Great case of this is Ace of Spades Champagne. That stuff was and still is $30 champagne. But they stuck in a gold bottle one day and marketed the hell out of it to people trying to cultivate an image and it worked.BoDog said:You just described Hublot to a "T"! In the 1980/90s they were a mediocre brand (some would argue still are) with very little presence or relevance on the watch scene. Fast forward to early 2000s they are taken over by the division lead from Omega. Comes out with the Big Bang, pays a few rappers and later athletes as endorsers then next thing you know they are "high end." Hell even Jerry Jones is on board and a ton of Cowboys wear them. It is a classic story on marketing and should be taught to every business student.YouBet said:I was going to post this the other day but I couldn't verify my memory. When I was in business school, we had a case study in our Marketing class on brand strategy and it was about a luxury watch maker. The gist of the case study was that this watch maker was a mid-range watch maker that almost overnight transformed their brand by simply deciding to declare themselves as a high end watch maker.Serotonin said:No doubt, it has to be mid-2000s vintage. Look at where Panerai and IWC were.YouBet said:
Graph seems to be significantly wrong. Rolex should be in Superpremium unless y'all are aware of someone selling them from $1,500-5,000.
Please share with board ASAP if you know where to find these unicorns.No one is putting them above Rolex in the 2010s and it would be even more laughable today.
I enjoy talking the brand strategy but I could go either way. The Mercedes example is a good one; if you are introducing new people to the brand and building some brand loyalty then that is a good strategy.
Nothing really changed other than them simply telling people: "We are high-end now". And people said "Ok" and they were then high-end and commanded high-end prices and got them. There was more to it than that I'm sure (this was ~20 years ago), but that particular case always fascinated me because a company changed their trajectory by simply speaking it without changing anything underlying it.
In my head, I had always remembered it as Rolex which was why I wanted to post it, but their story didn't feel like it aligned with that so it must have been someone else and I've been unable to find it.
I did a side-by-side of Ace of Spades v. small mom-and-pop stuff from small towns around Reims and Epernay and the mom-and-pop Champagne was the better product every time even though they were selling it for 15 euro/bottle and Ace of Spades was retailing close to 200 euro.
