Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Rolex brand

The Swiss watchmaking industry has been badly impacted by the Covid pandemic and despite its brand image and resilience ROLEX is no exception. 👑

That is what Google trends data are showing as a reflection of the interest for the brand during those difficult times. 📉

In this analysis, I extracted Google search volumes for 16 Swiss watchmaking brands during the January 2019 to October 2020 period. The idea was to analyze the decrease of searches during the 1st wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (March to June 2020) and see how bad the industry was impacted and if some brands were more impacted than others.

Interest for the Rolex brand since January 2019

As reflected in the chart above, the number of searches (expressed as a percentage of the week with the most searches for the brand) have been quite stable in 2019 with small peaks in March 2019 for Baselworld or in December 2019 for the holiday season. However, going into 2020 we see a huge drop in March and a very slow recovery without reaching the same levels of the previous year. We saw a peak in August 2020 for the presentation of 2020 novelties

Rolex is not the only brand impacted

Rolex is obvious the most famous Swiss watch brand in the world, but as I mentioned in the introduction of this article, it is not the only brand impacted by this pandemic.

Rolex is the most famous brand with 3 times more searches than the second brand Omega

In fact, most of the 16 brands have been impacted in similar proportions. Ulysse Nardin and Hublot with -35% and -37% respectively have been the most impacted brands while Omega and Vacheron Constantin have experienced relatively little impact.

Search volume in March-June 2020 vs last year

Evolution of the interest for Swiss watchmaking brands since 2019

Rolex collections / models

Rolex has many different models and price points. The submariner is maybe the most iconic model but as we can see some other models also generate a lot of searches like the Datejust (just 18% less searches than the Submariner) or the infamous Cosmograph Daytona.

The Rolex Submariner is the most looked after collection

Interest for all those collections have been impacted by the pandemic but some have shown more resilience than others.

Impact on the pandemic on interest for Rolex models

All models have experienced a decline of interest in 2020

Want to see more?

More details on the dashboard on my Tableau account: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Rolex brand Dashboard. You can also do your own searches on Google Trends!