Bang & Olufsen is a near-century-year old company. Naturally, the Danish electronics audio brand has some offspring—and a boatload of competition champing at the bit for market share.
That’s where their sub-brand B&O Play enters the audio fray by targeting an audience of young, urban professionals with a fashion forward and contemporary offshoot of more affordable products than their parent company—all while upholding their quality design, sound performance and craftsmanship that they’re most known for.
“We are a start-up with a 90-year-old heritage,” Jens Jermiin, director of global marketing for B&O Play, told [a]listdaily. “We are standing on the shoulders of giants. At B&O Play, we are driven by a focus to bring to life our heritage of combining technology and design to create iconic products and outstanding experiences.”
Promotions and new product introductions are helping the expedited growth in the Bluetooth market. However, according to an NPD Report, Beats by Dre and LG accounted for approximately 65 percent of dollar sales in the Bluetooth headphone market for the first half of 2016. That leaves a bevy of brands hustling for proverbial bread crumbs from consumers already fully embracing a wireless future.
The product B&O Play is kicking off with this year is the sleek, bass-filled B&O Play Beoplay M5. And like their other products, the 360-degree speaker is compatible with the free Beoplay connected mobile app for iOS, which allows consumers to personalize and update their audio products on a single platform.
“Our key messaging to consumers is ‘to make beautiful music,’ achievable with B&O Play products in their lives,” Jermiin says. “We believe that music is basically making the world a better place—and we believe that if people are using our products to listen to music, they will listen to even more music.”
In December, the luxury subsidiary further touched on that notion by reimagining the importance of everyday sounds and the artistic values it holds by launching their first branded content campaign featuring a variety of artists discussing how they perceive sound in their daily lives. Each one-minute movie for the US-focused campaign is a nonlinear story about sound and highlights the connection between content and real-life happenings. It closes with the same message: “Make beautiful music.”
When discussing the design-oriented brand’s approach to capturing style-conscious customers, Jermiin says his brand’s focus is to drive end-to-end campaigns with linked activities that move the audience through the consumer journey to conversion.
In October, they used drones to promote their new B&O Play A1 Bluetooth speaker at a beach club in Singapore. The fun-in-the-sun concept allowed bikini-clad beachgoers to experience B&O Play’s mobility and sound quality, and even rent an A1 speaker by sharing their #BEOPlayA1 experience on their social channels.
“We are using social data to tap into relevant topics and events that have the attention of the people we would like to talk to, to build our position as a cultural leading brand and thus to become even more relevant and emotionally meaningful,” says Jermiin. “In line with our overall ambition to become the leading audio lifestyle brand in the world, we are working hard every day and leveraging data into actionable insights, to understand people and the role that audio plays in their lifestyle.”
In order to explore and innovate the brand, the brand is not shunning from experimenting with its marketing with emerging trends like virtual reality and SMART audio, Jermiin adds.
“It’s something that we follow with great interest as potential categories disrupting trends and services,” Jermiin says. “We are in a very exciting place. As an industry. As a company. And not the least, as a brand.”
Follow Manouk Akopyan on Twitter @Manouk_Akopyan
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