Switzerland had been through hard times before, threatened by the makers of quartz and LED watches in the United States and Japan in the 1970s. But it fought back then, as now, by insisting on authenticity, craftsmanship – and luxury. Piaget placed itself in this niche in the 1950s, when it deliberately set its prices high and strove for innovation. A major turning point was the launch in 1957 of its 9P calibre watch: the slimmest mechanical movement in the world. Particularly appealing to women – who naturally did not want thick cases bulging from their wrists – the design allowed for wafer-thin watches with larger, more extravagantly decorated faces. Piaget began to veer further away from the creation of purely functional timepieces and towards the universe of fine jewellery. The slogan adorning its 1957 catalogue was: ‘Piaget, the watch of the international elite.’
The company’s insistence on watches as jewellery enabled it to weather the crisis of the 1970s rather better than some of its rivals. Instead of resisting the quartz revolution, Piaget embraced it, using the technology to further develop its ultra-slim designs. The decade also saw the birth of one of its most successful models, the Piaget Polo. Watch faces were discreetly integrated into flat bands of gold, with no visible break in the line of the bracelet. Neither raised nor demarcated, the watch face became a constituent part of the piece rather than its focus. It was a watch–jewellery hybrid.
In that sense, it was a perfect fit when Cartier’s parent company Richemont acquired Piaget during the great luxury brand consolidation at the turn of the millennium. Richemont also owns luxury watch companies Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC and Panerai. But now Piaget is part of a big corporation, isn’t it under pressure to take the ‘mass luxury’ route?
SELLING TIME
‘It’s a challenge to remain a genuine luxury brand,’ admits Philippe Léopold-Metzger, CEO of Piaget. ‘From time to time you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing, when you look at the market share you could achieve by diversification and by moving towards a more mass market positioning. This might eventually affect the image of your products, but you could correct that by very sophisticated advertising. So the question is: what is the critical size for survival? Because it’s all very well being small and exclusive, but in today’s luxury market there’s a danger that you might be forgotten.’
Léopold-Metzger believes Piaget is in privileged position, because it enjoys the protection of Richemont without any overt pressure to generate massive sales figures. ‘They take a very long-term view of their brands. They wish us to be successful, of course – but not by doing anything that might damage the brand for future generations.’
A true luxury brand, says Léopold-Metzger, has a strong focus. ‘We only do two things: we make watches and jewellery. We only use a handful of materials: gold, sometimes platinum, and precious stones. We deliberately have a very high entry price: we sell almost nothing for less than €2,500 for women and €6,500 for men. We keep levels of production fairly low. So, in short, we’re about exclusivity and expertise. But at the same time, we can afford to invest in enough communications to give us visibility among our target market.’
Luxury watch advertising is tiresomely predictable. The brands tend to avoid TV advertising (too mass market) and concentrate on print ads in glossy magazines. In their most traditional form the ads make a star of the product, sitting the watch up front with its hands inevitably frozen at the ten-to-two position (so it appears as though the timepiece is ‘smiling’) above a wedge of blurb about the fine materials and precision engineering that have gone into its making.
A more costly option is to hire a celebrity. This is hardly a new strategy: Rolex has been at it since 1927, when it proudly boasted that a woman called Mercedes Gleitze had swum the English Channel wearing a Rolex Oyster. Pilot Chuck Yeager wore a Rolex when he broke the sound barrier; Sir Edmund Hilary checked the time on a Rolex when he conquered Mount Everest. Omega went a step further and assured potential customers that astronauts had worn its watches during the Apollo space flights.
More recently, as the online magazine Haute Horlogerie points out, the emphasis has shifted from stressing performance to generating glamour by association. ‘Once a source of credibility, today these ambassadors bring the promise of notoriety. The accent is less on proving and more on seducing’ (‘Starmania meets haute horlogerie’, http://journal.hautehorlogerie.org). Rolex has concentrated on figures from sport and the arts, with the occasional explorer thrown in. Breitling has parlayed its aviator-friendly positioning into a relationship with John Travolta, pilot and actor. Tag Heuer has turned its attention to the movies (stars of its ads have included Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman and a resurrected Steve McQueen); so has Omega (James Bond and Nicole Kidman). Incidentally, product placement is another marketing option for watch brands – Omega has been ‘James Bond’s choice’ since 1995.
