This article is based on Chris Smellie’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in New York. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

Hi, there! My name's Chris, and I'm here to share how we brought Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to market and built an authentic point of view for our audience. 

So you understand what I’m talking about, let me tell you a little about this amazing product. 

Ray-ban Meta smart glasses

The glasses have a built-in 12-megapixel camera that allows you to take photos and videos. They also have a custom speaker so you can listen to music or take calls, and five microphones so you can record high-quality audio. Plus, they have built-in Meta AI, so you can ask the glasses any question that springs to mind. 

When we want to capture important moments, many of us are used to taking our phones out of our pockets, and seeing the world through the screen – you don’t have to do that when you have a camera on your face! So, part of the product promise is that you can stay in the moment and still capture it. 

All these features prompted us to think about the launch a little differently. 

How we built an authentic point of view

Throughout my career, I've worked on a ton of hardware products – laptops, other pairs of glasses, you name it – and there's a kind of playbook for launching hardware. You present it at the Consumer Electronics Show, you talk about tech specs, you put it in a Best Buy, and you ship. 

This was a little different. These smart glasses present a whole new paradigm that people aren't used to, so we had to educate our audience. We also faced the challenge of how to make people see the value of sharing their unique points of view through our product.

So, how did we tackle these challenges? In classic product marketing style, let’s break it down into three steps:

  1. Dogfooding
  2. Identifying intenders
  3. Collaborating with influencers and creators

Step one: Dogfooding

Dogfooding is super important at Meta. We do it all the time across all our lines of business – and these smart glasses were no exception.

We wanted to put these glasses into real people’s hands (well, on their faces) and let them test their capabilities. More importantly, we wanted to understand how people would actually use them.

So, we handed out smart glasses to thousands of Meta employees, who used them to film everything from playing the piano and petting their dogs, to skydiving and fishing.

Not only did they create tons of awesome videos (which we shared at our launch event), but in the process, they tested the product’s battery, reliability, speakers, and all that wonderful stuff.