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In 1955 Citizen introduced their Parashock technology to the Japanese domestic market.
At this time Seiko dominated the local watch market and while the Citizen technologies matched, and in some cases exceeded the Seiko range, the public needed to be convinced.
To highlight the performance of the Parashock technology Citizen devised a number of very public tests to show how shock resistant these new watches were.
These demonstrations involved dropping numerous watches from tall local buildings, planes and helicopters live in front of a public crowd.
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This example was conduced June 10th 1958 in the Kyoto City Hall Square.
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These demonstrations drew large crowds and they were conducted across the country.
Here is a demonstration being held at a local soccer match.
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The results were publicly recorded and then published.
From this table you can see that for the five watches dropped at each event, the overwhelming majority of times all five watches had no issues and in only two instances just one of the five dropped experienced a problem. The table lists the venue, how the watches were dropped e.g. from building, Cessna or helicopter and the number of watches that passed or failed.
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This innovative public marketing campaign was well received and the public embraced the Citizen Parashock technology.
It is likely that the success of this campaign was one of the reasons that Citizen went on to have another large public campaign to promote their Parawater technology. This involved putting Citizen Parawater watches into floating buoys that were sent across the Pacific Ocean.
For more information on the Parawater campaign please check out Stephen's blog post Citizen’s 1964 Demonstrations of their Parawater Watches or this forum post How to convince customers that a watch is waterproof?
I found most of this information in an interesting article on domestic watch marketing in the World Wrist Watch Time Spec No. 18 magazine that was part of a larger special on the Japanese watch industry.
![]()
At this time Seiko dominated the local watch market and while the Citizen technologies matched, and in some cases exceeded the Seiko range, the public needed to be convinced.
To highlight the performance of the Parashock technology Citizen devised a number of very public tests to show how shock resistant these new watches were.
These demonstrations involved dropping numerous watches from tall local buildings, planes and helicopters live in front of a public crowd.
This example was conduced June 10th 1958 in the Kyoto City Hall Square.
These demonstrations drew large crowds and they were conducted across the country.
Here is a demonstration being held at a local soccer match.
The results were publicly recorded and then published.
From this table you can see that for the five watches dropped at each event, the overwhelming majority of times all five watches had no issues and in only two instances just one of the five dropped experienced a problem. The table lists the venue, how the watches were dropped e.g. from building, Cessna or helicopter and the number of watches that passed or failed.
This innovative public marketing campaign was well received and the public embraced the Citizen Parashock technology.
It is likely that the success of this campaign was one of the reasons that Citizen went on to have another large public campaign to promote their Parawater technology. This involved putting Citizen Parawater watches into floating buoys that were sent across the Pacific Ocean.
For more information on the Parawater campaign please check out Stephen's blog post Citizen’s 1964 Demonstrations of their Parawater Watches or this forum post How to convince customers that a watch is waterproof?
I found most of this information in an interesting article on domestic watch marketing in the World Wrist Watch Time Spec No. 18 magazine that was part of a larger special on the Japanese watch industry.
