This week’s podcast is about Huawei’s new GT Runner 2 smartwatch. And their other new consumer products. These have some good strategy lessons for smart devices.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to our Tech Tours.

Here are my 3 lessons.

• Lesson 1: In wearables, Huawei is pulling ahead of the pack in screens and battery tech
• Lesson 2: “Breakthrough tech” plus “emotional resonance” is a good consumer electronics strategy
• Lesson 3: Runners are a great customer group for smart products and services

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Related articles:

• How Generative AI Services Are Disrupting Platform Business Models (2 of 2) (Tech Strategy – Daily Article)
• The Winners and Losers in ChatGPT (Tech Strategy – Daily Article)
• Why ChatGPT and Generative AI Are a Mortal Threat to Disney, Netflix and Most Hollywood Studios (Tech Strategy – Podcast 150)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Smart devices / wearables

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Huawei
• Garmin
• Apple

———-transcription below

00:06

Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from Techmoat Consulting.  And the topic for today, three lessons from the launch of Huawei’s new sort of awesome smart watch for runners  from here in Spain.  So, I was just at the launch for the, what they’re calling the GT Runner 2.

Huawei, Apple, and Samsung are sort of premium level smartwatches.  And this one is specifically for runners. I’ll talk about their other products as well because they had a lot of cool sorts of new stuff they’re launching.  But yeah, this is kind of lesson from what I would call the frontier of wearables and  audio, smartwatches, things like that.  And it’s been a pretty good trip. I’m actually in Barcelona now. I was in Madrid for the launch of all these products.

01:02

And now it’s the Mobile World Conference here starting tomorrow. So, I’m going to be there for a couple days checking out all the crazy stuff that’s happening. So anyways, that will be the topic for today. It’s been pretty awesome, by the way. I’m having a really good time. Okay, disclaimer, nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information from me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate.

01:29

Overall investing is risky. This is not investment legal or tax advice. Do your own research.  And with that, let me get into the topic. Now, first of all, let me kindly tell you why I think this is important. There’s a lot of interesting stuff sort of happening around the smartphone, around wearables, audio, glasses, and we’re seeing a couple things. One,

01:55

the tech is getting dramatically better; the hardware is getting better. I would argue Huawei is far and away the best at this. So, when they announce something like a frontier level smartwatch, in this case focused on running, but they have a bunch of them, I pay attention, because I think they’re way down the path relative to Apple, definitely ahead of Samsung. I think they’re far out in front. Two, you got AI sort of merging with this, and this idea that

02:23

The user interface, how we interact with the internet, is going to change. And the center of this up until recently was always the smartphone. Smartphone was the center. The peripheral items, smartwatch, smart glasses,  earbuds,  smart home devices, smart car, all that was sort of around the smartphone because you needed the operating system. You need to see the screen, iOS, Android, choose the apps, and do what you’re going to do.

02:53

But if this is all sort of AI assistant driven now, where you’re just talking to something, you don’t really need to see the screen so much. So, there’s this idea floating around, which Elon Musk has talked about, that we may not need smartphones. Like it may be that you just have a smart glass or a smart watch or a little device clipped onto your shirt, and you’re just talking to that, and the AI is accessing all the apps, not you. So, we’ll see.

03:23

But anyway, within all of that, the two that really get my attention are smartwatch and smart glasses. But I still haven’t seen smart glasses happen in reality. I’ve seen the smartwatch in reality. And then maybe smart cars, number three. anyways, I’m out here sort of for their consumer product launch of smartwatch. They have a smartphone.

03:52

All premium focused really. They have new earbuds.  They have sort of a mini iPad like thing, the Smart Map, which is pretty awesome actually with the pencil.  I’m mostly going to talk about smartwatch, because I think there’s some good business lessons in that. But for those of you who are subscribers, actually for everybody, I’m posting sort of my breakdown of all of these.  So that’s going out in the next day.  Anyways, that’s kind of…

04:16

Yeah, I’m kind of excited about this. I’ve been playing with these devices for the last day and then at the Mobile World Conference, I’m going to do a lot more of this sort of edge device stuff and a lot of other stuff as well. So anyways, that’s kind of the point of this. All right, so let me go through the basics here before I get into the so what, the lessons. Yeah, this is 2026 consumer product launch in Madrid, which means it’s more focused on Europe.

