Living in the West, we can find it jolly hard to understand countries where the population is prepared to live under a despot.
What with all the silencing and disappearing and such, how can they stand it? The answer, I suspect, is really quite simple. It’s because they get used to it. And once you’re used to something, you don’t much want it to change.
Psychologists call this metathesiophobia, the fear of change. It’s quite real. Studies have shown that we’re prone to judging things more favourably the older they are.
In one social experiment, for example, two groups of people were shown the same painting and asked to evaluate it. The group told the painting was from 1905 rated it more highly than the group told it was from 2005.
I’m not entirely sure if we can draw comparisons between life in a dictatorship and our appreciation of art, but the basic principle that we like things that have been around for a while more than things that are new rings true, and I doubt I’ll need to list everyday examples.
What becomes interesting is what happens when it applies to brands. Last year, Volvo announced it was ditching its estate cars as part of a root-and-branch range overhaul.
But after a customer outcry, it brought them back only a year later. In consumers’ minds, Volvo estate cars have been around for generations, ergo they must be good, and getting rid of them must be bad.
Watchmaking’s most recent example might be the froth and venom directed at Bremont when it rebranded earlier this year, canning its in-house movement manufacturing ambitions at the same time.
Unlike Volvo, Bremont has not backtracked, and given what we now know of the financial imperative behind its decisions, it’s highly unlikely it will. (As an aside, I’d suggest that whether the changes work or not is not down to the British brand’s existing consumer and fan bases.)
Fear of change can mean death to logic, but at the same time, it’s not always irrational, even when we know it’s coming.
Retirement of greats like Roger Federer or Tom Brady marked the end of a wonderful era for sports fans, triggering a changing of the guard that may never reap comparable rewards.
And by rewards, I don’t mean trophies; I mean the moments of elation their greatest victories brought us.
In victories, their joy could become ours. Part of us dies in their retirement, knowing we might never get those moments again. Change can suck.
This phenomenon, of course, also relates to the watch industry and to watches. For good and ill. A Swiss mechanical watch is just about the perfect expression of metathesiophobia. Why else would such an anachronistic object still exist?
I’ve given reasons for this before in this column. Nostalgia is an expression of metathesiophobia, and so too is the relentless pursuit of beauty. In nostalgia, we’re experiencing warm thoughts of the past, when we reckon things were better.
Beauty, we convince ourselves, is eternal and will bring us joy forever, and so we eulogise that, too. And in a good mechanical watch, we find nostalgia and beauty, and therefore metathesiophobia in spades.
The watch industry is all too aware of our predilections, and indeed of the less phobic condition that motivates it: conservatism. Small c, to be clear.
Think about it. Switzerland is the world’s most conservative nation. It does banks, big pharma, chocolate and watches. That’s it and for as long as anyone can remember, it’s always been it.
Take out antiques dealers and people that make shotguns, and you’ll find Swiss watch companies are the most conservative companies in the world.
The CEOs wear blue suits and white shirts and preside over companies that make watches that look just like the watches they were making half a century ago. They are guardians of the way things always were.
Is this a problem? Many watch buyers are fine with this.
If they weren’t, Rolex wouldn’t have a third of the market, selling designs and ideas it came up with 75 years ago.
Patek Philippe remains one of the most desirable brands in the world by making watches our grandfathers thought were charmingly old-fashioned.
Cartier became one of the fastest growing watch companies of the past decade by remaking all its old watches. Tank, Panthère, Santos, Baignoire … All designs of the past, all tokens of our innate belief that the longer something has been in existence, the better it is. It doesn’t get more conservative.
But this conservatism isn’t always healthy.
The threat is getting lost in the past, too rooted in what is comfortable and what used to work. Stale.
The affliction is most dangerous when it applies to branding and communications. Buyers may want a time capsule that tells the story of the good old days, but not if it looks like it’s been lodged at the back of the cupboard with the shortbread and a box of novelty tea bags.
Tissot spotted this with the PRX and married its retro design with an edgy campaign that made a young audience drool, so much so that it’s now propping up the mid-market segment.
So too Audemars Piguet, which made an oddball watch from the decade most of us thought style had forgotten one of the most desirable hard luxury items on the planet. The positioning may be ultra-contemporary, but the promise of the product behind it is anything but, no matter what brands say.
If there’s a worry, it’s that those are among the few exceptions to the rule. For too many brands, their natural conservatism is expressed by selling the same old thing in the same old way, when the job is to sell the same old thing in a new way.
Those brands are going backwards and in danger of pulling an industry that is far more interconnected than consumers will ever know down with them.
I don’t expect the industry to overcome its metathesiophobia, and frankly, I don’t think it should. Not entirely.
People love watches because they capture their conservatism and their fear of change. But it must learn to make consumers pay attention to its product and to convince them that product still matters. And quickly.
Otherwise the silencing and disappearing and such will come.