Influencer marketing is something that has successfully been implemented in various industries. One industry that has seen and acted upon the possibilities of influencer marketing is the luxurious industry of watches. Many watch brands, big and small, have been putting their watches out there for years now.
One case stands out above all others: the Swedish brand Daniel Wellington. It is the perfect example of how a new brand utilized influencers to promote its watches and build on its branding strategy.
Daniel Wellington Watches
When Filip Tysander founded Daniel Wellington in 2011 he realized the highly competitive market he was operating in. He had to find new methods of creating awareness around his newly created watches. Tysander did not have a triple-A brand budget, but other than the common brands he did recognize the enormous potential of Instagram and its users. Please keep in mind we’re talking about 2011: recognizing Instagram’s potential was still a decent quality.
Micro-influencers
He discovered that, besides celebrities with 100K+ followers, there were people on Instagram operating in a niche with around 5K followers. Simple calculus: 20 people with a follower base of 5K might have the same effect – if not bigger – as the celebrities with 100K+ followers. The fact that he didn’t have millions of marketing budget like many of his competitors, forced him to think outside the box.
Influencer Marketing and Watches
He created a strategy where he would ask influencers to post about his products in return of one of his DW watches. As he was pioneering in influencer marketing he recognized the importance of creative freedom for influencers. He left the creative freedom completely with the influencers because he knew that that was how they acquired their followers in the first place. His strategy paid off and the Daniel Wellington watches became widely available and popular. It also enabled him to build his own account on Instagram. The brand now uses its own social media channels to organize competitions under the hashtag #DWPickoftheDay. This stimulates both influencers and ‘regular’ users of the channel to post their Daniel Wellington pictures, broadening the global awareness of the brand.
Conclusion
This is just one of the many success cases of how watch brands implemented influencer marketing in their strategies. Although Tysander was way ahead of his time, it doesn’t mean influencer marketing in the watch industry is dead. Quite the opposite actually. It still proves to be a very successful way of marketing your product. At Join we have a lot of influencers operating in this vertical. Let us show you the benefits of using influencers for your brand now. Request a demo below to discover the possibilities!