Piaget has certainly not been immune to the lure of celebrity. In 2005 it launched a poster campaign, devised by the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, featuring the French actress Marie Gillain. There were a couple of differentiating factors, however: Gillain was not a major international star; and the art direction was by French artists Pierre and Gilles, giving the ad a lurid, surreal tinge that seemed out of step with a mature luxury brand. This was entirely deliberate, says Léopold-Metzger.
‘We wanted to demonstrate that we are a creative brand. Luxury watch companies are in the business of status, so many of them stick to producing iconic models that are instantly recognizable. But innovation is part of our DNA, so we wanted to emphasize that.’
Léopold-Metzger says that although Piaget watches have been seen on the wrists of major stars, he feels this is not something a true luxury brand should over-emphasize. ‘I like to think that our customers are aware of our history and our reputation. They don’t need the reassurance factor that comes with knowing that a certain watch has been worn by Nicole Kidman.’
Similarly, while Piaget has an attractive website (www.piaget.com), it has not yet ventured into e-commerce. ‘I don’t know whether we’ll get round to that, but it was clearly important that we should have a beautiful website. Our target market is fairly young, given the price of our products, especially in the emerging markets of Asia. So we must communicate in a way that is young and inspiring. And I don’t think younger customers take a brand seriously unless it shows that it knows what it’s doing online.’
However, Piaget is a fan of the bricks and mortar experience. It has 65 boutiques worldwide and Léopold-Metzger describes them as ‘more powerful than any advertisement’. He explains: ‘In the same way that you measure advertising by cost per thousand [views], you can measure how many thousand people enter the store. And I’m certain that the surroundings have a far greater affect on them than a page in a magazine. Take a magazine like Vogue: some editions contain 500 or so pages. Unless you buy a double page spread, there’s a good chance your ad will be overlooked. But if you have a beautiful store, magnificently decorated, in one of the most elegant streets in the world, you are offering a much more accurate image of the brand.’
For an insight into how seriously Piaget takes the store environment as a component of branding, I returned the following morning to the centre of Geneva. I had an appointment in rue de la Rhone, the classiest street in the city. Here Piaget has established not a conventional boutique, but a ‘brand experience’. For starters, behind a Perspex screen you can see two young watchmakers at work in a downscaled atelier, using similar tools to the ones I saw at Côte-aux-Fayes. Customers can bring their watches here for servicing, or simply come to get an insight into the watchmakers’ art.
In addition, since 2008 the second floor of the boutique has been home to a Time Gallery (don’t call it ‘a museum’) devoted to the history of the brand. This was established to take advantage of the 700 or so historic pieces that were languishing in the company’s safe at Plan-les-Ouates. Today, there are two themed exhibitions per year, plus a permanent display detailing the history of the
brand. For instance, you can see the 12P calibre watch – just 2.3 millimetres thick – that toppled the company’s own record as creator of the world’s thinnest automatic movement. Or the watch it designed in partnership with Salvador Dali. Watches of solid gold, watches studded with diamonds – they’re all here for enthusiasts to drool over. Crucially, as well as playing the role of a giant three-dimensional billboard for Piaget, the Time Gallery – like the nearby Patek Philippe Museum – underlines the positioning of Geneva as a city of watch savants.
Switzerland does not have a monopoly on the production of luxury timepieces. Since the reunification of Germany, the small town of Glashütte, near Dresden, has emerged as an unlikely competitor, thanks to brands like A Lange & Söhne and Glashütte Original. (The former is owned by Richemont, like Piaget; the latter by the Swatch Group, like Omega.) The watch industry survived there in a bubble, supplying the Communist East but sheltered from competition from the West. Now it competes in the international market and its timepieces are garnering critical acclaim from connoisseurs.
For the general public, however, Switzerland remains the home of luxury watch brands. And thanks to a serendipitous combination of geography and history, along with its own promotional efforts, it is unlikely to lose that status any time soon.
5
Auto attraction
* * *
‘You can create an impression of luxury. Whether your brand has substance, validity and longevity is a different matter.’
