Omega

Twenty-five years later, after leaving a career that took me everywhere, I enrolled in what turned out to be a wholly underwhelming marketing course at Harvard. I wanted to study how far the industry had progressed while I was doing other things. Apart from the technology and the touch points, it turns out, not much. It's as you say, it's all about unlocking human psychology and changing behaviour.

Now, to my main point. Human beings are organised into three arenas: state, market and society. It's the same in Chad as it is in Chile as it is in the Czech Republic. The only things that differ are how well developed each is, and the balance between them. There's good and bad in each of these three modes of organisation too. The first (state) and second (market) can be positive forces. They can be good for society at both individual and collective levels. When there are inadequate checks and when they concentrate too much power and resources, they always become predatory and parasitic. Their main objective at that point is to suck the life force out of us, i.e. out of society.

Today we call the efforts of governments to project vested interest "propaganda." In the 1950s, the same word was used for what we now call "marketing," including by - but not limited to - private actors. In a normal (non-pandemic and non-recession) year, the global marketing spend is close to half a trillion US dollars. About one half of this amount swills about in the US, making Americans by far the most propagandised population on the planet.

That half trillion dollars is used to distract, obfuscate, persuade and seduce us to buy stuff we didn't know we wanted and probably don't need. It boils down to this: massive, unending and intrusive propaganda-marketing is necessary for private capital to mine social capital and extract value in return for this or that.

These tensions have always been present in the world of watches. Watch companies know that in good times their fortunes are buoyed. They also know that in bad times the first thing we dump are trinkets. It's why they dedicate enormous amounts of superficial thinking to generate "brand loyalty." Heritage branding (not to be confused for actual history) is a big part of this. Watch companies know that one of the things serious collectors and casual enthusiasts have in common is a subliminal desire to escape the modern world through analog, mechanical devices. What better than to create a semi-fantasy world of the past where watches were signifiers of a more dignified, stable and contented time? Once that emotional hook has been buried into the cerebral cortex, we need our watch fixes and we behave in ways that might be incompatible with our actual circumstance.

The Moonswatch is/was a fascinating experiment. It so obviously tapped into vast latent aspiration, practically gifting a high-end label to lots of people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. It was an amazing spectacle. The social media aspect of this isn't the main story either, even if it did what social media does, which is to amplify and accelerate for good and for bad. The main take-away for me was that there are tens of millions of people so clearly wanted something that only tens of thousands can typically enjoy. What does it mean? Is it mass derangement? Is it market (or marketing) failure? Is it something else? I don't know, but i agree with you that the answers lie in human psychology and how companies tap it.

If like me you actively resist the efforts of companies to foist their narratives on you, and walk away from gimmicks of manufactured scarcity, then all of this becomes a subject for curious observation. The idea of a "drop" is so far away from how I want to enjoy watches that the thought of it makes me cringe. The only "drop" watch I have is one that dropped three years ago and which I recently picked up semi-accidentally after it came up in a conversation with the seller. Generally speaking, if I like a watch, if I can afford it, and if it's available, I'll buy it. Numbered piece? Don't care. 10-minute sales window? No thank you.

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