My criticisms of fashion watch brands are well documented on my YouTube channel. I’ve more than vented my frustrations about some of the terrible quality watches that are being rammed down our throats.

I think a lot of fashion brands absolutely deserve their condemnation, however, today I thought I’d drop the negativity and take a different approach to the subject. There are several simple things that these startup brands are doing that are giving them a leg up on some of the traditional, heritage brands; especially when it comes to finding and attracting new customers.

I think the likes of Seiko, Casio, Orient and so on need to take these approaches on board if they really want to capture that next generation of watch buyers; because right now these cheap fashion brands are eating their lunch, even with rubbish products a lot of the time. These heritage brands have the products and infrastructure but are choking due to complacency.

I’ve identified three main components of this. Marketing, web design and products. Let’s discuss them

Marketing

One of the areas where these fashion brands excel is definitely marketing. In fact, I’d say some of these company’s are marketers first and watch retailers second. A quick look at the followership of their social media accounts is evidence enough. So, what are they doing that these heritage brands aren’t?

Influencer Marketing

Firstly, they are getting their watches into the hands of social media personalities. I’d be willing to bet that you first heard about brands like Daniel Wellington or Vincero through someone online, whether it be your favourite YouTuber, podcaster or celebrity. This is what’s known as influencer marketing.

A lot of the time, especially with smaller content creators, these brands can essentially get free advertising. They just ship the creator a watch that costs the brand virtually nothing to make and will usually get a video featuring their watch in return.

Because they are overwhelmed by the possibility of getting a product for free, they often give the watch a ringing endorsement by default, without even thinking about it. This isn’t always the case, but from my experience, it usually is. Each time, this can result in hundreds, if not thousands of people watching someone endorse their brand on social media, for virtually no cost to the brand.

When it comes to bigger, more influential figures, these brands also aren’t afraid to sponsor their posts fairly regularly; to repeatedly expose their target audience to their brand and to establish an association to success and successful people.

Unfortunately, heritage watch brands simply aren’t doing any influencer marketing whatsoever – outside of major celebrity endorsements. While I’m bombarded with watch review requests from fashion brands and startups, the likes of Seiko, Tissot and Citizen and others are nowhere to be seen.

They only focus on the likes of sports stars and Hollywood celebrities – which sounds good on paper but comes with some downsides. The main one being that I just don’t think the average person finds those people relatable whatsoever. There’s no real way I can relate to someone living in a 300 million pound Beverly Hills mansion, sipping cocktails brought to them by their waiter.

Fashion brands have realised that you can make a more impactful connection with ‘success’ by getting in with these large social media personalities. Their viewers all know these people are successful, however, they still feel somewhat of a personal connection to them, compared to run of the mill celebrities. Most of the time the audience can relate to the creator in some capacity – giving their recommendations more weight and trust. This is especially true when you have a creator who has been on their chosen platform for several years, with their subscribership following their journey. You don’t get that personal connection to a music star for example.

When it comes to social media, currently these older brands are relying on individuals to go out, buy one of their watches and then enjoy it so much that they feel the need to create promotional content in their own time, for absolutely nothing in return. Unless you have a wristwatch channel like mine and have something to gain, like affiliate income, there’s literally no reason to do that. I guess maybe they are relying on the old ‘let the product speak for itself’ motto, but that just doesn’t work well in this new digital world. Especially when your products don’t even look nice.

Great product shots

A common trait of successful fashion brands is outstanding product photography. A quick skim through their websites and socials reveals an array of beautiful looking images, that make their products look phenomenal; to the extent where they often look better online than they do in person. These are high-resolution images, edited to perfection and clearly showcasing what every single product looks like. If you’re looking to quickly grab an image of any of these watches, there are plenty choose from.