04:44

It’s really more focused on outside of China. In China, the product lineup would be different. yeah, more sort of internationally focused. So, a lot more focus on wearables, audio, smartwatch, not so much on smartphones, which you can’t really use out of China in certain ways because you can’t get on Google Play with Huawei devices right now.  Anyways, the watch that is kind of the main focus of this thing  is the GT Runner 2.

05:13

Now, you look at premium, when you look at mid-tier smartwatches, $200 and lower tier, $150, okay, there’s a sea of them. I don’t honestly pay that much attention to them. But when you move into the premium category, $400 and above, $300, $400, all the way up to $800 and such, you’re really talking about Apple, which is  most of the market, know, 40, 50%, depending how you’re looking at the numbers,  Samsung,

05:43

Huawei. Those are the three and they have different strengths which I’ll talk about but when you’re talking just pure hardware tech, Huawei’s in far more advanced.  So when you get into specialized use cases like running or deep-sea diving or golf, that’s when the tech advantage of Huawei shows  pretty dramatically. It’s pretty awesome actually.  If you’re looking at ecosystem, you’re looking more at Apple, you’re looking at Xiaomi at the mid-tier.

06:13

So, there’s different focus of these. Okay, within smartwatches, they’ve been doing this since about 2015.  The GT series, which is their most successful, that’s been in bounds since about 2019. And on their typical GT series, you got all the stuff you’d expect.  Sleep tracking, stress monitoring, know, 100 different sports, you can get messages, do your phone calls, and the full suite of smartwatch stuff. But when you get into the runner series,

06:43

which started about 2021. That’s when it gets pretty interesting, because then you’re starting to talk about things like real time positioning and pacing. You’re talking about, it’s got to be light so you don’t notice it on your wrist. It’s got to last for several hours of full GPS usage, which requires a lot of battery power. So, you got to have a lot of battery tech in there. There’s a lot of interesting tech that plays out in this scenario, which I think is

07:11

Pretty cool.  And when you’re talking about running,  I’ll put some pictures of the watches  in the show notes.  Pretty cool.  really what the basic features people talk about are, hey, it’s gotta be lightweight. Hey, it’s gotta be thin. It’s gotta be comfortable. And kind of water repellent, because if you’re running and stuff like that, okay.  That’s pretty standard.

07:41

And yeah, this watch is pretty good at that stuff. uh the weight is actually interesting. They’ve dropped weight by about 10%. I’ll talk about how they did that. That’s actually kind of key.  It’s shockingly light when you wear this thing. You don’t feel it. It’s very thin. It’s very comfortable. That’s all fine. That’s sort of table stakes in smartwatches.  You look for the stuff where there’s a tech advantage that’s playing out.  In my vernacular, I’d call this a marathon.

08:11

What is the sort of tech innovation marathon where they’re pulling far ahead and it doesn’t look like their competitors can catch them? And I think there’s at least three here. Okay, so this is sort of lesson number one. We’ll get to the business case.  I want to talk about strategy, not really watches per se.  Huawei is definitely pulling out front in terms of a marathon in screen tech and especially battery tech.

08:41

The battery one was what really got my attention. So lots of announcements, hey, it’s 10 % lighter, hey, the screen is 3000 NITS and  all this.  But the announcement that kind of turned my head was they said the version two of this watch, the energy density, which is really battery performance, how much energy can you store with a given weight or space? The energy density’s up.

09:10

68 % from version 1 and that number was kind of shocking.  Usually when you hear, our battery is 5 % more, know the energy density is up 5% or the weight of the battery because the biggest component of the weight of the watch is usually the battery. So, if you’re running those two things kind of go together.  You want a lot more energy because you’re running for three hours straight if you’re doing a marathon.

