The Power of Brands: Breitling Watches

The Power of Brands: Breitling Watches

While the current average lifespan of a US company on S&P’s 500 Index is just over 21 years, the family-owned Swiss watch company Breitling had just five bosses in over 130 years. Breitling’s origin as a provider of highly technical chronograph timepieces for the aviation industry, with both “industries” sharing an obsession for precision and performance, satisfied the criteria of heritage and reputation, exclusivity and elitism that luxury brand building requires. We’ll look at how rebranding Breitling watches’ unique story has transformed it in the past five years to maintain its aspirational luxury brand relevance to a new generation.

Breitling’s story

Breitling’s astonishing story, and its long-standing affinity with aviation, began in 1884 when it was founded by Léon Breitling in St. Imier, Switzerland. It was the same year that a dirigible (a powered and steerable hot-air balloon) took off from and landed successfully back at the same place; the first patent was issued for curved aerofoil wing sections; it was the year of the first controlled heavier-than-air unpowered flight in America. Timekeeping and aviation’s shared obsession for precision and performance is because pre-digital aviators needed accessible, reliable and accurate timekeeping to navigate.

Soon after its launch in 1884, men’s watches began to move from pockets to wrists, leaving both hands free to drive a car or fly an aircraft. Breitling created the first watch with an independent push-piece to control some other function than setting the watch hands or (at the time) winding it up with the crown piece. This added a separate timed duration facility, effectively a stop watch within a watch. The addition of a second push-piece made it possible to add together separate successive timings.

Breitling’s precision timepieces and chronometers made their way in to the cockpits of the British Royal Air Force fighter aircraft in World War Two, sharing some of the finest hours of aviation combat history.

The post-war availability of former military aircraft boosted the commercial passenger and freight air travel industry. On-board navigation tools included cumbersome and impractical paper maps and sliderules. Breitling created its ground-breaking Navitimer in the 1950’s, a wrist-worn device with a built-in sliderule that could handle all aviators’ navigation-related requirements, and it was soon worn by pilots everywhere.

Breitling’s historical and unique achievements continued. It supplied the first wrist-worn chronograph used by an astronaut orbiting Earth in 1962.

By 1984, ultra-thin quartz-powered watches were the height of fashion. Breitling took a brave step in the opposite direction, and with the help of a French aerobatic display team created the Chronomat timepiece that revived the whole mechanical watch market. In 1995 they also released the first wristwatch with a built-in distress signal transmitter.

The Breitling Orbiter 3, with a two man crew, completed the world’s first global circumnavigation by balloon in 1999, creating another strand of intertwined Breitling and aviation history.

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