The sound of angry customers is not, generally speaking, the kind of audio experience that a premium speaker company wants associated with its brand.
Yet that is precisely what Sonos found itself amplifying last spring, when a rebuilt mobile app generated the sort of consumer outcry more typically reserved for airline rebooking policies. Features vanished. Systems stuttered. Owners of equipment costing upward of $3,000 discovered that their carefully assembled home audio networks had developed sudden cases of amnesia.
The fallout was swift and institutional: Patrick Spence, the chief executive, departed in January. Tom Conrad, a board member, stepped in as interim leader before taking the permanent post in July. And in November, the company installed Colleen DeCourcy — the former Wieden + Kennedy executive who had been running marketing and creative at Snap — as chief marketing officer, with instructions to rehabilitate the brand's reputation.
The result of those efforts debuted this week in a global campaign called "Love the Sound. Feel the System," which represents Sonos's first significant departure from product-focused advertising. The work, created by an in-house team that Ms. DeCourcy assembled with recruits from Anomaly, Special Group and her former employer, trades the usual technology demonstrations for what the company calls "emotion-driven storytelling." (What, you were expecting the ads to say, "This time the app actually works"?)
The hero film, set to "Masterpiece" by the British collective Sault, features hand-drawn "dance card" diagrams that illustrate how various Sonos products connect — a visual conceit that Rinee Shah, a co-head of creative who joined from the sleep-technology company Hatch, said emerged from an internal need to explain the ecosystem without relying on lifestyle photography.
"Transparency, showing up, consistency and execution are the things that help you along the road of making good when something's gone bad," Ms. DeCourcy said, noting that Mr. Conrad has taken to appearing on Reddit each weekend to field questions from the very customers the company disappointed.
The campaign will concentrate its spending in New York, with placements at Penn Station, Moynihan Train Hall and the Westfield World Trade Center — locations chosen, presumably, because commuters have both disposable income and a demonstrated tolerance for systems that occasionally fail to perform as promised.
Original story published in campaignlive.com: "From sound check to vibe check: Sonos’ new global campaign aims to win back customers | Campaign US"