Most companies have one. A regular measuring instrument to assess the brand’s status quo. But more questions than answers are often thrown up by the large number of facts measured. How can we enhance brands and increase sales? How should positioning be sharpened up, how should be make communication between touchpoints or segments different from each other? The SONOS Case shows us.
SONOS is a home audio brand that has established the new multi-room audio category with its active Wi-Fi speakers connected to the internet. Until very recently, there was only one maxim in SONOS’s marketing: Awareness at any price – retailers will do the rest. The advertising was as expected– shrill and loud.
Here is an example:
Global market research set itself the task of getting to the bottom of the brand drivers. Conventional driver analyses threw up questions, did little to explain the variance in customer behaviour and were not very plausible in their restrictive assumption. SONOS therefore approached Success Drivers. We used the available data to build up a Universal Structural Model (USM). The results were eye-opening.
It All Depends on the Method
Comparison with a correlation analysis showed, for example, that a positive evaluation of Customer Services has a strong correlation with the intention to purchase – however, USM shows that service is not the cause. Consumer who already are already customers tend to assess not only the service more positively but also have higher likelihood to purchase even more.
Comparison with a conventional driver analysis (regression) shows that an association of the brand as a “Leadership Personality” directly and negatively reduces the intention to purchase, but the same driver increases identification with the brand. Since the latter has a great influence on the intention to purchase, “Leadership Personality” is therefore not negative in the overall effect. This is a finding that only path analytical approaches would reveal.
Comparison with conventional path analyses shows that a universal modelling approach models non-linear and interactive connections and, in the case of SONOS, is 60% better at explaining why customers buy. In particular, it because obvious that a perceived “Relax” emotion was barely significant in the linear model, but was extremely important in the non-linear model.
If the brand is seen as hardly relaxed instead of moderately relaxed, consideration and intention to purchase fall dramatically. Moreover, in certain subgroups a high level of relaxed feeling was a genuine sales booster – in methodical terms we call this phenomenon an interaction: drivers can have different significances and importance in various contexts or segments.
Key Insights are Taking Effect
In conclusion, SONOS gained so many insights that completely turned the marketing around. We noted that Paid and Earned Media need completely different communication as opposed to Owned Media or at the POS.
We discovered that SONOS was somewhat neglecting the basic lever of “Sound” as a category in its communication. A new Premium Speaker has been developed and target customers are now seeing much better that the unique SONOS features (multi-room, software updates, etc.) are the reason for a unique sound experience. Every creation has been optimized so that there is always a relaxing feel. See for yourself:
