Basically the title. Zenith makes some pretty stellar and innovative watches imo. I also love their history and style. However, the brand recognition outside of watch lovers is pretty dismal. And while I generally buy watches for me, I do want the watches I buy (particularly those I’m paying $5k-10k for) to have some brand recognition among the public. What happened with Zenith in this respect? Or am I giving the public too little credit?

  • FarookWu@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think the general public-to-watch enthusiast continuum breaks out like this:

    1. That person is wearing a watch (and it goes no farther)
    2. That person has a watch but it’s not an Apple Watch etc.
    3. That person has a digital watch or a watch with hands
    4. That person has a nice watch on their arm (or an ugly one)
    5. That person has a cheap Timex or an expensive Rolex
    6. That person has a Timex/Casio/Citizen/Armitron, or Rolex/Omega
    7. Everything else (for brevity’s sake)

    By the time you get to level 5 above, you have covered probably 99% of the population.

    Maybe some of them have seen or heard of Fossil or other “fashion brands”/Department store offerings, or seen a Tag/Breitling/Longines/Cartier commercial, but I’m betting most of them wouldn’t remember the brand name afterwards. They don’t care.

    A scant few will know of Bulova, Seiko, maybe Hamilton. Some of this, whether Bulova or Rolex, is due to advertising, or having seen Rolex or Omega banners /product placement at sporting events.

    The number of people who have ever heard of Sinn, Oris, Grand Seiko, Glycine, Tutima, Alpina, Helson, on and on = very very small.

    And accordingly, the number of people of who know about AP PP VC LAS JLC etc. is quite small, in part because how many people can actually afford one, and be interested in obtaining one? We know about them, because we like watches. Well, at least some of us.

    I like watches for a multitude of reasons. But none of them are related to hoping someone recognizes me as having an expensive watch. A cool watch? Yes. An interesting one? Certainly. And I’ll likely bore somebody to death if they make the mistake of asking about my watch (“Oh wow, man, did you know this is a handwound using the ETA 6497 with a neat small seconds dial at the 9 o’clock position, whereas the 6498 …”).