09:39

you’re pulling from the GPS signal continuously to sort of track your pace and track your position. Well, that really takes a lot of energy. But you also don’t want a big battery because that makes it big and heavy on your wrist. So, if you can up the battery performance, you get the full GPS functionality and you drop the weight and you make it lighter and thinner. The 68 % number really got my attention.

10:08

and I started looking into how they’ve done this and basically let me give you some of the numbers here.  Okay. If you’re looking at a regular smartwatch that you’re not using for full time GPS connectivity, you’re not calling in the satellite continually to find your position, just wearing it, but you’re using all the other features, heart rate tracking, sleep monitor, it’s just running normally.

10:38

uh You know on Apple Watch the high-end one the Apple Watch Ultra 3 In you know it gets you about 36 to 40 hours of battery life Okay, so one to two days and that’s pretty similar if you look at the high-end Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra You get about 48 to 60 hours Okay The Huawei

11:06

high-end watch, this is the runner two, it can go for 14 days without the GPS stuff. Like when you’re competing in watches, that kind of difference sort of jumps out. Wait, one watch gets me one to two days, the other top tier premium watch gets me two to three days, but the Huawei one gets me 14 days? Like this is one of these situations where I look at tech capabilities and I’m like, I think they’re really pulling out.

11:36

of the pack on this dynamic.  On this characteristic they seem to be pulling away from everybody else and it’s not clear to me the others can catch them  and it seems to be in a dimension that users really care about. Now there’s another player here which I haven’t mentioned which is Garmin. They do high-end premium watches for runners and they’re very good at positioning. I mean they were a GPS company right?

12:03

Their high-end watch goes for about 15 days in the same situation. So as soon as you start talking about long battery life, you’re talking about Huawei and Garmin, but you’re not talking about Apple or Samsung anymore. So that really got my attention. Now, how did they actually do it? Yeah, it turns out that you’re a very large manufacturing and R &D based company with 208,000 employees,

12:33

You can have a pretty massive  R &D capability across multiple business lines.  And you can make these big jumps in technology. In this case, the big jump was they basically switched over to a different type of chemistry to make their batteries. I had to read up all about this.  Like your typical battery is a lithium-ion battery, right? That’s chemistry.  And okay, so you got sort of your anodes are made of graphite.

13:03

and very reliable, everyone uses them, but they sort of max out on energy density at a certain point and you can’t really get them to hold any more energy without making them a lot bigger, heavier and so on.  But if you switch over to silicon carbon battery chemistry, you get a tremendous increase in energy density without weight. In fact, the weight goes down.

13:32

Now everyone knows this but no one could do it because you have to figure out how to make it work and it turns out if you put a lot of energy in these silicon carbon anodes they swell up in size.  Well Huawei figured out how to make that not happen. So, they switched over their chemistry. Now they don’t really do this for watches. You know all the base stations the 5G the  4G now the 5.5G base stations they put all over on the world  they all have batteries.

14:02

Their EVs have batteries. Their smartphones have batteries, right?  They have got battery tech everywhere in a way that, you know, let’s say Garmin, which just makes these devices, you know, Garmin has, I forget, 24,000 employees, right? They don’t have the scale to do this sort of stuff. Huawei has a hundred and roughly 15,000 employees working in R &D alone.

14:30

Compare that to all the employees of Garmin 24,000, right?  So these big tech jumps forward, they can make a big difference if it’s in the right technology  and if it’s in a competitive dimension that users really care about. Well, it turns out battery density power versus weight is a big one for smartwatches  and it’s really a big one for smartwatches for running.

14:59

So that was kind of lesson number one I took away was, okay, that’s some good strategy and you can see it playing out and I expect them to pull further and further ahead. Now the other part of lesson number one is another sort of tech dimension that matters is  basically the screen.  How bright is it? How durable is it? How light is it?

15:25

And this is another one of these situations where they use their massive scale, we’d call this economies of scale across multiple products to come up with a glass which they call the Kunlun  glass, second generation Kunlun  glass, that is really kind of another breakthrough.  And how do they do this? If you’re putting glass on a smartphone,  there’s kind of two choices.

