'Vision' in Product Marketing

I touched a nerve last week on Twitter when I tweeted that the new Apple AR/VR headset from Apple, the ‘Vision Pro’, looks a bit lonely. Fair to say quite a few people took offense to this, with commenters pointing out that we’re usually glued to our phones and laptops etc, in a similar way.

The future of computing

The point I intended to make here wasn’t to do with the product itself. There’s many better takes on that from the usual sources e.g. Stratchery, MKBHD, Daring Fireball and so-on. No, what I was trying to suggest was that this was a rare failure of Apple marketing. Some other folks picked this up, notably Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman (but not many which was surprising).

Apple Vision Pro is supposed to be the future of computing, and to reverse our screen addiction while at the same time opening new worlds. The foundation of this so called ‘spatial computing’ is the ability to mix alternative and virtual reality (AR/VR). They claim they’ll do this with Vision OS aka software - and Vision Pro headset aka the hardware.

That’s all very well, and most normal people couldn’t give a crap about the ‘speeds and feeds’. What people want to see from companies, especially technology ones, is a vision of how the product will fit into their lives. And that’s where Apple failed here; every single use case from the launch was someone using it alone. What kind of future is that? At least with our current devices, you can still look up across the dinner table occasionally!

Product marketing is how it makes your life better

When you think about the products you use, you usually choose from the perspective of how this thing will make your life better. That’s also where marketers should approach promoting a new product. There’s a marketing term for that, FABE (features and benefits) that they use but beyond the acronym, it’s their job to show people how the product fits in their lives.

The Apple Vision Pro marketing team didn’t do anything wrong on a technical level - every asset was beautifully polished as usual. But what Steve Jobs used to do was to stress test every product by asking product marketers aka the PM’s, to show him how the average person would use the product (as told in Tony Fadell’s book which I reviewed).

Is this Apple Vision Pro story the future that everyone wants? I highly doubt it, and to me, it showed that Apple marketing didn’t really know what to do with this product. This even pushed to the awkward photo with Tim Cook not even using the product!

I could be completely wrong; one day this could be the way people use computers/technology. But products don’t sell themselves, and product marketing is the way you show consumers how their lives will be better. I can’t help but think this is not the isolating future people will want, and while the market will decide, I think Apple really could have done a lot better with their product marketing vision.

What do you think about product marketing and Apple’s job with the Vision Pro? Leave a comment below.