Branching into app development and marketing has come with its own unique challenges though.

“We’re not known for software. Our brand is powerful and well respected, but frankly we’re not a software company,” says Panasonic NA President of Health and Wellness solutions Steve Safier.

Safier says the difficulty is compounded by the nature of the app itself, which requires them to market to whole families in order to get multiple users to sign up for the subscription service.

Another part of the challenge is that they’ve created a new market. Safier notes their initial marketing efforts revolved around the features of their product, but they quickly found that emotional messages resonated better with their target audience. For example, HomeTeam’s Halloween campaign urges families to “make reading less scary” by signing up for the service.

He adds that an effective branch of their marketing has revolved around social influencers, whose large followings can help generate conversions in a way that banner ads can’t.

Selling a product isn’t the only thing that Safier is thinking about though, despite the fact that Panasonic is a profit-driven company. He says that he wants to start “positioning advocacy as a new strategy for marketing,” and supporting the senior community.

A key element of wellness, in later years especially, is social engagement, Safier says. Even if someone has a perfectly fine social life, families are often separated by physical distance.

In their initial talks with seniors, Safier says his team’s original thinking was to provide a service that would help protect seniors, like a life-alert button, but what seniors said they wanted were products and services that helped them enjoy life more.

Those conversations lead them to the idea behind HomeTeam.

According to AARP.org, the average age of a first-time grandparent is 47, a surprisingly low number. That same survey, which was conducted in 2012, says that more than 80% of grandparents report speaking to their grandchildren on the phone at least once a month and more than a third communicate through new technologies, such as e-mail, Skype and text messaging.