The Mondial de l’Automobile – the Paris Motor Show – is spectacular. Several giant hangars in a vast exhibition space the size of a small airport are filled with the gleaming carapaces of motorcars. And as the auto industry has never fully embraced political correctness, many of these vehicles are draped with beautiful women. There are plenty of industry professionals here, identifiable by their suits and air of nervous energy. But this is also a family affair: the number of fathers and sons, each as wide-eyed as the other, is quite staggering. Held in October every two years, it is the most visited motor show in the world. It attracts almost 1.5 million visitors during its two-week run.
Personally, I’ve never been an automobile fanatic. I’ve owned a few cars, of course – particularly in my early 20s when I lived in the countryside. But city living makes car ownership irrelevant as well as impractical. In fact, I’ve always found city drivers to be the most arrogant of beasts. There they sit, alone in their polluting machines, only too willing to jump a light, ignore a pedestrian crossing, or hurl a curse at a cyclist. Let’s face it, unless you have a large family or a job that requires extreme mobility, there’s only one reason to own a car when you live in the city: status.
And yet, I am not immune to auto attraction. I love a movie with a good car chase. I always let out a sigh of envy when I see a classic car in the street – a Daimler V8, for instance, or a Citroën DS – and I occasionally regret that I’ve let my driving skills slip for so long that I’m a bundle of nerves behind the wheel of a hire car. I take comfort in the fact that, when you live in a big city, a car is a luxury.
Perhaps that’s why, at the Paris Motor Show, I’m perversely drawn to the grandest, flashiest cars of them all. I make my way to Hall 5, the Pôle Prestige, the luxury car showroom. I can barely drag my gaze away from the latest Lamborghini, which looks – as ever – like a child’s fantasy of a sports car. But I must move on, because I have an appointment with one of my favourite brands: Bentley.
THE BENTLEY BOYS
It began with James Bond. In the movie world, the immortal British agent is associated with Aston Martin. But he only drove an Aston in one of the books – Goldfinger – and it was a company car. Bond’s real passion was for his ‘1930 4.5 litre Bentley coupé, supercharged, which he kept expertly tuned so that he could do a hundred when he wanted to’ (Moonraker, 1955). Even as an adolescent I suspected that Bond’s creator Ian Fleming was a true snob, and that only the very best was good enough for his agent. It therefore followed that Bentley had to make the most desirable and glamorous automobiles in the world.
Bentley sales and marketing chief Stuart McCullough is understand-ably pleased to hear this. ‘As you know, “luxury” is a much-abused word. I mean, even chocolate can be described as luxurious. But I have a feeling that the idea is swinging back to its origins a little bit. As for Bentley, we aspire to being right up there – one of the ultimate luxuries. Prices start at £115,000, but the sky’s the limit. At the factory in Crewe, we offer what amounts to a bespoke service. We can build you a car from scratch, to your specifications. We’ve built vehicles for clients in the Gulf that cost a million pounds each.’
Why choose a Bentley and not, say, a Rolls-Royce? A sensitive question, it transpires. Bentley has a dashing heritage, but its history is as chequered as a starting flag.
Walter Owen Bentley was a daredevil with a taste for speed. Born into a well-off London family in 1888, he apprenticed with the Great Northern Railway before turning his attention to automobiles, with a post servicing taxicabs for the National Motor Cab Company. In his spare time he loved the thrill of racing motorcycles in the Isle of Man or at the new Brooklands circuit. By 1912 his ambitions had outgrown his job and he partnered with his brother H M Bentley to become the British agent for a French motor car called the Doriot, Flandrin et Parant. The vehicle was described as ‘quick, robust, sporting in character and of the highest quality’. Inspired by an aluminium piston used as a paperweight by one of the DFP company directors in France, Bentley later kitted out his own cars with pistons made of this revolutionary light material. The adaptation allowed Bentley to outrace his competitors, who were still doubtful of aluminium’s ability to resist heat.
During the Great War, Bentley put his expertise to military use, designing engines for the Sopwith Camel fighter plane. Finally, in 1919, he was able to turn his attention to the ultimate goal: the creation of his own automobile. The three-litre Bentley was unveiled in 1920, initially as a prototype. Appropriately enough, the first customer was a wealthy racing car driver and playboy named Noel Van Raalte, who took delivery of a three-litre Bentley on 21 September 1921.
