Asecret smile keeps watchmakers ticking
Whether it is David Beckham ostentatiously showing off his Breitling or a European plutocrat declaring that he doesn’t actually own his Patek Philippe but merely holds on to it for the next generation, one thing holds true.
In the wealthy world of watch adverts it is almost always 10:10.
So why does everyone from Accurist to Zodiac think that this very specific time is best for selling their wares? Theories have ranged from the fact that at 10.10 the company’s logo is not obscured by the hands, to the idea that it might be a marker of the time at which Abraham Lincoln was shot.
Now psychologists have suggested that it is because watches set to that time make a smiley face. They also showed that compared to the mirror image "sad face" of 8.20, people feel happier when looking at them.
For an experiment published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, researchers from the University of Tubingen in Germany sought to see if there is something about 10.10 that might make it attractive to both advertisers and potential customers, even if only subliminally so.
They showed 46 people a selection of watches set to either 11:30, 8:20 or 10:10, and asked them to rate how likely they were to buy them and how pleasurable they found looking at them.
Separately, they asked the participants to compare the watch dials to expressions. They found watches showing 10.10 evoked more pleasurable feelings, and there was also evidence that the participants may have been more willing to buy them.
Charles Spence, a psychology professor at the University of Oxford, said that the experiment tied in with research showing that people are very good at picking out faces, even if they don’t realise it.
"It’s something we probably evolved for," he said. "Just like finding food and foraging, we need to be able to rapidly interpret facial expressions and emotions. It happens outside of our awareness." And if that face is happy, it makes us happy too.
Professor Spence said that since reading the research, he has noticed the clock settings everywhere. "At the airport, in magazines, there it is. You can’t believe you hadn’t seen it before."
Watch companies insisted that their marketing decisions are based on more practical considerations. "The main reason is so the brand logo is not interrupted and there is a lovely symmetry in the aesthetic of the design. This position also ensures that the date window at three o’clock or six o’clock or any of the subdials on chronographs are not obscured," Craig Leach, brand director at Raymond Weil, said.
He did not discount the subconscious entirely though. "The 10.10 position also creates a subliminal tick of approval," Mr Leach added.