Insight
Better sound quality alone wouldn’t get Bose SoundTrue onto millennials’ radars.
The headphone market has exploded in the past five years. Brands like Beats have created a boom in ‘Fashion’ Headphones. Its colourful look-at-me appearance is designed to appeal to a millennial audience that is placing a premium on “style over sound”.
Bose has always set the standard for sound but now needed to compete in aesthetics. Bose launched a new range – SoundTrue – of more playful, affordable headphones designed to challenge Beats’ dominance in this market. Available in every colour from white to teal and retailing at £100 less than their usual models, the new SoundTrue range offered great sound and great style.
The primary goal was a conventional one: to sell headphones.
However, social, qualitative and brand research studies proved that while millennials respected Bose, they didn’t relate to the brand - it wasn’t part of their consideration set. Bose would only sell headphones if it addressed this.
This transformed the role of media. This wasn’t about building launch awareness. This was about make Bose’s brand purpose “Better Sound Through Research” relevant for the younger generation.
Bose is one of the most authentic brands there is, built on research and audio excellence – authenticity which Mediacom knew would appeal to millennials. If the agency could communicate the brand in a modern, relevant and credible way, the headphones would sell themselves.
Strategy
Yes, millennials are swayed by fashion and celebrity – but they also value authenticity.
The dominance of Beats was established through a celebrity, music, sports and media culture that put a premium on style rather than substance.
Mediacom decided that consumers should make their own decision, not follow the herd. It decided to tap into a passion for originality, authenticity, craft and experimentalism.
The #listenforyourself platform would ask them not to follow the crowd but to decide for themselves which headphones they loved. To do this Bose had to be a part of their scene; and had to be authentic.
The agency trawled traditional datasets but quickly realised it needed to see real listening data, and real-time music trends. To do this it had to access a dataset never accessed by brands before: Spotify listening information. Spotify’s listening data helped uncover hidden music movements from around the world – trends that were now, real and undiscovered. Music scenes like hip-hop in Japan or electro in India were unveiled.
The #listenforyourself challenge would invite the millennial audience to explore these stories, appealing to their desire for the unusual and esoteric, thereby providing them with significant social collateral. #listenforyourself media would focus on embedding that content into newsfeeds where more than 50% of the audience now discover their new and original content.
To ensure that stories got their attention Mediacom’s strategy would combine three elements:
• A research-based understanding of the music habits of millennials around the world.
• Authentic, original, localised stories in a newsfeed narrated by a partner with a natural affinity with the audience.
• Impactful placement, delivered through the newest technology, giving Bose a stand-out presence in its targets’ newsfeeds.
To fulfil this strategy Mediacom assembled a team that would provide unique data, compelling content and far reaching connections.
Execution
A powerful three-way partnership – with Spotify, Vice and Facebook – allowed the agency to deliver stories at scale. Mediacom teamed up with:
• The millennial music platform of choice, Spotify, to provide listening data that would fuel the stories.
• The millennial media owner of choice, Vice, to tell those stories in the most authentic way.
• The largest millennial social network, Facebook, which gave Bose a prominent newsfeed presence and the highest affinity millennial network Tumblr.
As the first media agency to access Spotify listening data, Mediacom identified fascinating music trends from around the world.
It knew to get millennials' attention, only engaging, authentic, documentary-style content would get them hooked and intrigued, so used the listening data to shape two key properties, developed by Vice into:
1. ‘Scene Unseen’ looked at unexpected music scenes; from the burgeoning dancehall scene in Japan to India’s underground electro movement.
2. ‘Behind The Sound’ featured intimate interviews with artists such as The Hives.
For each property the agency created films that were primarily distributed in the Facebook newsfeed, where Bose was one of the first brands in Europe to use auto-play for video.
Mediacom turned the Spotify data into interesting infographics appealing to music lovers, like which city listens the most to reggae (Stockholm!). This short-form content delivered more frequent #listenforyourself stories through Facebook and Tumblr.
All content was localised in French, German and English for maximum impact.
And to close the loop to purchase, direct response copy pushed people to the product page.
Results
The campaign radically transformed perceptions of Bose and ensured that its SoundTrue headphones have rocked at retail. It gave the dad brand a youthful voice, shifted its perception whilst ensuring SoundTrue headphones benefitted in store.
The #listenforyourself videos have so far been seen more than 25 million times across all platforms and continue to be watched, transforming Bose’s brand image in this critical market.
The agency created brand new partnerships, uncovered fresh data and made the most of every morsel of content it got out of it.