When you buy a watch, you aren’t just getting the physical timepiece on your wrist, but you are also buying a brand. Expensive items are funny that way, in that when you purchase the item, the entire personality of the brand comes with it. In many instances these days, branding is often more important than the items themselves. Many top “luxury houses” thrive on the fact that people want to “wear their brands,” more so even than they actually want the actual products – a concept that is extremely common in the world of watches.

Why someone likes or wants one particular brand versus another is another conversation entirely. In fact, I could probably write a book about it. Over the years, I’ve become more and more interested in how people relate to brands – it is similar in some ways to how they relate to other people, groups, and feelings of identity. The purpose of this conversation is to ask fellow watch lovers what ways a brand’s image can be tainted – leading to someone either not being interested in a brand to begin with, or worse, reversing their positive opinion of a brand to a negative one. Somewhere in the middle is a more ambivalent sentiment where a brand never upsets a possible consumer, but also fails to make any impact whatsoever that helps to convince the consumer they should own something from the brand.

Given that high-end watches do not come with modest price tags, consumers carefully consider which watches they want from both a product and brand perspective. In some instances, consumers are given so many choices that rather than looking for reasons to like a watch, they look for reasons to like a watch less, in order to reduce the group of timepieces they need to choose from.

I’ve noticed that, in many cases, people may use relatively minor instances or experiences that turn them off to brands. Other times, people very much want to like a brand only to have their feelings destroyed by a negative experience that the brand fails to rectify. So what I want to ask the aBlogtoWatch audience regards the experiences they have had which have either turned them off to a brand initially, or that have reversed their positive opinion of a brand to a negative one. Perhaps in the future, we can talk about how brands have been able to redeem themselves after making a “mistake,” and thus having to make amends with consumers.

I realize that it might not be possible to include in poll-question format all of the reasons that someone might be turned off to a brand, but I’ll do my best to come up with some of the larger types of situations which can have a negative effect on someone’s relationship with the brand. As always, please do elaborate on your experiences in the comments below. This is particularly interesting to me because there tend to be a series of brands which (despite economic and sales success) tend to routinely incur the wrath of at least some watch consumers – and I’m really curious as to why that might be.