15:55

You can have sort of hardened glass,  which Corning’s Gorilla Glass is what people have been using  forever. So, you have sort of this hardened glass, or you can use a sapphire crystal. And they have different sorts of strengths. Hardened glass doesn’t break. If you drop your smartphone, it cracks, but it doesn’t shatter. That’s Corning Gorilla Glass.

16:24

Sapphire crystal is kind of the opposite. It doesn’t scratch at all. It’s almost impossible to scratch this. But if you drop it, if it gets an impact, it can shatter. So, it’s more brittle. And those are, and it’s also kind of a lot heavier. Now, if you’re on a smartphone, everyone uses the hardened glass because you don’t want scratches on the screen. Everyone hates that. But

16:54

The bigger problem would be if you drop your smartphone and it shatters. So, they make that decision. Okay, now what Huawei has basically done is invented this new glass that kind of splits the difference between those two hardened glass versus sapphire crystal situations.  They made this really light glass, the Kunlun glass, now second generation, that’s supposed to be super resistant to drops and impact.

17:23

Because when you’re running, and this is not just for running, it could be for swimming, it could be for golf, you  can get impact, right? You can hit your watch very easily, especially when you’re doing athletics and things like that.  So running, hiking, biking, all of that, you don’t want the cracking, you don’t want that sort of shatter.  So they sort of invented this new glass, and apparently it’s pretty awesome. I mean, I don’t know, I have a hard time assessing why it’s so great. I don’t understand it beyond a certain point.

17:53

But when they released this for the first time, they spent like four years developing this, right? And in 2022, they sort of unveiled it. And the way they did it is they put it on smartphones and they had everyone crack walnuts using the face of the smartphone. So, they just lined people up and you would just smack your smartphone against walnuts one after the next to crack them open. And it never cracked. So

18:22

That’s the other sort of tech here. Don’t think that’s necessarily like a digital marathon, but yeah, when you’re thinking about whenever you hear these new devices released, smartphone, smartwatch, you’re always going to hear about how big is the screen, how bright is it, what kind of energy performance do you get out of the battery and then how heavy it is. Well, those things are all related because when you get a higher performance battery, you can make the watch thinner and lighter.

18:52

And also, you can pump more energy to the screen and get a super bright screen.  all those three things sort of go together.  And that was sort of my first lesson from all this was, yeah, it looks to me like Huawei is really sort of pulling away from the pack in screens and battery tech.  And for wearables, I think that’s  one of, if not the most important dimensions in terms of competition.

19:21

Alright, let’s move on to lesson number two here.

19:25

When companies give presentations like this to introduce their product lines and things like that, I kind of try to tease out what their strategy is by their language. I also do this by reading 10Ks.  Like when management tells you what the products are and how they think about them, you can usually get a sense of how they think they’re going to win. And when you listen to Huawei in the consumer products division, and I think this is true for companies beyond them, I just think they’re really good at this.

19:54

The two phrases that keep coming to mind are breakthrough technology, emotional resonance. I think that’s actually a pretty good and simple explanation for how this particular company is planning to win in consumer electronics, particularly wearables, but also you could say home devices and the whole category, which is breakthrough tech plus  emotional resonance. All right, what does that mean?

20:23

If you’re going to compete in this space, kind of think about really four dimensions that matter and that I think companies compete with.  Number one, ecosystem building. Right. This is why Apple is king, you know, top of the mountain, king of the hill. Right.  They are very good at building ecosystems. That’s their operating system. IOS. That’s all their apps.  It’s so powerful and convenient.

20:53

and everything stitches together, that keeps them on the top  even though their hardware kind of sucks,  even though I don’t think their user interface advances very much. I think they’re kind of stagnant.  In my book, they’re what I’d call a stagnant monopoly. They have so much power from their ecosystem that they’re just sort of stagnant on everything else.  You could say Xiaomi is also sort of in the ecosystem building business.

