CEO Frédéric Arnault tells Rob Corder how he is condensing years of repositioning TAG Heuer into this year’s 60th anniversary for the iconic Carrera chronograph.
Frédéric Arnault did not have an easy start to his tenure as chief executive of TAG Heuer.
His very first public appearance was in New York in March of 2020, where an international audience of journalists gathered to see him introduce a new generation of Connected luxury smartwatches.
The usually jaded press pack was particularly attentive that night as the son of LVMH’s CEO and chairman, Bernard Arnault, took to the stage for what would normally have been a pretty routine product line extension announcement.
It was not just the fact that another member of the Arnault family was taking the reins at one of LVMH’s most historic brands causing a frisson that night.
There was almost certainly something else in the air: a virus that would kill millions over the next three years and turn the global economy on its head.
Nobody present had any idea how devastating covid would become, but within days it would have been impossible to get a commercial flight out of the United States.
By March 20, TAG Heuer had closed its factories along with every other watchmaker in the world. TAG Heuer’s mantra, Don’t Crack Under Pressure, could never have been more apposite than during those first few months for the new CEO.
Covid looked like an existential threat for every business, but we now know that companies like TAG Heuer not only survived, they have bounced back to record sales higher than before the pandemic over the past year.
The company is evolving under Mr Arnault, with innovation at the heart of new products positioned to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Connoisseurs and collectors have been treated to classic reissues like the Monaco x Gulf, which scooped the Iconic Watch Prize at GPHG, while younger customers have had their heads turned by novelties like a first solar-powered TAG Heuer, which appeared in the Aquaracer collection, and the unveiling of the Carrera Plasma decorated with lab-grown diamonds; another first.
The Plasma, in particular, showed a new confidence for grabbing attention on social media, an environment that terrifies many of the old guard in Switzerland.
This tilt at wedding product innovation with modern marketing was even more in evidence later in the year when TAG Heuer signed a new generation of brand ambassadors, including 14-year-old skateboarder Sky Brown, Britain’s youngest Olympian, who helped to launch a range of vibrant coloured TAG Heuer Formula 1 watches.
Hollywood star Ryan Gosling, who signed with TAG Heuer in 2021, appeared in The Gray Man action thriller clipped into a three-hand Carrera automatic, the first major outing for an ambassador who this year will take his association with the brand to a new level.
Arguably the most significant development was a formal partnership with Porsche, the German car maker who was also so in thrall to the legendary (and deadly) Carrera Panamericana rally in Mexico during the 1950s that it has been using the name since the 1970s. There was no connection between Carrera the watch and Carrera the sports car until Mr Arnauld finalised a deal to formalise the marriage in 2022.
Meanwhile, a thoroughly modern boutique style was being rolled out with retail partners around the world. International groups including Watches of Switzerland, which has 19 TAG Heuer boutiques in the UK alone, are creating a physical canvas for the brand using bright, contemporary interiors with digital displays to give customers an immersive experience.
Product innovation, omnichannel marketing and the elevated retail experience are all part of one unifying strategy that Mr Arnault is executing at TAG Heuer that manages to satisfy experts who pore over every facet and finish for historical significance while drawing in a new generation of customers who might only buy one fine mechanical or quartz timepiece in their lives. And, if nothing in the analogue catalogue appeals, there is always the TAG Heuer Connected smartwatch.
“It is important to appeal to a younger audience, which you hear a lot about in the watch industry. We believe that it is not incompatible to be mainstream while at the same time appealing to connoisseurs and collectors. We want to appeal to a wide audience. TAG Heuer might be a first watch or once in a lifetime watch, so a lot of our customers are not fanatics or enthusiasts. But at the same time we have the rigour and legitimacy to appeal more and more to the enthusiasts,” Mr Arnault tells WatchPro in an interview ahead of this year’s Watches and Wonders.
Connoisseurs, collectors, fanatics and enthusiasts, as Mr Arnault calls them, would not forgive TAG Heuer if 2023, the 60th anniversary of the Carrera, slipped by unmarked. They will not be disappointed, and nor will the younger customers the CEO wants to attract. There is something for everybody in this year’s line-up.
The hero piece is a new “glass box” Carrera Chronograph, available in blue or black, which takes inspiration from the very first Carrera designed by Heuer’s motor racing obsessed CEO Jack Heuer, who wanted to create nothing less than the perfect chronograph to wear on the track.
This was far from Heuer’s first chronograph, but the young Mr Heuer, who took over as the fourth generation of the family to run the timekeeping company in 1958, had an eye for marketing matched to product innovation, much as Mr Arnault does today.
He learned about Mexico’s Carrera Panamericana — which claimed 27 lives in just five runnings in the early 1950s before being cancelled — and concluded that the speed, emotion, jeopardy and romance of the race made it a good name for his new line of chronograph wristwatches.
The Panamerica connection has faded into history a little, but the Carrera retains its association with a racing spirit for a young, stylish, upwardly mobile generation for both TAG Heuer and Porsche.
The glass box glass was key to the legibility of the first Carrera chronographs, which had to pack a lot of information onto a 36mm dial. Domed glass created space above a dial that curved at its outer edge and carried a fifth of a second track for accurate measurement off the central chronograph hand. This made more room for larger subdials indicating small seconds as well as an hour and 30 minute counter.
This glass box case has been modernised in recent years, and much improved with tougher, scratch-resistant sapphire glass on 39mm versions of the Carrera, which also have more dial space to add additional features like a tachymeter scale. TAG Heuer has drawn all of this together in the 2023 Carrera, whose most notable feature is an extra curve in the dial so that it first rises towards its outer edge — as it did in 1963 for the fifth of a second track — and then dips again to meet an integrated bezel to make room for a tachymeter under the glass.
