The watch on the right is the venerable Omega Speedmaster. One of the most famous and recognizable mechanical watches of all time, the Speedmaster is the apogee of centuries-old Swiss horology. Open one up: 220 tiny and exquisitely crafted gears, levers, and springs are meticulously assembled inside a 42-millimeter stainless steel case. Hand-assembled and regulated by a master watchmaker, the Speedmaster is accurate to within two seconds per day. Over six pioneering decades, the Speedmaster has been celebrated for its iconic design and superlative performance. It is an instrument of firsts, most notably the first watch worn on the moon. Buzz Aldren strapped on a Speedmaster during his 1969 moon walk. The Speedmaster is considered a classic among collectors and casual fans alike, one of the few models that transcends prevailing fashions decade after decade. Your great-grandchildren can wear it and it will still look great. The base model Speedmaster retails for over $6,000, with some variants running north of $40,000.

The watch on the left is the battery-powered quartz Moonswatch, a collaboration between Omega and Swatch, two of the 17 watch brands within parent company Swatch Group AG. Yes, that Swatch, the fun, plastic fashion accessory ubiquitous in the 1980s. The eleven Moonswatch variants (one for every major stellar body in our solar system) were launched in March 2022 with a retail price of $260. The Moonswatch is made of something called "Bioceramic," which looks and feels suspiciously like, well, fancy plastic.

Did the Moonswatch damage Omega’s brand equity? Did it turn off collectors and casual fans, especially younger consumers less interested in traditional watches in general? The technology is quaint and dated (our mobile phones tell the time far more accurately), while the price of these watches makes them a luxury in a time of economic uncertainty. And there are more useful options for the wrist now; consider that the Apple Watch has outsold the entire Swiss mechanical watch industry every year since 2019.

Still, the Swiss watch industry is thriving, setting sales records in every major market, especially to the burgeoning Chinese middle and upper classes. In an age of rapidly changing and frequently expendable technology, people can't seem to get enough of old-school analog technology like mechanical watches, physical books, and vinyl records.

Omega has long been the second best-selling luxury Swiss watchmaker behind Rolex. Ever the Avis to Rolex's Hertz, Omega has tried hard over the past twenty years to level up with Rolex in prestige and price. Since the turn of the century, Omega rolled out groundbreaking technology, was unafraid to shake up its staid design aesthetic, and continues its lucrative, if cheesy, affiliation with James Bond.

So how did the Moonswatch perform? It shot through the stratosphere: Swatch Group AG sold over a million Moonswatches in 2022 alone. Large queues formed at each of Swatch's 168 retail locations worldwide. The Moonswatch almost singlehandedly grew the revenue of parent Swatch Group AG, a CHF 7.5 billion company, +4.6% in 2022. Out-of-stock almost everywhere, the Moonswatch is fetching 3-5x retail on eBay. The success haloed to Omega, as Speedmaster sales also spiked after the Moonswatch landed.

Of course, collaborations between luxury and mass brands are nothing new. Crocs partnered with Balenciaga, one can buy Dior By Birkenstock, and Kim Kardashian’s Skim co-branded with Fendi. The strategy can work when executed well (misgivings about fancy plastic aside). The Moonswatch is a relatively affordable luxury item at a time when we all want gratifying diversions. Younger consumers who were curious about high-end horology test drove a nicer watch. Speedmaster fans craved all 11 variants for their collections. And the hardcore watch nerds (me) just shrugged and moved on.

Another dynamic at play here: the "inside baseball" effect that we see in many high-involvement sports, entertainment, and luxury brands. We’re all hyper-informed by the constant flow of information coming at us from the news feeds and social media platforms on our smartphones, a phenomenon that didn’t exist twenty years ago. We experience overload and burnout from the sheer volume of information. And it’s not just the quantity – the quality has also changed.

When the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919, the newspapers reported only the dry facts of the trade to a bewildered public. The conversation was largely one-way and static. If the Angels traded Shohei Ohtani to the Yankees in 2023, websites would leak the trade days beforehand. The GM of the Yankees would get grilled on satellite and terrestrial radio shows. The trade and its broader implications for the team, New York, and the league would be dissected endlessly by reporters, experts, baseball executives, politicians, celebrities, current and former players, and fans. We would all be fluent in the nuances of the luxury tax, the Yankees’ ability to sign other players, and the market value of Ohtani as a brand ambassador.

We experience high-involvement brands as much more than just a bundle of physical assets, intellectual property, and intangible equities. More and more, consumers understand these brands as businesses, and they’re well-versed in concepts like brand positioning and consumer targeting. We’re all GMs, CEOs, and CMOs – we’re inside baseball – knowing how the sausage gets made and second-guessing the marketers and senior executives in real time. Frequently, the executives who run the brand are as integral to the brand’s equity as the marketing campaign (example: what happened to the re-sale value of used Teslas and Tesla’s stock price after Elon Musk took over Twitter).

Simultaneously, the brand’s story becomes amplified and echoed in unpredictable ways as more consumers strive to be influencers and social media allows them to gain control of the brand’s narrative. Where does the consumer end and the brand begin?

As such, traditional marketing is often secondary to our wholistic experience of many high-involvement brands. We now have the rise of brand meta-narratives: the long-term consumer perception of the brand is intertwined with our lived experience of it, the brand’s outbound marketing, and our intimate understanding of brands as businesses, marketable properties, and cultural entities.

Furthermore, we know we are being advertised to and we know how branding works, and that knowledge further complicates the brand’s narrative. We see a clever social media campaign and think, “That should drive sales among Gen Z.” How does that change our consumption of the brand? How do we separate this meta-knowledge of the brand from our lived experience of it simply as a product? Before the internet, our perception of a brand was typically shaped by our direct experience with it and a curated advertising campaign we saw in traditional media like TV or print. Now, it’s an ever-changing conversation on multiple levels.

For the launch of the Moonswatch, the meta-narrative helped to drive its success (or at least it didn’t hamper its success). Watch fans know Swatch Group CEO Nick Hayek was a huge advocate for the launch of Moonswatch, and that Omega has been hammered by Cartier lately and looking for a way to energize the brand. These consumers understand the distinct brand positionings of Omega and Swatch within a vertically integrated industry controlled by a few large conglomerates, and they get the rudiments of brand segmentation. They understand that the launch of the Moonswatch doesn’t mean Omega will suddenly start making plastic watches, or that the Moonswatch is anywhere close to the quality of a Speedmaster.

As both consumers and would-be CMOs, we might think: “I’d have launched the Moonswatch if I were Hayek.” We evolve the brand’s narrative in a way that we never could have done twenty years ago. Besides, the Moonswatch is just cool and fun, and who doesn’t crave that now?

We experience high-involvement brands as much more than just a bundle of physical assets, intellectual property, and intangible equities. More and more, consumers understand these brands as businesses, and they’re well-versed in concepts like brand positioning and consumer targeting.