will also fail.” – Amazon slogan

In the Four Lenses of Innovation Rowan Gibson reminds us "However, innovating from the customer backward doesn’t just mean ‘listening to the voice of the customer.’ Of course it can be helpful to conduct market research, get customers to fill questionnaires, or run focus-group sessions. But merely asking customers what they want or need doesn’t always yield the most inspiring or unique customer insights."

As Henry Ford is known to have said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’  

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