cazalea[Seiko Moderator]
17087
FINALE
Dec 17, 2014,13:49 PM
I have been negligent in explaining how the SPRING DRIVE in 25 WORDS contest has come to an end.
HOW IT STARTED
I was hoping that we could come up with a statement that would be useful to Seiko as they trained their in-store brand ambassadors (sales associates), so they could communicate what a Spring Drive was all about to the customers. Especially since the three stores I'd been in had failed to either understand Spring Drive or be able to explain it in plain language.
Thus the contest, which many of us participated in (writing or reading) and hopefully we enjoyed.
We didn't have a single winner, but we had some technical entries, and some artistic ones. Who's to say which is the right way to describe a ground-breaking technology to a potential buyer. I began to see how Seiko might have some difficulty getting the details across to sales staff.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
I took the 25-word summary page with me to Japan. As our two factory visits progressed, I began to see how LARGE Seiko is (Billions of dollars; hundreds of billions of Yen), and HOW FAR a distance there is from the people who build the watches and those who sell them.
While there are hundreds of kilometers just from one Seiko factory making mechanical watches to the Epson studio making Spring Drives, there are thousands of kilometers and many organizational steps between those who make the watches and those who sell them. As I find on the Seiko website:
"Our local partners, whom you can locate from this world map, play the key role in all our marketing activities.
They are the primary source of information in every market.
Affiliates and distributors are responsible for advertising and sales promotion at the local level throughout the world."
The PR folks were well acquainted already with our contest as they had read about it on the website in advance (they did their homework!).
The watch masters were not familiar with it, nor was it of concern to them. They CREATE the watches; people far away sell them. Explaining how SD works in 25 words seemed a waste of their valuable time - a Japanese (or was it French?) shrug meaning "not really my problem" was the only reaction I received from the few people I talked to about it.
We never got to the Seiko sales organization headquarters, or talked with any of the people involved in that part of the company.
SO WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THIS?
Thanks to all of you, we learned more about Seiko Spring Drives and how they differ from strictly mechanical or strictly quartz watches.
My wife and I learned how very nice the Seiko people were at every point that we came into contact with tour guides, workers and artisans.
We learned more about Seiko than we ever imagined - its divisions, partner companies, distributors and dealers. Its size!
Best of all, we learned about ourselves and those poets and dreamers who lurk among us. Who would have imagined Haiku on Spring Drives!?
WHO ARE THE WINNERS?
Umm, I hate to give a politically correct answer, but I think we all are. And I promise in the future I will not START any more contests that don't END.
Your humbled moderator,
Mike aka Cazalea