By offering their customers the timeless qualities of craftsmanship and good value for the money, many watch makers thrived. Those watch makers who tried to profit from cutting corners and offering shoddy goods surely saw their reputations and their bank accounts suffer as a result. The early watch making business was driven watch by watch and customer by customer.



By the middle of the eighteen hundreds new methods of mass communication were sweeping across the Europe and North America. This expansion of communication technologies paralleled the growth of trade between Europe and North America. Thanks to advances in printing technology books, once a rare commodity reserved for the rich and influential, became widely available. As literacy rates began to rise, newspaper sales soared. Advances in technology included the telegraph, invented by Samuel Morse. The telegraph allowed for a more rapid transfer of information and exploded with the laying of the transatlantic cable which connected North America and Europe.

By the eighteen sixties, a major revolution in how sellers communicated with buyers was underway. With merchants were eager to get the word about their products, magazine and newspaper circulation grew as publishers began to see an enormous potential in the selling of print advertising. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the radio propelled human to human communication to new heights. By the early Twentieth Century, everything was in place for merchants and producers to enter a new era of marketing and advertising.

The Bulova Watch Company was one of the first companies to jump aboard the technology train. Putting together a string of brilliant marketing programs, Bulova is said to have written the book on modern electronic marketing and advertising. In particular, the company is considered to be a pioneering force in the effective use of radio advertising.

One notable promotional campaign launched by Bulova took advantage of the trans-Atlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh. Seeing the importance of the event, Bulova helped to sponsor the event which was broadcast by radio and telegraph on both sides of the Atlantic. This success of this groundbreaking initiative was made possible by the advancements in mass.

No other mass communication technology has had a greater impact on marketing and advertising than television. Television advertising added a new dimension to the spoken word. The ability to visually demonstrate a product was not lost on the Timex Company. The now famous slogan it takes a licking and keeps on ticking helped to make the Timex brand world famous. Timex became known as a producer of stylish and reliable watches that were also affordable. Popular during the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, the innovative campaign took advantage of the visual strength of television.

Trusted television personality John Cameron Swayze treated viewers to a series of different demonstrations which tested the durability of the Timex watch. During what was billed as the torture test, Timex watches were strapped onto the blades of outboard boat motors, dropped into the water from heights as far as sixteen hundred feet and shown on camera to still be running. To prove just how rugged these timepieces were the company strapped their watches to the backs of sea turtles and cliff divers in Mexico.

International sporting events like the Olympic Games and World Cup Soccer have always drawn worldwide media attention. Wristwatch manufacturers have created their own Olympics competition, vying for the right to have their timing systems used to time various Olympic sporting events. Longines and Bulova have both had long relationships with the Olympic Games and are examples of using product placement as a successful marketing strategy.