What is it like to do video marketing in the luxury watches industry? To find out, we talked with Manuel Müller, the CEO of Huber - a retailer of luxury watches.
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In the luxury business, we work together with famous brands with various strict standards and rules. What you have to make, say on social media, website, etc. We usually have to promote with material that brands prepared in advance. Therefore, you can't individualize the messages, pictures, and stories for you personally - it's standardized worldwide. So each retailer who has Rolex, IWC, or Cartier has the same amount of visual assets he can choose from.
And that's a big issue in the luxury industry. Brands want us to stick to a design and the colors as they say. Therefore, we can't do individual things on social media. But we want people to get in contact with us. We also want customers to know us and who we are. That’s why we asked ourselves: how can we do that? That people get the feeling, what is Huber and what is our philosophy?
That's why we said YouTube is a possibility because there are no restrictions from brands for videos. On YouTube, you are essentially free; you can do your content. Of course, a large demographic pool was very attractive for us.
As mentioned, YouTube was very interesting for us due to its large demographic pool. That's the reason why we made three dedicated channels. One channel is the Huber Lifestyle. The second is Huber Time Talk. And the third is under construction Huber Vintage. All of them are in German.
The idea is that our vintage expert is talking with collectors or with some sales staff about one or two watches. And vintage watches are older than 30 or 40 years. With this channel, we want to show people that we have expertise in this area and tell the history of this particular watch. Our goal is to give the emotions, the past, the stories about the watches, and the expertise that Huber Vintage has for vintage watches.
The second channel is Huber Time Talk. The host is an older guy, around 50. He's talking with our sales staff, partners, suppliers, and people who are linked to us about specific topics, and it's half an hour with each guest.
One time with a supplier, we talked about Tissot; one time, we spoke about jewelry; another was about what is in and out of the watches.
The third channel is Huber Lifestyle. This is a typical YouTube channel for younger people. It's fresh. It's individual. I am the host, and we are talking with different YouTube influencers. We are doing a challenge where I show YouTubers watches, and they have to give the price, and I say it's correct or not.
If they bought the watch, then they talk about the stories behind it. This channel is about the younger generation where we want to show the people that we are not elite, we are younger, we are open-minded, and we do entertainment in the watch business.
To sum up, we have three channels with three different target groups. What's the goal behind that?
We have a strong partner, the manager of some YouTube stars in Germany. Together, we made a concept with him at the start in which he is also helping us with SEO video guidance such as length, title, etc.
We are also talking together about video ideas. I have some proposals; our partner has recommendations, and the people doing the content have some suggestions from their experience. So it's a combination of 3, and we are discussing what is good and what not.
We had talked about that at the start. Should we do that, or should we not do that? We said no because there is a lot of competition and we don't want to copy that. Maybe when we are longer online and have a community, it would make sense for how-to videos, but not for a start. It's not entertaining, so it's not so working well at the beginning. But when you have a community, you can do more and more different types of videos.
The good thing in the luxury business is that we do not see the result in views. People must see how we are and that we are not elite, that we are open, that we are younger, and that everybody can come in. The result is very good for that goal because we made no advertisements. Some customers came to us and said hey, I saw your video; I think that's very good! Finally, we see that you are younger. That you are open. So for us, that's the currency we are looking for, not to have many views.
We are working on a project where we collaborate with German YouTube stars on our channel. We are building individual watches for a YouTube-Star and the watch brand. With 1000 pieces and the only point of sale is our shop.
So we are finally putting the pieces together from the awareness online to offline, to our shop. That's the next big project we are doing on YouTube, and a nice part of the collaboration is that it wasn’t planned. To summarize, we have a strategy for one year, and let’s see what will happen.
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