Obsolete products don’t disappear if they solve a different kind of need.

Luxury watch sales have been climbing again.

Rolex, along with brands like Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet, continues to post strong demand despite the obvious, ironic reality.

A smartphone is more accurate, and infinitely more useful.

Both make an analog watch completely unnecessary.

And yet, the category is growing.

This isn’t a tech story, but a meaning one that marketers and product makers struggle to get their heads around.

An analog watch does not compete on function at all. Forever, the best watches were the most precise.

Now smart watches, and everybody’s phone, are perfectly precise, always. Auto-freaking-matically. Even when you cross time zones and switch to and from Daylight time.

But the luxury watch competes on what it says to people who are not the wearer.

Stuff like craft, permanence, taste, and in many cases, achievement.

Heck, it’s always about achievement.

It turns a timekeeping accessory into something personal and visible.

You can see the same weird pattern with vinyl records. Digital is objectively better on almost every measurable dimension, but vinyl persists because it delivers something else entirely.

Ownership. Ritual. Identity. The ability to hear something special in the crackles and pops that others can’t have in the most perfect digital recording.

As Taylor Swift puts it, when you know, you know.

I’m SO not the market for analog watches. I like my walks tracked automatically, a haptic tap on my wrist for directions, and the ability to walkie-talkie my wife without pulling out my phone.

That is pure function. (My only achievement is buckling it on in the dark every morning.)

And yet function is clearly not the ONLY driver of demand.

In fact, once a category is saturated with function, something irrational happens.

The winning products often charge in the exact opposite direction. They become minimally about capability and essentially all about meaning. I challenge you to show me otherwise!

That’s where premium, high-margin products live.

For product makers and marketers, this raises an interesting question.

If your product disappeared tomorrow, would customers miss what it does? Or would they really miss who it makes them?

Want to make your product irresistible? That’s what we do as product go-to-market experts at Graphos Product, helping innovators turn need-driven ideas into market-ready successes.