No, I’m not talking about the World Cup that concluded yesterday. There was another international football tournament that took place last week at the very heart of the Swiss watch industry. It is called the “Uhrencup” (that’s the German for “Watch Cup”) and is held in Biel, the town that is home to numerous watch brands and has appointed itself “Watch City”, and naturally has a watch sponsor. Lesser-known brand Votum watches has been producing exclusively mechanical watches since 1962, the year in which the Uhrencup was first staged.
It all started when another major watchmaking town, Grenchen (home to Breitling and Eterna), wanted a big celebration for the opening of a new stand. At the time the local team FC Grenchen had a solid record in the national league and tens of thousands of spectators came to the tournament, which invited club teams from foreign leagues to compete with Swiss teams. Although FC Grenchen’s fortunes have since waned, the Uhrencup has been held without fail every year ever since, in some years thanks only to the passion and dedicated of a handful of people. More recently, the tournament has experienced renewed popularity and I was delighted to see the Uhrencup 2018 welcoming my local team Wolverhampton Wanderers for their pre-season warm-up. I missed out on the chance to see them, since I was in England enjoying the Goodwood Festival of Speed for the first time, so look out for my report on that soon.
The Uhrencup is the perfect analogy for the Swiss watch industry, which remains as popular as ever thanks to passionate and dedicated people. From unsung heroes like Charles Vermot, who hid all the tools required to produce the Zenith El Primero movement in an attic when the company was considering abandoning mechanical movements altogether in 1975, to visionary businessmen like Nicolas G. Hayek and Jean-Claude Biver, the industry owes a lot to a few people.
But how did Hublot do?
A month ago I suggested that Hublot couldn’t lose as the official timekeeper of the FIFA World Cup, but just how much impact did the brand’s sponsorship of the event have? Watch marketplace Chrono24 released infographics showing what I would like to call “micro-peaks” in traffic to their Hublot-related pages that appear to correlate with the moments when the Hublot-branded fourth official’s board was shown in two of Germany’s matches in the group stages. Chrono24 has its headquarters in Germany, so the use of two Germany games is understandable, as is perhaps the casual omission of any statistics related to the country’s shocking 2-0 defeat to South Korea or indeed any further matches in the tournament. The statistics for the thrilling encounter between Belgium and Japan in the round of 16 might have been interesting, for example. The peaks on these graphs are indeed unmistakable, but take a closer look and you will note an absence of scale on the y axis and different time frames on the x axis.
The more fastidious reader may also wonder who the mystery “Perez” is who is supposed to have been brought on as a substitute in the 58th minute of the Germany vs Mexico match (there is no such player in the Mexican team). The only graph genuinely worth considering, even without the figures, is the final one, showing the general increase in traffic for Hublot, at least until 27th June, when Germany got knocked out of the tournament. It may well be less visually appealing but it shows a gentle increase in interest around Hublot during the tournament, which correlates well with the increases we have seen on WorldTempus, which equate to a 50% jump in traffic during the tournament for Hublot. If the same figure could be applied to Hublot’s sales, then I’m sure the brand’s CEO Ricardo Guadalupe would consider this sponsorship a resounding success.