Unfortunately, the majority of heritage brands absolutely suck in this regard. Outside of the occasional, flagship watch release, there is almost no effort put into most of their product images. If I’m after a stock image of a random Casio or Seiko for a thumbnail, I’ll struggle to find a square-on image. You often literally cannot find a fully frontal photo of many of their watches – how crazy is that? In addition to this, a lot of the time, the few photos that do exist are often terrible quality and not even representative of the real-life product.

There are so many images where the white balance is completely off, meaning the colours are inaccurate; for example, silver’s start looking yellow or green and watch dials that aren’t even close to their real colour. This is outright misleading for consumers and very frustrating when you receive a watch that you weren’t expecting. It’s also lazy on the part of these big companies, who could easily afford to provide decent images of all of their products, yet don’t.

Selling the specifications

Another interesting point of comparison is the sales technique. Whilst many fashion watches have poor specifications for the retail price, the brands producing them still actually manage to ‘sell’ the specifications to their customers. They do basic things like describing the features and benefits of each part of the watch to the consumers. This is helpful when it comes to educating wristwatch newbies and also makes their products sound feature-rich.

Unbelievably, aside from their flagship models, loads of the traditional watch brands aren’t doing this whatsoever. Often they don’t even list important specifications such as the type of movement inside and they rarely ever point out any benefits for the customer.

It feels like they’re selling to people who are already interested in watches and know all the ins and outs. This might work fine for luxury brands, who really aren’t targeting newbies to the hobby. However, for more affordable watch brands, this makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s like they’re not even using basic sales tactics or even attempting to create a sense of desire for their watches.

Sense of community

One of the reasons these brands appeal to the masses is that they are able to craft a sense of community through their marketing messages. It’s tricky to pin down exactly how they manage to do this but I’ve noticed a couple of things.

Firstly, their marketing images actually include people wearing their watches. Admittedly, they’re consistently featuring those who you’d consider ‘conventionally attractive’, but most of them aren’t what you’d call celebrities. They also use a lot of user-generated images provided by their followers. These images show you how you could look in their watches.

A quick look at Seiko’s Instagram reveals the opposite. The only person really wearing the watches is world-famous tennis star Novak Djokovic. On their website, it’s a similar story, just more celebrities. In fact, they still have outdated advertising for last years Baselworld on the front page!

When you include other factors like the lavish launch events, with their exclusive parties and celebrity crowd, it feels like they send a clear message. We don’t want average people. These fancy watches are for the rich, for the celebrities and are unattainable for most of you. I think it’s one of the reasons that so many regular non-watch people that I speak to consistently think brands like Seiko are out of their price range; they never even consider them an option in the first place, they have this impression that Seiko isn’t meant for them and that they must be too expensive. This is compounded by the fact that many of these heritage brands completely forego advertising most of their existing models; only seeming to market their newest or most expensive pieces.

The opposite is the case with these fashion brands. Everything they do compels the customer to ‘join us’ and become a part of their community. Regardless of who you are, these watches are going to make you better. They’re gonna help you climb mountains, go base-jumping or excel in your area of expertise. They also continually advertise a variety of their existing watches, at a range of price points, to appeal to as many people as possible. I’ve also seen them utilising the ‘us vs them’ mentality, encouraging prospective buyers to join them and their cause in their supposed mission against mainstream society and traditional retailers.

Website

Lots of fashion watch brands have gorgeous, functional websites, that really help them to generate more interest and sales. Not only are they attractive to look at, but they’re usually easy to navigate and you can easily find the watch you want. They often fit the ‘image’ the brand is trying to portray.

The opposite can be said when it comes to many heritage brands. Their websites are dated and cluttered. They’re often difficult to navigate and don’t work well on mobile, which makes it tricky to find a specific watch. Then if you do finally find the watch, you can’t even buy it on their website!

Quick and efficient

These fashion brands usually offer fast delivery and purchases straight through their site. There are no third party sites you need to go through and your watch will usually be with you before you can change your mind. This also means they are easily able to adjust prices on the fly and offer sales incentives whenever they want to.

