The Brand Age
Facing obsolescence from quartz movements, Japanese competition, and currency shifts, the Swiss watch industry dramatically transformed from precision instrument makers to luxury brand peddlers. This involved prioritizing distinctive, often inconvenient, design and heavy brand advertising over traditional engineering excellence like accuracy and thinness. The article argues this transformation is a perfect case study for "the brand age," where brand becomes paramount as technological advancement.
When you have a market defined only by brand, quality becomes compromised while the product requires constraints that depend on the worst features of human psychology.
The solution is to follow the problem and avoid selling or buying for the brand.
Updated May 4, 2026
From the source
The Brand Age --> March 2026 In the early 1970s, disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time. The first was competition from Japan. The Swiss had been watching the Japanese in the rear view mirror all through the 1960s, and they'd been improving at an alarming rate. But even so the Swiss were surprised in 1968 when the Japanese swept all the top spots for mechanical watches at the Geneva Observatory trials. The Swiss knew what was coming. For years the Japanese had been able to make cheaper watches.