Wonderful essay by Paul Graham: The Brand Age. I learned a lot about watch history from it.

I like how he positions branding and design as opposite:

Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge. […] It’s the same if you want to set your designs apart. If you choose good options, other people will choose them too.

Which shortly leads to pointing out that religion also has its followers do inconvenient and unreasonable things:

Indeed, the conflict between branding and design is so fundamental that it extends far beyond things we call design. We see it even in religion. If you want the adherents of a religion to have customs that set them apart from everyone else, you can’t make them do things that are convenient or reasonable, or other people would do them too. If you want to set your adherents apart, you have to make them do things that are inconvenient and unreasonable.

Ties in well with:

Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it’s not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things.