COMMENT
People Spread the
would be paying a huge amount for high profile brands’
WORD Y
A key to the success of Christopher Ward is how its customers have spread the word – using the most modern of forums, social media
ou won’t see Daniel Craig wearing a Christopher Ward watch. Or, if you do see
Daniel Craig wearing a Christopher Ward then it won’t be because of any marketing deal, any celebrity promotion – it’ll be because either he or someone else has bought it and he likes wearing it. Christopher Ward of London is not a brand that has associated itself with any sort of celebrity promotion or overt branding exercise, instead it has relied mostly on social networking to get its message across. Which was tricky because when the company started in 2005 nobody had invented “social media”. You can imagine the board meetings. “Could someone please hurry up and invent social networking so we can promote ourselves a bit…” It didn’t happen like that, of course. Although it wasn’t called “social networking” or “social media” at the time, similar stuff has been going on for a fair while. In the mid-1980s people started communicating through bulletin
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... if you do see Daniel Craig wearing a
Christopher Ward then it won’t be because of any marketing deal, any celebrity promotion – it’ll be because either he or someone else has bought it and he likes wearing it.
boards, online “conferences” and forums, if they were lucky enough to have the then-very-expensive equipment to do so. In the 1990s companies like CompuServe and AOL brought online forums to a wider audience. By the early part of this century broadband and always-on internet was starting to emerge, and online interest groups became widespread. Newsgroups and forums were not yet called social networking, but there were people using online networks for social purposes.
One watch forum called Timezone is still thriving. You can
join it and discuss watches and horology in general, or specific brands of watch. There’s even an online school where you can learn about mechanical watch movements. It’s a really good resource for watch enthusiasts. Meanwhile, it’s worth looking at the origins of Christopher Ward and particularly its philosophy. The founders, including Christopher Ward himself, were passionate about watches, but more particularly thay had a background in retail – two of the founders are former owners of Early Learning Centre. They felt strongly about the sort of value a watch customer would typically get. Co-founder Mike France explains. “We were totally appalled by the business model which was established and seemed pretty set. There seemed to be no way to avoid buying a watch indirectly.” Apart from the mark-ups and profits inherent in the supply chain,
marketing campaigns...
The internet gave the fledgling Christopher Ward the chance to get away from that...
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