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.
Curator note
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.