The Neuroscience Behind "Swiss Made"
Why Your Brain Betrays Your Wallet
So, let’s venture a little deeper into said hole, and explore the science which proves your ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been thoroughly colonised by marketing departments in Geneva. Once you understand what’s happening in those 85 billion neurons of yours, you’ll never look at a Swiss Made dial the same way again.
Estimated reading time: ~18 mins
Beyond Pepsi
If Montague’s 2003 Pepsi Test was the opening salvo in understanding brand-related neuroscience, then the wine studies that followed were the full-scale invasion. In 2008, researchers at Stanford and Caltech1 conducted one of the most revealing studies about price perception ever undertaken. They had volunteers taste wines while their brains were being scanned using fMRI, and they told participants they would be sampling five different wines priced at $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle.
Except… there were actually only three wines! Two of them were served twice but with different price tags. When participants thought they were drinking the $90 wine, they loved it. When the exact same wine was presented as costing $10, they rated it significantly lower. What’s even more remarkable is that this wasn’t just people being polite or trying to seem sophisticated; their brain scans showed that increasing the price of a wine actually increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (the area widely thought to encode experienced pleasantness). In essence, these participants weren’t even pretending to like expensive wine more; they were literally experiencing it as more pleasurable2.
This should sound familiar, because it’s exactly what Jack described happening with the Pepsi Challenge - except now we understand the mechanics a little better. A couple of years ago I discussed materialism; if we accept Francis Crick’s astonishing hypothesis (that our consciousness, emotions, and experiences are “no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells”) then these marketing effects we observe in studies would essentially amount to physical changes in brain activity which end up altering the actual quality of our experiences and what they are not, is just some basic “psychological trickery.”
Brain & Brand
Nowadays, researchers call this the “marketing placebo effect”3 i.e. a behavioural and physical change which is produced by marketing alone, and is totally separate from the product itself. This effect is not to be underestimated, and to highlight this point I want to reference another insane study. Other research4 has shown that people who paid discounted prices for energy drinks solved fewer puzzles than those who paid full price for identical products. Here, the discount affected a lot more than just perception; it measurably reduced physical effectiveness.
Think about that for a second; my reaction was “what the fvck!” If it isn’t clear already, let me spell out the implications in simple English:
Marketing not only influences what you think about a product; it also changes how well that product actually works for you.
To a large extent, your brain quite literally gets what it pays for, and objective quality doesn’t necessarily matter. This also connects directly to what I wrote about dopamine and watch collecting. Remember, dopamine is widely accepted to be about pleasure - but it’s also about expectation and reward prediction. So when your brain sees that Rolex crown, sure, it’s recognising a logo; but it’s also firing up the same reward circuits that respond to cocaine, sex, or a perfectly timed joke5. Following this logic, the higher the price tag, the stronger the expectation signal, and the more powerful the eventual reward when you strap that watch on to your wrist.
Where the placebo effect lives6
We concluded that the BVMS—the brain’s valuation and motivation system—is a causal contributor to the placebo effect. The BVMS, composed of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum, assigns subjective value to things around us and determines how motivated we are to approach them. The ventral striatum is also known as the motivation centre of the brain, i.e. the brain’s chief “dopamine dealer”.
On Japanese Brands
Let’s go back to Jack’s original observation about Japanese versus Swiss brands. If we agree that research has sufficiently shown the exposure to luxury items activates the brain’s reward centres, which then triggers the release of dopamine and creates pleasure and satisfaction, then we can also agree that this neurological response easily explains why consumers are willing to pay extraordinary prices for luxury goods (i.e. it’s not just about the luxury product itself, but about the emotional and psychological fulfilment it gives the buyer).
With that context, I think the Japanese Big Three (Casio, Citizen, and Seiko) simply have a neurological disadvantage. Decades of marketing have trained consumers’ brains to associate Switzerland with precision, luxury, and exclusivity. In many of the studies, when the test subjects could see brand information, the parts of their brains associated with emotions, memories, and unconscious processing showed enhanced activity. All this proves is that knowledge of the brand will alter how the brain perceives products from the brand.
