'Swiss Made,' Neurology, And The Pepsi Challenge

This is your brain on brands.

Earlier this week, in a totally unsystematic way, I began to wonder why it is that the watch universe I inhabit has so little to say, relatively speaking, about Japanese watchmaking and Japanese watch companies. There are some exceptions – Seiko mechanical divers are usually good for drawing views; Citizen divers as well, although to a lesser extent – but by and large, Japanese brands are absent from the larger enthusiast conversation (which is in startling contrast to their commercial success in comparison to the Swiss watch industry). This may be as simple as selection bias – I make a living writing about mostly luxury segment watches and with the exception of Grand Seiko, the Japanese brands very much have value and affordability as part of their appeal, rather than luxury per se. This is compounded by the fact that for much of the history of Japanese watchmaking, any luxury watchmaking was largely confined to the Japan domestic market. It seems to me, however, that for whatever reasons, Swiss watchmaking as a brand, is overall stronger than Japanese watchmaking, as a brand, in the minds of enthusiasts; watches from Casio, Citizen, and Seiko/Grand Seiko are achievable (with the exception of higher end Grand Seiko, like the Spring Drive Eight Day) are achievable, but Swiss luxury brands like Rolex, Omega, and Audemars Piguet are aspirational. The poster child for brand power is of course, Rolex, which has such a strong brand presence that it overshadows just about everyone, but overall, Swiss brands seem to enjoy a degree of enthusiasm and attention that the Japanese Big Three don’t.

This is really more of a thesis than a categorical statement, and the reasons behind the brand power of “Swiss made” are beyond the scope of a speculative essay; people write books about that sort of thing. Brand power, however, is not just a subjective set of preferences – it actually makes the brain work differently, and in the course of thinking about why the Japanese brands don’t seem to have as much mind share as they should (especially nowadays, when Swiss Made usually means much more expensive) I ran across some information whose origin goes all the way back to 1975, when Pepsi launched the “Pepsi Challenge” marketing campaign.

The Pepsi Challenge is a blind taste test, in which someone tastes unlabeled identical cups of Pepsi and Coke, and picks their favorite. The upshot of the Challenge was that with remarkable consistency, people picked Pepsi over Coke when the pick was blind. Many years later, in 2003, a neuroscientist named Read Montague recreated the Pepsi Challenge, but this time with the tasters hooked up to an MRI machine which measured activity in specific regions of the brain during the tasting process. When blind tasting, Pepsi produced five times the activity of Coke in a region of the brain called the ventral putamen, which is located deep inside the brain, below the cortex, in the basal ganglia. The ventral putamen is involved in learning and reward processing. But when Montague told tasters which cup had Coke in it, something interesting happened. As the New York Times reported:

“In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ‘brand influence,’ by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.”

The result makes me wonder how you would design a blind-taste-test equivalent study for watch brands. Figuring out how to expose someone to the relevant qualitative features of a watch without also exposing the brand seems basically impossible; there’s no way to “taste” a watch without also knowing what the brand is. I guess you could block out the brand name and/or the words Swiss Made, but I doubt that would keep anyone who was even slightly familiar with watches, from recognizing a Submariner as a Submariner or a Speedmaster as a Speedmaster. Montague’s study does, however, put the brand loyalty which is so much a part of being a watch enthusiast in a new light – if you want to convince someone that their favorite brand isn’t what they think it is, you’re fighting an uphill battle against the medial prefrontal cortex. Or as the Times put it in its headline, there’s a sucker born in every medial prefrontal cortex. Apparently Montague, who was working during a time when functional MRI studies were really trending, is responsible for having given us the sketchy sounding field of so-called neuromarketing.

In other news, a subscriber suggested to me that as I write for different outlets, it might be nice to mention where else folks can read what I’ve been covering. The 1916 Company Journal is always a good place to look – I publish there four to five times a week, along with editor Greg Gentile, whom I poach from his many other responsibilities at 1916 whenever I can get away with it. Recently,

Jason Heaton

contributed for us as well, with a story on Blancpain’s Ocean Commitment program – a surprisingly diverse range of initiatives aimed at ocean conservation. Recent stories from me include a look at the aesthetics of movement design, a Hands On with the new Breitling Superocean Heritage watches, one with the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso Tribute Geographic World Time, and from Greg, a look back at one of the early Internet enthusiast darlings from the beginning of the 2000s, the Minerva Pythagore.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who is supporting Split Seconds with a paid subscription! I don’t like paywalls, although I certainly understand their necessity after many years in both digital and print publishing, and I hope, if you’re a subscriber, you’ll consider supporting Split Seconds as well. Thanks everyone – coming up this week, Part 2 of John Davis’ in depth technical review of the Seiko Black Monster, from 2002.