Rolex, Armin Strom, Breitling, Timex, Tag Heuer, you know the names. They're the first brands that come to mind when people think of luxury watches.
It's not just name recognition, though. Surely you've seen NFL pretty boy Tom Brady's most recent Tag Heuer ad, right? He's cocking back a deflated football, scanning the field, reading imaginary coverage while looking for an uninjured, open target. The tag reads: #DontCrackUnderPressure.
The perfect spot for a watch ad, right? Who knows?
What that ad doesn't say is how much it cost to make it.
Not included in that hashtag is #CostRecuperatedInPricingOfTheProduct. Why should it? Why should you care about the price of the ad itself?
Ask yourself whether or not the price of running that ad-- celebrity endorsement or otherwise-- has any influence on the price of the product.
You should question the relationship between how much a company spends on advertising, their gross sales for the year, and the average price for their product, right? Absolutely.
Take Rolex. In 2013 they spent $61.48 million on advertising in the U.S., becoming the first watch brand to ever spend more than $60 million in a single year. Gross sales that year? For them, it was a record-breaking, "fairly accurate" estimate of $5.1 billion.
brathwaitwatches Today we launched a brand new Brathwait. To celebrate we did not rent a Manhattan building, spend USD 100,000 on wallpaint and make you pay for it with artificially high prices. However, this is what it would look like - luxury is not created by billboards #brathwait #fairretailing
But what Brathwait did earlier this year is quite possibly the absolute best troll move we've ever seen.
They photoshopped over an existing ad from another brand, and in typical, always-transparent, Brathwait fashion, told you exactly what they did-- rather, what they didn't do.
What they didn't do was rent a Manhattan building, spend $100,000 on wall paint, and then transfer that cost to you with an artificially-inflated price and product.
Something else they didn't do?
They don't inflate their prices to account for an already inflated resale value because they're not concerned with a secondhand value that isn't guaranteed. They don't do secondhand, or retailers. They don't trifle with a middleman of any kind.
There's nothing dubious about them. Brathwait tells you exactly where they get the pieces, what it cost to get them, and that their greatest value (other than using the exact same high-quality materials as other luxury brands) is getting them directly to you.
Luxury is not created by a billboard, and it should only be measured by the quality of the pieces used to make it, not the spaces used to promote it.
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[Feature Image Courtesy Instagram]