It has been said that in the audio business, the hardest thing to recover is not market share but the trust of people who once believed you understood them.
Sonos, the Santa Barbara company that spent two decades persuading Americans that their living rooms deserved better sound, is now undertaking what it describes as the most significant brand repositioning in its history. The occasion is not a new product launch or an expansion into new markets, but rather the unhappy aftermath of a 2024 software update that left many of its customers unable to use the equipment they had already purchased.
The new campaign, which begins today, attempts to reframe Sonos not merely as a maker of wireless speakers — the category it more or less invented for the mass market — but as a provider of what the company calls an end-to-end sound system. The distinction may seem subtle to civilians, but it represents a strategic bet that customers who felt abandoned by a buggy app might be won back by a grander narrative about what Sonos actually does.
(Whether customers who spent several months unable to adjust their subwoofer settings will be moved by brand repositioning remains, as they say, to be seen.)
The episode has become something of a cautionary tale on the conference circuit, cited alongside other examples of technology companies discovering that the software connecting their hardware to their customers is not, in fact, an afterthought. Sonos, which had built its reputation on seamless integration and a certain domestic tastefulness, found itself apologizing to the very enthusiasts who had once served as its most reliable evangelists.
The new campaign does not dwell on the troubles of 2024, focusing instead on the breadth of the Sonos ecosystem. It is the kind of forward-looking message that brand consultants tend to recommend in such circumstances.
The sound, presumably, will have to speak for itself.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Sonos' New Brand Story Aims to Win Back Trust Two Years After Botched App Update"