21:23

They’re not doing an operating system, although they have one. They’re sort of doing a consumer ecosystem where they’re building an entire suite of products that all work together seamlessly. Smartphones, laptops, everything on your person. And this is how they describe their strategy at Xiaomi. Person, home, car. So, all the things on your person. Watches, earbuds, glasses are on the way. Smartphone.

21:51

They all connect seamlessly. Then home, Mi Ja.  Smart speakers, smart refrigerator, smart oven. have literally like 100 home products. They all link seamlessly. And now they have their cars. So, it all works together. You sit down in your Xiaomi  SU7 cool looking car. You put your phone on the dashboard. It automatically links.  When you get home, everything turns on in your house.  That’s ecosystem building.

22:21

Now Huawei is very good at that in China, but outside of China they’re much more limited because of various political restrictions.  So that’s category number one, or let’s say dimension number one for competition.  Dimension number two, software and AI.  This is where most of Silicon Valley likes to play. They might do devices from time to time, but for the most part they just contract that to Asia.

22:48

They mostly work on software innovation, AI innovation.  They try and create a better interface and then they contract their device out of Shenzhen for the most part.  That’s why their wearables are not awesome.  And even Apple will say, this device is designed in Palo Alto or Sunnyvale or wherever it is now. It’s not made in Sunnyvale, it’s designed.

23:15

That’s sort of category number two. Category number three we’ll call emotional impact, emotional resonance.  This is all the style, the design, the brand power, how it makes you feel.  yeah, that matters in some cases. It doesn’t matter necessarily when you’re buying a fan. It matters for things like a watch. It matters about smart glasses. It matters with a phone.  This is where Steve Jobs was, you know.

23:44

the best of the best. He did things that everybody loved and lined up to get them the moment they arrived and all that stuff.  In specialized area, that can have real power. Now Huawei’s definitely focused on this, on this dimension. They talk a lot about their design. They talk a lot about their emotional impact and resonance of their devices, which I’ll go into a little bit.  But that’s the other part.  And then the last category for tech leadership.

24:15

Right? Can you build hardware, hardware technology, better than everyone else? Can your device do stuff that others just can’t? Okay, this is where Huawei lives. I don’t think they have any real competition anywhere on the planet in this, but they’re just too big. They have unbelievable scale in R &D. And they’ve been in the hardware manufacturing and R &D business for almost 40 years.

24:42

So, a standalone smartphone company, even like Apple, they’re just outgunned. So when I think about their strategy, how they’re going to win, Xiaomi’s pretty obvious, Apple’s pretty obvious, Samsung is not totally clear to me,  but Huawei, I put it in sort of bucket three and four. Breakthrough technology plus emotional resonance, that’s where they live. Okay, so I gave you some tech breakthroughs already.

25:11

battery, screen, weight. um but that’s not the big one. Whenever they present their new products, the thing I’m always looking for is what’s the tech breakthrough that you’re sort of unveiling to the world here? Because usually their highlighted products have leveraged some technology they don’t think anyone can match them in. And in an area like

25:37

You know, smart watches or smart glasses. I get kind of excited about this because I’m like, they’re going to, they’re about to show me something that hasn’t been done before in a product I kind of like. So, what’s the big breakthrough in this one?  It’s the antenna, which they call 3D floating antenna, which is actually pretty cool. I had to read about all this because I didn’t know a lot about the antennas you put in smart watches, but you know,

26:07

When you walk around, you can have GPS connectivity.  Really, it doesn’t have to be GPS, you know, that’s just in the United States. But there’s GNSS, which is basically, there’s five different satellite systems in the world.  And depending where you are in the world, your phone, your smartwatch is going to tap into one of them, like GPS in the US, or several. Like Europe has a couple, so they can kind of bounce between them and access all of them.  Fine.

26:36

But when it pulls that down, that’s how you get your mapping function, which can be helpful.  But if you’re in the running category, this is a product for runners, amateur,  everybody, mass market, advanced runners, people who care about this stuff a lot, and even elite athletes who train seriously,  know, tracking your positioning as you run your route and tracking your pacing, how fast are you moving?