Japan may actually have superior manufacturing capabilities in some cases, but overall, I think it carries associations with efficiency or value as opposed to exclusivity. Grand Seiko might produce some movements which do outperform Rolex chronometrically, but they are fighting against neural pathways carved by decades of “Swiss Made” marketing. This would be like trying to convince someone that The Matrix isn’t real when they’ve been plugged into the system since birth; in that sort of setup, their very framework for processing reality is, inherently, compromised.
Susceptibility May Vary
Before
pipes up with his usual snark, I will add that not everyone falls prey to marketing placebo effects equally, and he remains a shining example of how some collectors can see past ‘the traditional hierarchy’ of brand prestige while others stay on script.Looking at different bits of research, it feels like there are three key factors which determine people’s susceptibility to marketing placebo effects: (1) consumers high in reward seeking, (2) low in somatosensory awareness, and (3) high in need for cognition. I nearly left all the definitions as a footnote because it felt like we were getting too far into the weeds, but I decided to move it back up here because it is genuinely interesting!
High in Reward Seeking
This is basically your dopamine hunger - how much your brain craves that next hit of pleasure and satisfaction. If you’re high in reward seeking, you will constantly be chasing experiences that make you feel good; whether that’s the rush of buying a new watch, the satisfaction of completing a collection, or just the daily pleasure of checking the time on something beautiful.
It’s worth remembering that not only do people high in reward seeking want more pleasure, they are also more sensitive to cues that predict reward. So when their brain sees a Rolex crown or reads “Swiss Made” for example, it will already start firing up the reward circuits in anticipation.
Low in Somatosensory Awareness
This one is a bit more subtle but equally powerful. Somatosensory awareness is how tuned in you are to physical sensations from your body; this is things like texture, weight, temperature, and even your own heartbeat and breathing.
People with low somatosensory awareness are less likely to rely on direct physical experience and more likely to be influenced by external cues like branding and price. These people are not as connected to what they are actually feeling, so their brain fills in the gaps with contextual information.
In watch collecting, someone with high somatosensory awareness might immediately notice the difference between a Seiko SKX and a Submariner just from holding it - the weight distribution, the smoothness of the bracelet links, the tactile feedback from the crown and bezel etc. Someone with low somatosensory awareness might not consciously register these physical differences, and instead, their brain relies more heavily on visual cues (Rolex logo, iconic design), contextual information (the price or source), and social signals (brand prestige) to determine how the watch makes them feel.
High Cognition
This may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but the need for cognition measures how much one enjoys thinking, analysing, and processing complex information. People high in this trait actively seek out mental challenges and prefer complex explanations to simple ones.
You might be inclined to think this would make someone more resistant to marketing manipulation, right? Usually, all that analytical thinking should help you see through brand positioning and focus on objective specifications. But some research shows exactly the opposite, and I quote: “emotion and cognition have a significant impact on brand attitude.”
It might be a stretch to say people with high need for cognition are MORE susceptible to marketing placebo effects but it might in fact be true because these people engage more deeply with all the complex narratives that brands create. They are over-thinkers, so it might be that they never just see a Patek; they may in fact process the entire story about Swiss heritage, generational craftsmanship, celestial complications, and all that mechanical poetry BS. Their analytical brains may not dismiss this as marketing fluff, and instead treat it as rich, complex information worth factoring into their decisions. I have yet to find a study that definitively proves this, so I’ll state this as my own interpretation after reading a few different papers. If I were pursuing a Doctoral thesis or something, I would say this is a fabulous topic to research further.
On Blind Testing Watches
Jack was spot on about the fundamental impossibility of blind-testing watches7. Unlike wine or soft drinks, watches are inherently visual products where design language has become inseparable from brand identity. Research shows8 that packaging and visual design primarily affects the automatic and intuitive part of the brain. After this first impression, the brain rationalises decisions in the logical and reflective parts.