The watch’s flange and indexes have also been curved, which further improves the fluidity and legibility of the dial.
“We took inspiration from the past, but used today’s techniques,” Mr Arnault explains.
There is a movement upgrade as well, with the Heuer 02 automatic replaced with the TH20-00, which has a bi-directional rotor shaped into the TAG Heuer arrow.
For those that want a little more horological sophistication in their Carrera, TAG Heuer has also produced a new 42mm Carrera Chronograph Tourbillon housing a COSC-certified TH20-09 automatic movement.
TAG Heuer is broadening the popular appeal of the 60th anniversary family, and embracing the current trend for brightly coloured dials, with a range of 36mm Carrera Date watches.
The 36mm steel on steel models have a slightly tweaked case and a new tapered bracelet design compared to previous versions, but it is the dial colours that grab all the attention, coming in silver, blue, green and — get your name down fast — pink.
There is an improvement under the hood as well, with the Calibre 5 automatic movement and its 38 hour power reserve upgraded to a Calibre 7, which will keep purring for 56 hours.
The new Carrera Chronograph and the 36mm Carrera Date watches both appear, or should we say star, in a movie starring Ryan Reynolds that has been created to promote the 60th anniversary watches.
In a first for a major watch brand, this is not a regular film with product placement, it is a standalone short film made using Hollywood blockbuster levels of creativity, direction and production.
Called The Chase for Carrera, it has all the accoutrements of a Hollywood release, including a trailer, which will be aired for the first time on day one of Watches and Wonders, posters, billboards, social media adverts, the lot.
We will only see the trailer at the show because the main event, a worldwide premier, will take place in London a few weeks later, complete with a red carpet appearance by Ryan Gosling and his co-star, comedian Vanessa Bayer, who he has worked with before on Saturday Night Live.
TAG Heuer’s chief marketing officer, George Ciz, says he wants the movie to be “truly disruptive”, and for people watching it to engage with the brand on an emotional level.
“To succeed, you have to stand out,” he tells WatchPro, describing how The Chase for Carrera, a spoof of classic car chase movies, fits into a world where consumers are bombarded with marketing all day, every day through their phones.
“We are confident it will connect,” he adds.
This is the new language of luxury promotions in which other LVMH brands excel.
Over at Tiffany & Co., which the group acquired in 2021, Beyoncé’s “Lose Yourself in Love” campaign ahead of Christmas last year, notched up 4.6 billion social media impressions and 690 million video views. That’s what you call cut-through.
TAG Heuer is not being positioned or promoted in quite the same way, because Mr Arnault believes product is more important in watches than might be the case in jewellery (don’t tell his brother Alexandre who runs Tiffany).
“Repositioning TAG Heuer today is mainly being done through our products. We are increasing the perceived value, improving the design, ergonomics and durability of the watches,” he insists.
That may be so, but it is no easy feat to align product strategy with improved presentation at retail, both online and in stores, along with bold marketing through partnerships and campaigns that resonate with the broadest target audience.
This 60th anniversary for the iconic Carrera is giving Mr Arnault and TAG Heuer precisely that opportunity, and the company appears to be grasping it with the sort of relish that his predecessor Jack Heuer would appreciate.
Formula 1 Survives and Thrives
Formula 1 racing is changing. Once fuelled by adrenaline, masculinity bordering on misogyny and danger, the apex series of the motoring world was falling out of step with millennial tastes.
Its officials tackled the safety of the sport first, with new tracks designed to prevent high speed crashes, cars with far greater protection for drivers and rules that kept lethal contact to a minimum. The business also modernised its image, with pit lane girls banished and a push towards less environmentally damaging engines.
But the changes pleased almost nobody. Races became processional, cars are quieter in the hybrid era and the whole sport became less edgy and glamorous. There was a danger of the public losing interest, which was bad news for a brand like TAG Heuer that is forever associated with the Monaco Grand Prix, and had been investing millions into its partnership with Red Bull Racing.
“When I joined, Formula 1 motor sport was not any more at the core of TAG Heuer’s strategy. There was criticism of it being an old man’s sport; it had a huge issue to tackle around sustainability. But now the picture is very different.” recalls CEO Frédéric Arnault.
Then along came Netflix and its Drive to Survive documentary series. Suddenly the sport was not just about the race weekends, but about lifestyle stories of the drivers, the teams, the money, the mayhem, the comedy — the entire circus of billionaire owners and multi-millionaire drivers performing extraordinary feats of athleticism and bravery.
The turnaround could not have come at a better time for Mr Arnault, who took the decision to refocus TAG Heuer’s energies into the spectacle.
“A lot of our investment was going into other sports and entertainment partnerships. We decided we would concentrate our investment into motor sports, and particularly Formula 1 where we have sponsorship of the now two-time World Championship-winning Red Bull Racing,” he describes. “This was three to four years’ ago at a time when Formula 1 was making a real comeback.”
The sport is hot again, and not just for petrol heads. It is once more a marketeers dream.
“Due to Netflix, it has a huge new audience. They are much younger. There are a lot of women who are really interested in the sport, in the dynamics and in the drivers. It has become more international. Rather than being focused too much on Europe, it has become much stronger in Asia and the United States,” Mr Arnault says.
With America currently the largest market in the world for luxury watches, outings this year in Miami and a brand new street race in Las Vegas, will be incredible opportunities for all watchmakers associated with the sport.
But TAG Heuer will benefit more than most thanks to both its deep association with its Monaco and other collections of sporty chronographs, but also because Red Bull Racing and its star driver Max Verstappen, look near certain to walk away with both the driver’s and constructor’s championship for a third year in a row.
