Learnings from luxury watchmaking industry

In Others by Sébastien FluryLeave a Comment

Earlier this month, I’ve attended the 16th “Journée Internationale du Marketing Horloger” in La Chaux-de-Fonds (you know, the other watch capital alongside Biel/Bienne).

This year’s theme was about experiential marketing, which can be defined as a concept that integrates elements of emotions, logic, and general thought processes to connect with the consumer.. Which industry could more qualified as one which sell so expensive products?

A program mixed between presentations from research institutes and industry experts gave the non-geeky audience (yeah, this time, no more than 3-4% of the audience had a Macbook on his knees!) some insights about the topic.

Independent of how much efforts the brands put in the experiential marketing strategies, people always stay master of their experience. An interesting formula was presented: a lived experience is the result of People x Object x Situation. What is to learn there is that a single negative point destroys the entire experience. Seems obvious?

The vice-president of international sales at Omega watches shared the definition of the luxury, viewed by his brand:

“When emotion goes past the reason”

Brands are more and more aware of what online media can bring them, but the watchmaking industry generally doesn’t invest more as 3-4% of its marketing budget  online. Even if “we live in a new world”, the success always comes from clever use of basic principles. Marketing and selling is an art and even if social media can transform the way it works, that’s not because the tools are new that you don’t have to be rational… to make people irrational and buy expensive watches!

What most watch brands currently do is to unify all distribution channels (off- and online) to keep the image around a brand, more than innovating or really investing in new social media.

Marco Gabella, co-founder of the information and community portal Watchonista, gave an excellent talk about the evolution of web community networks and experiential marketing. He explained that people are favoring immediate actions (rather than content contributions) and interact more and more between individuals around a brand (rather than with the brand). He advised that brands have to be present on every social network (at least to avoid a misuse of the brand name) and to provide specific and original content related to each channel. Brands cannot really master the external content published, but can influence it by their interaction with the communities.

Marco’s opinion is that brand can manage their own (but open) community by:

  1. offering experiences without agressively collecting data;
  2. favoring independent initiatives;
  3. widening  brand communities to passionate (not only owners) and external contributors;
  4. encouraging spontaneity in brand communities to generate conviviality;
  5. reinforcing community cement by real-life meetings.

In conclusion, my impression is that Swiss watch brands have understood that they will have to invest in social media. But most doesn’t know exactly how to implement it, now. You cannot blame them, as the majority of brands have been constructed slowly during decades to reach their current strong brand DNA. Social media open a new risk which potentially can damage their offline efforts. Luxury brands could enter these new distribution channels… with huge means! Currently, a brand like Omega doesn’t invest much online, as they would have to be able to react at every request in less than 1hour, worldwide (that is, 24h/7 in more than 150 languages!).

So either you invest massively, or not. And margins are still so high in luxury watchmaking industry that brands aren’t urged to act… unfortunately! I’ve made a little dream after learning these insights: imagine that every top Swiss watch brand invest in social media and would recruit the dedicated experts… It would fuel Switzerland with hundreds (no, thousands!) of social media professionals. And such brands have deep enough pockets to recruit rockstars from around the world and bring them back to Switzerland… Can you imagine what it would mean for startups?