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Longines digitises 45 million watches
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Longines digitises 45 million watches

Wednesday, 15 February 2017
By Louis Nardin
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Louis Nardin
Journalist and consultant

“Audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”

Georges Jacques Danton

“A quality watch is a concentration of creativity, rare technical and scientific skills, and age-old gestures. It appeals to the desire for uniqueness and distinction; it is a badge of knowledge, power and taste. A watch has many stories to tell; the details and secrets provide the relish”.

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4 min read

The brand has digitised records of every watch it has made since it was established in 1832. This Herculean task is proving to be a silent but no less powerful asset for the brand’s communication.

Walter Von Känel has been a familiar figure in the corridors at Longines for more than 50 years. The effervescent CEO, known affectionately as “The Boss”, continues to lead the company with an energy bordering on atomic. Each year, under his stewardship, the brand extends its presence in the markets and now punches with the heavyweights. Always discreet about its companies’ finances, Swatch Group only reveals that the brand’s turnover comfortably exceeded the billion and a half franc mark in 2015. A performance that sends Longines shooting up the ranking to fifth most powerful watch brand in the world.

Longines
© Longines

Considering the markets’ healthy appetite for Longines watches, its media and advertising presence can seem somewhat underwhelming compared with the often gigantic means rolled out by the competition. “Longines has its communication niches and there are no changes in sight,” says Walter Von Känel. “We focus on equestrian sports, Alpine skiing, the Roland Garros tennis tournament, artistic and rhythmic gymnastics, and archery. Alongside these sports we also have the key word “elegance”, used since the early twentieth century and which continues to govern whom we choose as our ambassadors.”

For a brand to be authentic, Longines believes it must cultivate its legacy, hence the considerable efforts made to show off this history in the most transparent and objective way possible.
History first

And so noisy campaigns are not Longines’ style. As a man whose personal library is said to contain over 12,000 volumes, Walter Von Känel pursues a more subtle but no less effective strategy by building on the brand’s history. The Longines Museum, which takes up 550 square metres of the head office in Saint-Imier, is the living proof. It houses an impressive collection of 10,000 timepieces, only 500 of which are on show to the public, and rare archive documents including film posters from 1908. In addition, the brand regularly funds research by renowned scientists. Put simply, for a brand to be authentic, Longines believes it must cultivate its legacy, hence the considerable efforts made to show off this history in the most transparent and objective way possible. So many brands are happy to rewrite their past if this will serve a commercial objective; not so Longines. In 2012 it thus saw through a project launched in 2008 to produce a database of every single watch it has ever made.

It took three years to digitise the content of the main documents.
Longines Electronic Archives

This database, or Longines Electronic Archives (LEA), was developed in-house and provides a full inventory of every watch Longines has manufactured since it was established. It currently has a phenomenal 45 million entries. It took three years to digitise the content of the main documents, which fortunately for the project have been conserved without interruption since day one, a rare fact in the watch industry. New entries are constantly being added. Users can consult the database via a series number, reference number or calibre to obtain information on each watch, the model in question, production, right up to when it was sold.

Longines
© Longines

Initially, Walter Von Känel wanted a means to reliably document every Longines watch sold at auction, but the project quickly gained in scope. Today, the Heritage department handles around 40 requests a day from the owners of vintage Longines watches. Accessible only within the company, the Longines Electronic Archives are a means of precisely tracing and authenticating the “life” of each watch.
By investing in this powerful tool, Walter Von Känel is providing Longines with the means to give greater impact to its 184 years. The project makes even more sense considering Longines’ positioning – around CHF 800 to CHF 5,000 – and audience, which includes more and more Millennials, the post-1980 generation who are less easily swayed by marketing ploys and fancy ads. Longines prefers actions to words, and it pays.

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