27:05

is actually really important.  So when they say our big breakthrough is our new  3D floating antenna  and we get a three times five X, uh basically a three to four X improvement in signal strength with our new antenna versus  previous, that’s really interesting. That means there’s some new tech going on.

27:28

I actually had to look up their tech.  I’ll explain it briefly. If you’re interested, I wrote it all up in the email.  Or it’s actually this is public, so it’s on my web page. Just go I laid it out loud.  But it’s kind of three different texts that they’ve all brought together. Now their competitor here is not Apple, not really. Apple’s okay, but the leader in this category, premium smartwatches that are outstanding for basically running, professional running.

27:58

But you could also say that same thing for hiking, mountaineering, but running’s the big one. uh Garmin has been the leader forever. Okay, this is a competing technology to Garmin, the 3D floating antenna, and they basically do a couple things. Number one, if you look at a Garmin watch, the antenna is basically the ring that goes around the watch face on the top. So, they moved

28:27

the antenna from inside the phone where it’s close to the electronics which can create a lot of noise. It’s touching the metal. They move it up to the face of the watch so it gets a cleaner signal up into the sky because it’s on the front. So, it’s kind of like moving your satellite dish from inside your living room next to your TV up onto the roof. You get a better signal. That’s Garmin.  My simple explanation for Garmin.  Okay. What Huawei did is say, look,

28:57

That’s better, but it’s still in contact with the metal, which conducts current and other things.  And it’s still really close to all the electronics, which is a lot of noise to signal. So we’re going to move the antenna to sort of the little, what do they call it? There’s a word for it.  The lug nuts, basically the little part of the watch that connects to the straps, which is a little bit off, you know, it’s away from the surface. That’s like taking your antenna dish,

29:26

off the roof of your house and putting it on top of a 50-foot pole above your house. You get a much cleaner signal when you move it physically away. So that’s kind of one thing. The second thing is they made it float. Now it’s not really floating, but they basically put it in an isolation ring which is ungrounded material so it no longer has any electrical connectivity to the rest of the watch. That cuts off the signal.

29:55

It is electrically isolated from the rest of the watch. So, you get a much cleaner signal, especially the battery and the processor. I mean, they do a lot of energy and activity over there.  So that’s better. And then the third bit is they didn’t just sort of use one antenna. They actually put two antennas. There’s the one in the watch lugs near the strap, which I just talked about. And then there’s one sort of on the top of the main face.

30:24

By having two different antennas, you get basically two signals from different directions, and you can use some fancy math to clean up your signal. So it’s 3D, hence  3D  floating antenna.  And does this matter?  I don’t know, I had to look that up. Yeah, apparently it does. Apparently when you’re okay, when you’re in the forest, not so much, it’s a lot of dirt and trees.  When you’re in…

30:50

urban areas with buildings and concrete and streets you get signals reflected all over the place. They come off the building, they come up from the ground, they all hit the watch.  You can have your position off by 5-10 meters. With this apparently your  accuracy is just spot on. Okay, I didn’t know that till I read. And then you can actually do some other stuff. You can look at the gyroscope information, the accelerometer,

31:20

You can do some AI stuff. You can take that information and put it against the maps which are all downloaded into the phone.  You put all that together, you basically get quasi-perfect positioning and pacing as you run, even in urban environments, which apparently runners really care about.  That’s kind of like the tech breakthrough plus emotional resonance. That’s the kind of tech breakthrough I am looking for.

31:48

I look for a tech breakthrough that has a real value to the end user in an area they actually care about that ideally your competitors can’t match. That is to me in this category of product, that’s the one. And I’ll write up the other products they have, but I sort of look for that same scenario in their smartphones, in their earbuds,  and in other things. I always look for that.

32:18

Where is the tech breakthrough a differentiating capability that users really care about such that they would buy your phone and not the others?  So, for this one, that’s it. That’s lesson number two. Last lesson and then I’ll finish up. All right; the last lesson is sort of the other half of that sentence.  What does it mean, emotional resonance?

