Since 1920, the Swiss watch industry has spent billions of dollars promoting its products around the world. Formats and tactics have evolved with the times, but one thing is true of the most successful marketing efforts: A commanding vision lies at the heart of them all.

Here are some of the biggies.

1927: Rolex and the Art of Marketing

When it comes to marketing and advertising watches, all roads lead to Rolex. In 1927, Hans Wilsdorf, the Bavarian who co-founded the brand in 1905, arranged for the English swimmer Mercedes Gleitze to cross the English Channel wearing its newest watch, the Oyster, around her neck to draw attention to the model’s pioneering water resistance. (“It’s called the Oyster because its case is as tight as a clam,” ads would later say.)

“This is when watch marketing took on a whole new dimension,” said Aurel Bacs, whose Bacs and Russo consultancy runs the watch department at Phillips. “Until then, a wristwatch was praised as the most elegant, the most precise, maybe the cheapest.”

Rolex didn’t stop there. In May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa mountaineer, became the first people to summit Mount Everest; both were equipped with Rolexes.

Source: New York Times

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