Loads of these traditional brands don’t sell directly to the consumer, meaning margins are affected by watch dealers and physical retail stores. It’s just less clean and simple compared to buying directly from the manufacturer; customers often find themselves surfing between different sites to try and find the best place to buy. It reduces the chances of an impulse purchase.

Customer Service

Another area where fashion brands shine is customer service. Outside of the easy checkout and delivery process; they also are readily available to answer consumer questions through chat applications on their websites or through their social media channels, especially on Twitter. They often have a very consumer-friendly returns policy and make it smooth sailing for those not happy with their product.

Unfortunately, due to the fragmented sales method used by many traditional watch brands, this often isn’t the case and customer service quality seems to vary from brand to brand. In fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to get in touch with some brands at all.

Products

One of the simplest ways these fashion brands are taking off is their designs that are resonating with their young target demographic. Lots of these companies are producing a wide array of designs featuring a variety of straps, colours, styles and sizes; including many slim watches, which are particularly popular.

To me, it just feels like heritage brands aren’t doing well in this regard. Many of the big players have a plethora of samey-looking designs that fail to capture the imagination of youngsters.

Availability and Marketing

Furthermore, these fashion brands identify their most popular and successful watches and continue to make them available for years to come. Let’s say you stumble upon a YouTube video promoting an MVMT watch; I bet you that watch is still available to this day on their website.

Unfortunately, especially when it comes to low-cost pieces, many big brands just discontinue highly-popular models out of the blue. I’ve noticed this on a few occasions recently. I made a video about a Casio fashion watch that blew up, got over 100,000 views and the watch ended up selling out on Amazon within hours of the video being published. Then, weeks later, people were having trouble finding it, because Casio randomly discontinued it. So now, that video that was driving Casio purchases is made completely irrelevant. I also remember the Seiko SNKL23. That watch got a ton of coverage online, Seiko was undoubtedly shifting a huge amount of them; then they discontinued it. The articles and videos promoting this watch as a great buy were immediately made obsolete. The same happened with the Seiko SKX to an extent. You may think that these brands could capitalise on this by using the ‘scarcity’ marketing tactics, to sell even more; however, they are even screwing this up.

Many of these fashion brands are utilising these ‘limited edition’ scarcity strategies to sell more watches in a shorter space of time. Importantly, the potential customer is immediately made aware that these items are in fact ‘limited edition’ and soon will no longer be available; thus giving them the motivation to act now, before it is too late.

Unfortunately, with many heritage brands, the watches just seep away with a whimper and potential customers only have the rumour mill to go off. They almost never make official announcements and people are left speculating, which is crazy! One brand I think have managed to adapt well in this regard is Timex. Their recent Timex Q watches proved to be extremely popular and they are more frequently releasing these limited-time models as a result. Unfortunately, this is an outlier and not the overall trend for historical watch brands.

Sharp Focus

In addition, I think another factor that potentially results in these discontinuations is the sheer number of different watches produced. Smaller fashion brands tend to focus on a relatively small number of pieces that they can effectively promote, each having their own unique look, name and identity. Once you’ve viewed one of these watches, the brand will also utilise retargeting advertisements, which seemingly follow you around the internet. This ensures you see that watch repeatedly until you eventually purchase.

Many traditional brands seem to take a completely different approach. They pump out hundreds of different models, most of which have absolutely no marketing effort behind them whatsoever.

Typically it’s left up to the dealers themselves to do the advertising for these pieces, which often results in only the top of the line or most popular watches being marketed; with other standard models left sitting on the sidelines. This is evident from the sheer amount of people who comment on certain videos of mine saying they’ve never seen or heard of the featured watch.

The Seiko 5 range is a perfect example of this. There are undoubtedly some great watches in that huge catalogue of timepieces, however, I rarely see them advertised anywhere. There are so many options they don’t even have proper names, just codes that are hard to remember and identify with. It’s no surprise to me that so many great watches have flown under the radar and been discontinued as a result of this non-existent marketing.