COMPETITIVE OVERLAPS WITHIN TITAN

While ‘competitive overlaps outside Titan’ has been within the radar of things that the company has always had its eye on, there was another problem that went unchecked for a long time until it made the design and coordination of sub brands/collections difficult. It was the problem of sub brands and collections competing with each other. While ‘competitive overlaps outside Titan’ revealed the relative ‘sameness’ in the design and core offerings of watches from different companies within a certain price and target group, ‘competitive overlaps within Titan’ will try to focus on how ‘differentiation’ between the sub brands and collections within the company has become a muddy subject.

A few pages ago, we saw each collection laid out with a description of the core distinctive characteristics and their target audience. However, there are three things that make the division less clear in the day to day design of products within the company.

The first is the fact that the base on which we build our sub brands and collections (the user) evolves and shifts with time, just like the tectonic plates beneath our feet. Today most users across categories want more watches that are designed ‘simple’ and ‘dressy’. In case, that sounds like a paradox, I’ll clarify what simple and dressy means. A public demand for ‘simple’ watches mean that most people are not looking for a busy dial packed dense with detail or multiple complications. ‘Dressy ‘ means that the watch should look premium and combine well with the kind of business casual clothes we find ourselves in for the most part. The change in the desires of users are more nuanced than just ‘simple’ and ‘dressy’ but to speak broadly, we’ll leave it there for a moment. We can see this happen with Titan Regalia. In the past, Regalia was all about gold and detailed layered designs. However with a change in the Regalia consumer, Regalia needed to change as well. You’ll see less gold and more silver or black in their latest Grand Master series. While this may be a good move to contemporize the Regalia collection, it eats into the octane design space. The second is an unfortunate consequence of how design plays out in a mass company. While the flagship models of every collection will look distinct and stand out, as we start looking at the less expensive models in the collection, we find that they all look very similar. Due to these watches being at the lower end of the hierarchy, designers in the company are not able to devote enough time to designing them differently. However, most of the watches that are bought

Figure 119. Titan 2018 Octane or Regalia?

Figure 120. Titan 2018 Karishma Figure 121. Titan 2018 Raga

are from this fuzzy spectrum of watches and thus they affect the business metrics of each sub brand significantly. To the end user, it may not matter whether the commodified watch he/she bought is from one sub brand or another, however, as a design effort, if you’re spending time to design difference that won’t be perceived, then you’re wasting your time. Even if that time is a week’s work, when you add up all the weeks then you get a significant amount of time that you could have saved had you established better clarity at the start.

Lastly, Titan is a brand that is often associated with an older target audience. The company is well aware of this and is actively trying to attract younger users to buy into both watches and the Titan brand. One example can be highlighted from Raga. Raga watches have always been seen as the kind of watches you either buy for special festive seasons(when you’re clad in heavy ethnic armor) or a raga is bought by/for an elder women (while the company cites this age bracket to be around 30 years and above, I would gauge that number to be older). To keep the Raga sub brand from getting older by moving along with the same set of users that have already adopted their watches, they are seeking to appeal to younger women. They are also looking at moving away from being all about ornate designs and special occasions to being more everyday. Newer releases like Raga Viva are proof of this move. This shift has caused them to eat into the consumer space for Titan Neo and Titan Classique.