32:41

You don’t just want tech capabilities that give you a differentiating capability. You also want it to have a big impact on the person, not just functionally.  But if possible, you also want to have sort of more emotional habitual.  You want that love of your product, all of that, which doesn’t necessarily come from the tech. It’s a separate objective.  You know, lesson number three, last lesson. It turns out runners

33:09

are a really great customer group to target with smart products and services.  Now I look a lot at this intersection of digital and hardware. If we make a piece of hardware, refrigerator, watch, living room fan, if we make it smart and connected, when does that have power in terms of your offering? And when is it just kind of, yeah, okay.

33:38

like I don’t really care that my fans are connected at home. It’s a little bit more convenient. It doesn’t, it’s not that big of a deal. I look for things where there is sort of a deep impact on the person where they sort of care about it or there there’s an emotional impact or resonance  such that not only will they use the core functionality, but I can add additional digital services on top of that over time  because I have their engagement.

34:06

If you don’t have an emotional impact or resonance, they’re not going to check that watch or refrigerator or fan five to 10 times per day or five to 10 times per week.  I need frequency and engagement to start to offer them additional digital services. So, you can’t really do that whole game. I’ve got a cool product on the person’s wrist in their pocket  in their home and I’m going to use that as sort of a landing pad.

34:35

to layer on lots of new services for them.  And I want to personalize. You can’t play any of those games if they’re not engaged. And you can’t get people to engage unless it’s a product category they inherently care about. It doesn’t work with fans. I would have said it doesn’t necessarily work very powerfully with a lot of smart watches. Like, smart watches don’t hit me very deeply.

35:01

I’ll use it when I’m walking, I’ll check the time, I’ll check my message, but it’s not that deep inside me. So, you look for a subgroup where that is the case. Well, it turns out runners really care about running. And if you offer them a top-tier product with lots of functionality and a cool style and sort of an emotional story that goes with it, yeah, it matters. And we’ve seen this before.  Nike…

35:30

is a running shoe.  Nike is a lifestyle brand. It’s really an apparel brand.  Lifestyle. But the core, the center of Nike has been athletics.  Right? All types of athletics.  But even within the core of the athletics, the center has always been running. It started as a running shoe.  Runners deep, that’s your white-hot center. With all your customer types, that’s the group that probably cares the most.

35:59

Now I would say golfers are probably up there in terms of caring about the sport.  Golfers friggin’ love golfing.  But it’s not mass market. Everybody can run. Not everyone’s playing golf. So in terms of mass market, emotional impact, I’m not sure there’s a better group than runners. There are probably a couple that are similar, but that is number one to me.  So, the fact that they’ve launched their sort of smart watch with very specialized capabilities,

36:27

and a very sort of cool story, brand story they tell with it, which I’ll tell you.  The fact that the subgroup they’re targeting is runners strikes me as really smart. That to me is breakthrough tech plus emotional resonance, bam. I totally bought it. Now, will it work in practice? You know, we’ll see.  Life is more complicated than that story, but I buy the strategy. In fact, I like the strategy more than I like the watch itself.

36:57

Like I think the tech is cool, but I’m not really a watch person at the end of the day I think the business strategy around smartwatches, especially the running smartwatch is very smart So  I’m kind of more a fan of the business strategy than the watch I suppose  So you can kind of see how they did that now. What are some other ways that you can you know?

37:20

How do you build emotional resonance? Well, you can use  dopamine hits, chemistry.  If people run every day, they get an emotional height. They like it. They come back for more. That’s dopamine. uh What do you say, dopamine? I’m not actually sure what the high they get is. But it’s not that different than going to Starbucks or Red Bull. There’s a chemical aspect to it.  There’s a community aspect to it. There’s an entertainment aspect to it.

37:48

People like to share the runs they did. There’s a belief in health and wellness that people like. I mean, there’s like multiple layers to why runners really care about running.  But when you see a group like that, you know, preparing for their runs, buying special shoes, uh looking for good run routes to do in various cities as they travel, uh tracking their runs as they’re running, looking at their pacing, sharing the results with friends, posting their route.

