NSOW 31-19. Too Many SKUs - Notes

Too many SKUs:

Mosso vs Adams.

In short, an ongoing criticism of both Breitling (Mosso) and Longines (Federico) has been too many SKUs leading to confusion as to what is the brands identity, what does it stand for etc.

This is a massive issue in a world where we increasing relate to brands as if they were our teams and had to represent us where simply having a good watch wasn’t enough but rather we also need to have an emotional connection to the brand.

See Adrians discussion re Tag and Tim in one of his SIHH videos.

On the flipside in a recent podcast Ariel Adams complained that brands were too focussed on a ‘one size fits all’ approach to their range and didn’t appear to recognise that different markets needed different designs.

Both are, in fact right.

How to manage this conumdrum?

First, note this is only a problem for watch geeks – normal, sane people don’t care about this stuff.

My suggestion….

Lie to us……………..As Seiko (and Hodinkee) appears to be doing.

Create “fake” xxx market only models but then make them available to everyone via an alternative channel – say ordering through a local boutique.

Now this is risky. Get it wrong and you run the risk of offending everyone, this would have to be really carefully managed to avoid racist stereotyping. Perhaps the answer is to not say too much – eg I don’t recall Seiko ever says “why” some of its models are JDM – they just are.

Another method would be to make the division of models by market relatively arbitrary – Take the recent Breitling Airline linked Navitimers. Arbitarily make the Swiss Air EU only, PANAM US only and (say) JAL JDM - note, they would actually be available everywhere but we just made it “appear” they were separated.

Also, you run the risk of annoying your customers by withholding stuff they really want – that’s why its important that this separation be, ultimately, fake. While initial distribution and marketing may be targeted to a specific region I think its essential that brands actually provide an avenue for someone not in that market to access the entire inventory.

While risky however it creates opportunities:

1. Brands get to shape their inventories, perhaps even their identities, to suit specific markets – in fact this is kind of already happening

2. And within any particular market the appearance of too many SKUs is reduced

3. Three – and this is kind of cool – I think – by making the brand – say via a local boutique – the contact between the customer and remote region it deepens the engagement between the collector and their brand. This has to be carefully managed – to get the amount of ‘friction’ just right. Make it too hard and you turn people away (a little like the angst people are beginning to feel towards rolex) but make it too easy and the whole experience becomes unrewarding – there needs to be some (but not too much) effort required for the watch geek that goes to the trouble of finding that JDM purple dial variant (for example) to feel they’ve done something special. Because remember – we are talking here only about geeks. Essentially we are gamifying the buying experience.

Is it worth it?

Really don’t know but I suspect it might be.