Since 1920, the Swiss watch industry has spent billions of dollars promoting its products around the world. Formats and tactics have evolved with the times, but one thing is true of the most successful marketing efforts: A commanding vision lies at the heart of them all.
Here are some of the biggies.
1927: Rolex and the Art of Marketing
When it comes to marketing and advertising watches, all roads lead to Rolex. In 1927, Hans Wilsdorf, the Bavarian who co-founded the brand in 1905, arranged for the English swimmer Mercedes Gleitze to cross the English Channel wearing its newest watch, the Oyster, around her neck to draw attention to the model’s pioneering water resistance. (“It’s called the Oyster because its case is as tight as a clam,” ads would later say.)
“This is when watch marketing took on a whole new dimension,” said Aurel Bacs, whose Bacs and Russo consultancy runs the watch department at Phillips. “Until then, a wristwatch was praised as the most elegant, the most precise, maybe the cheapest.”
Rolex didn’t stop there. In May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa mountaineer, became the first people to summit Mount Everest; both were equipped with Rolexes.
The Explorer model the company introduced after the ascent — like its cohorts in the Rolex pantheon: the Datejust, the GMT-Master and the Daytona, to name a few — owes its longevity in large part to the brand’s commitment to advertising.
Nicholas Federowicz, owner of Ad Patina, a Chicago-based vintage watch ad reseller, referred to his 1966 magazine ad for the Explorer Ref. 1016 that he said was among his best sellers. The ad shows a climber’s hand — with a watch-wearing wrist — gripping a rock and has text that reads: “We built the Rolex Explorer because there isn’t any watch repair shop on top of the Matterhorn.”
“Meaning you take this Rolex with you because it’s not going to let you down,” Mr. Federowicz said. “Any other watch you run the risk. But a Rolex you have confidence in.”
1971: Off to the Races
The marriage between timepieces and car racing is one of the pillars of modern watch marketing. Credit goes to Jack Heuer.
In 1971, his namesake brand became the sponsor and official timekeeper of Scuderia Ferrari, the racing division of the luxury Italian automaker. It represented the first time a watchmaker was associated with a Formula 1 team, and the first time a watch brand emblazoned its logo on the body of a racecar.
“Jack Heuer brought a whole new dimension to watches,” Mr. Bacs said. “Having a Formula 1 driver wear one created an aspirational layer we hadn’t seen before.”
It was 17 years before partnerships between watchmakers and their counterparts in the world of fast cars — be they carmakers, racing organizations or drivers — truly began to proliferate. In 1988, Chopard inaugurated its continuing sponsorship of the Mille Miglia, Italy’s beloved 1,000-mile vintage car endurance race. Breitling and Bentley formed a lasting relationship in 2002. Nine years later, Hublot and Ferrari signed a deal that continues to yield wristwatches that look like racing machines.
1980s: The Business School Case Study
In 1981, Jean-Claude Biver, then the head of Omega’s gold division, was so committed to the future of mechanical watchmaking that he paid 22,000 Swiss francs (about $16,000 at the time) for rights to the name Blancpain. That Swiss watch manufacturer, founded in 1735, had fallen on hard times in the 1960s, on the eve of the boom in quartz watches that nearly decimated the Swiss mechanical industry.
Undeterred by those who said mechanical watches were a dying sector, Mr. Biver and his business partner, Jacques Piguet, formed a plan to differentiate Blancpain. The self-described hippies went to the annual watch fair in Basel, Switzerland — sleeping in a Volkswagen van and showering at the railway station — to emphasize what became the brand’s slogan: “Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be.”
Three decades later, Mr. Biver’s success — he sold Blancpain to the Swatch Group in 1992 for $43 million and then went on to rebuild Omega, Hublot and TAG Heuer — would make him the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on how industries reinvent themselves.
“He was one of the first people to articulate the value of art and tradition in a world where everybody around him was looking to adopt the new technology,” said Ryan Raffaelli, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the case study on Mr. Biver.
“A lot of people think the resurgence of the mechanical watch is because of marketing, but it’s so much more,” Mr. Raffaelli said. “How do you bring people back from the ashes and a sense of defeat? It’s about infusing the industry with confidence.”
2000s: The Blog Rises
When Ariel Adams founded aBlogtoWatch in 2007 (initially called aBlogtoRead), only a handful of watch blogs existed, chief among them Fratello Watches, founded in 2004 by Robert-Jan Broer, a hobbyist in the Netherlands.
“The 800-pound gorillas in the digital watch conversation room were the forums such as TimeZone,” Mr. Adams wrote in an email. “These were like closed communities with strict rules of engagement. While they had some very interesting conversations internally, forums then (as they are now) were never particularly accessible to outsiders or the public in general.”
Mr. Adams, a lawyer, wanted to create a space for authentic conversations about watches, including taboo topics like pricing.
Motivated by a similar passion, Benjamin Clymer, a New York-based product manager at UBS, founded Hodinkee in 2008. Three years later, the freelance journalist Jiaxian Su began a personal watch blog, SJX, in Singapore. And in 2014, the longtime watch writer Elizabeth Doerr co-founded Quill & Pad as a hub for fans of independent and highly technical watchmaking.
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that without these five blogs — and the countless fan sites and Instagram accounts that have sprung up, too — the modern watch industry would be nowhere near as diverse, or as exciting.
“The rise of specialist publications, blogs, magazines and social media has forced the Swiss to be more transparent about what they do and why and how they do it,” said James Lamdin, founder of the vintage watch reseller Analog Shift. “As a result, you have stories being told and products being shown, and it’s no longer about hush-hush luxury. It’s about sharing this passion and growing the industry.”
October 13, 2020 at 03:51AM
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