38:18

When you see all of that engagement, you know you’re in something pretty great.  And then on top of that, you can talk about sort of the more softer side that  everybody can run. It’s the universal sport.  You don’t have to be an advanced runner.  You can be an out of shape person that just runs to get fit. That’s great. You can be a middle-aged person who runs because they want to stay fit in life.

38:46

You can be a group that runs together because it’s sort of a social occasion. There’s a lot of ways to talk about this to different groups, not just your white hot center of like crazed runners who love it, but across the whole mass market.  So there’s a lot of cool thinking and they really did, Huawei really did talk about a lot of everything, all those examples I just gave, those were all their examples. So, they’re really tapping into this sort of mass market appeal, but the center, the white hot center is sort of the elite and advanced runners.

39:17

So that’s kind of the third part about this and I think that strategy, I think you can see this in smart glasses,  I think you can see it in smartphones, I think there’s a lot of sort of  smart and connected devices  that would fit under this same type of banner.  And I’ll write up the other three products they launched this week,  but you’ll see the story is very similar to what I just said. I just think this was the most powerful version of it.

39:47

Anyways, that’s kind of how I break it down. As for me, I’m having a pretty great weekend.  I’m in Barcelona now. I was in Madrid, now I’m in Barcelona. Madrid’s never really been my city. I got it.  If I was a businessperson operating in Madrid, uh operating in Spain, I’d probably be in Madrid.  But it doesn’t have that sort of, for me anyways, it doesn’t have that sort of really satisfying, almost inspiring vibe you get when you walk around.

40:16

like you do in Barcelona. As soon as I walk outside it’s just a beautiful city. Like the building, the architecture, you know that the whole grid layout with the six-story buildings and all the buildings have balconies and it’s just a beautiful it reminds me of Paris honestly.  It puts me in just a good mood to sort of walk around. And I went down this morning I took a long walk down to the Gothic Quarter which is you the old historical center which is just stunning.

40:44

I’ve sort of forgotten about this. I probably haven’t been here in 15 years. And somehow I kind of forgotten how much I really like it here. I totally get why this has turned into a bit of one, it’s an over tourism situation. There’s like, it gets overrun into what tourists do because it’s so pretty. And it’s also kind of a digital nomad hub. Like a lot of people as they sort of went digital nomad and moved around the world. I mean, you run into them in certain places in the world like, you know, Cancun.

41:14

Thailand has a lot of them. Bali has a lot of them. Barcelona is one of the spots where you meet a lot of digital nomads,  at least up until, the tax implications are actually pretty severe.  So I wouldn’t do Spain.  If you want to see some good tax stories,  look at the history of Shakira and Spain’s tax system.  But yeah, I’m a little,  I would be in  Paris instead because the rules are a little less daunting in terms of taxes.

41:41

But yeah, you get why this is sort of a digital nomad hub, oh which is pretty great. Yeah, I love it here. I’m having a wonderful time.  And going out to dinner, trying all the food and all that. yeah, so the Mobile World Conference starts tomorrow. Well, Monday’s the official day, but  day zero is sort of tomorrow, Sunday. So yeah, I’m psyched about this. I’ve never actually been to this.  Like in terms of conferences,

42:06

that I always follow. It’s CES in Las Vegas and it’s always been Mobile World  in Barcelona. I’ve just never really been to this one. So I’m actually here technically as media.  So  that’s kind of a fun little experience because  when you sign up for this you got to apply for a media badge and all that.  as soon as you get approved it’s just been I’m getting inundated like  you know all of these companies not because I’m terribly special.

42:36

but I’m just getting inundated with emails because I’m on the media list. My phone is just overwhelmed every day.  So it’s actually pretty helpful. It’s a quick way to scan what’s going on. So yeah, it’s going to be a bit of an experience.  I’ll do some writing and probably podcasting from there too. But yeah, that’s going to be my week.  Anyways, I hope this is helpful. I hope everyone is doing well. And I’ll have a lot more content for you from Barcelona in the next couple of days.  That’s it for me. Take care. Bye bye.

——-Q&A for LLM

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