Once an undisputed staple of the British high street, luxury audio brand Bang & Olufsen has struggled to remain relevant in recent years, with its global brand awareness dropping to a paltry 1% (roughly 8% in the UK).
Naturally, successive economic crises and the challenging retail landscape throughout the 2010s and early 2020s has hardly helped matters, but – speaking at Frontify’s Paradigms Brand Experience Summit in Lisbon last month – Bang & Olufsen’s global creative director Paul Collins admitted that the brand’s lacklustre marketing approach also had a significant role to play.
Collins himself was brought in just over three years ago to help reverse these fortunes and earlier this year revealed the fruit of his labours: an all-new interactive brand platform, tailored towards capturing the attention of that most elusive of customer – Gen Z.
‘See Yourself in Sound’ is a complete departure from anything the brand had done over the past two decades, enabling customers to bring their music taste to life in the form of interactive avatars that reflect each user’s musical preferences.
While previous content had been centred around stony-faced models, emphasising Bang & Olufsen’s luxury qualities, this latest effort infuses some much-needed life into the brand’s image.
“I came in three and a half years ago, and you’re always inheriting a lot of baggage,” Collins begins.
“But brand platform wasn’t a bad piece of work, it was actually really, really strong.
“It was about being the most desired audio brand in the world, about this whole principle of exist to create, which talks very much to the design, the craftsmanship, and the sound capabilities of what we were. However, I think the way we activated it visually and verbally was wrong.”
Looking to move away from its traditionally older, more established customer in favour of a younger, more relevant audience is the campaign’s ultimate goal – targeting the increasingly financially mature Gen Zs who want to experience luxury audio.
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‘See Yourself in Sound’ marks a radical departure from anything the brand had done before. This is partly down to the emergence of new technologies, but can also be attributed to Gen Z’s fundamentally different outlook.
This generation craves experiences, which is exactly what this campaign activation aims to offer.
Through a specially-designed microsite, users can to link their Spotify account or take a short questionnaire in order to create bespoke, shareable avatars that visually reflect their musical tastes.
On the campaign, Collins explains: “We looked very much at what was happening out there when it comes to self-expression, and that’s how we landed pretty quickly on avatars.
“From a creative standpoint, we’re looking at pulling inspiration from what’s happening, what’s trending within popular culture – but then how do we contextualise that into something that still is ownable for us?”
“We aimed not to blend in with everyone else, to make sure we were actually standing out, we had to be very visually distinctive – that was the genesis of the idea.”
Collins also points out how the campaign is rooted in the idea of giving, as opposed to taking – a popular concept among Gen Z customers, many who reject traditional notions of brand/consumer relationships.
“Then there’s the whole thing about giving something back versus taking, which is essentially ‘Hey, I’m not going to talk about our stuff, and we’re not asking anything of you. You might not know who we are, but if we give you an experience that you feel is cool and want to share it, then we’ve done something’.”
With this new direction, Collins will no doubt be hoping to redefine how customers around the world interact with and view Bang & Olufsen.
Launched earlier this summer, only time will tell if ‘See Yourself in Sound’ has the desired effect, with the audio brand set to make figures available later this year.
Whichever way the results fall – this campaign marks a significant creative departure from the brand’s past, and certainly signals interesting things to come from a revitalised Bang & Olufsen.