The 1920s are considered Bentley’s glory days. There were a series of racing triumphs: fourth place at the inaugural 24-hour race at Le Mans in 1923 became first place the following year, a feat that was to be repeated many times. Meanwhile, Bentley was refining his engines to adapt to a demand for heavier and more luxurious coachwork. This led to the 6.5-litre Bentley and its racing version, known as the Speed Six.
This was also the era of The Bentley Boys, a swashbuckling team of racing drivers who kept Bentley in pole position and had an indelible impact on the brand. Among them were the flying ace Glen Kidston, the automotive journalist S C H ‘Sammy’ Davis, the playboy Baron D’Erlanger and the Kimberley diamond heir Woolf ‘Babe’ Barnato. The heavily built Woolf’s nickname was ironic. A former artillery officer and a first-class cricket player, he had inherited a multi-million pound fortune at just two years old. His love of racing was such that he became the majority shareholder and chairman of Bentley in 1925. He went on to win Le Mans three times in a row, starting in 1928.
But the Depression of the 1930s opened a dark period that was to cast a pall over the company for decades. Bentley had always considered Rolls-Royce an arch-rival, hence the bitterness when Rolls acquired the financially weakened Bentley in a hostile takeover – using the cover name British Equitable Trust to do so. Now considering himself little more than an employee, W O Bentley left the company. From the wartime period onwards, Bentley motor cars began to look like Rolls-Royce clones with a lower price tag, their racing heritage diluted. One of the few high points was the shift of production from Derby to Crewe, which had become an engineering hub during the war.
The 1970s may have been the bleakest period of all – with only 5 per cent of Rolls-Royce production bearing the Bentley badge. In 1973, the struggling Rolls-Royce Motors was spun off as a separate company, while the more successf
ul aircraft and marine engine manufacturer briefly became a state-owned company, until it was privatized as Rolls-Royce plc by the Thatcher government. In 1980, the engineering company Vickers acquired Rolls-Royce Motors – and with it the Bentley name. With the creation of high-performance models like the 1982 Bentley Mulsanne Turbo, the brand began to recover some of its former élan. The critically acclaimed 1985 Bentley Turbo R reinforced the impression that Bentley was on its way back.
There was drama again in 1998, when Volkswagen acquired Rolls-Royce Motors. What it had not acquired, however, was the Rolls-Royce brand name. That still belonged to the aero engine giant, Rolls-Royce plc, which had merely licensed it to the motor company. Not only that, but the right to use the Rolls brand name would soon pass to BMW, which had a joint venture agreement with Rolls-Royce plc. There is no way of knowing what would have happened if VW had retained the right to use the Rolls-Royce badge, but the fact is that it committed to Bentley, pumping money into the brand and ensuring that it once again became a powerful name in its own right.
A number of events, Bentley will tell you, indicated that the brand was back on the right track. The first was the creation of a specially commissioned Bentley limousine for the Queen on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee in 2002. The second was the launch that same year of the Bentley Continental GT – here at the Paris Motor Show – which attracted 3,200 advance orders. The brand regained its pride on the racetrack a year later, when Bentley cars finished first and second at Le Mans. Other models were launched – the Continental GT and Azure convertibles, the Bentley Brooklands coupé – and sales continued to increase. In 2007 Bentley sold more than 10,000 cars in a single year for the first time.
MARKETING TO THE ‘AUTOCRACY’
Genuine luxury purchasers, we know, are fussy. When they are buying a big-ticket item like an automobile, they are entitled to be fussier still. ‘Ignore the people side of it at your own risk,’ warns a report in Admap (‘Luxury cars: different and purchased differently’, issue 402, May 2006). ‘People don’t live in caves; they draw on associated luxury experiences. The laws of contiguity apply. The way they are treated in first class by British Airways, the greetings they receive at the Waldorf Astoria and the patience the salesman showed them when buying a Vacheron Constantin [watch] at Wempe are all used as reference points... Inconsistent behaviour, to the wealthier customer’s eyes, does not build value, conviction or loyalty.’
Luxury World: The Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands Page 8