I have been thinking lately about B Corps and Sonos and mission-driven brands.
Sonos is an interesting case, because they make speakers and audio systems. Fair enough. But speakers and audio systems aren’t what their brand is about. Sonos gives their mission as:
…To reinvent home audio for the digital age. Our vision was simple – fill every home with music and make listening a valued experience again. We’re making it easy for everybody to listen to the music they love in every room of their home. To hear the songs they love, to discover new music they never knew existed, and to appreciate it all with the highest sound quality.
This mission, to “fill every home with music and make listening a valued experience”, goes far beyond a the scope of a particular product or range of products, and enables a number of interesting opportunities:
- Passionate engagement. Almost everyone is really connected to and moved by the music that they love. A mission to enhance enjoyment of music is something nearly everyone responds to on some level.
- Brand experiences. The idea of making listening a “valued listening experience” creates vast opportunities for experiential marketing. The mission statement alone gets Sonos out of the showroom, off of the webpage, and out of their offices, out into concerts, venues, record shops, where music lovers are.
- Broad scope of activities. Under this mission, Sonos can, yes, make speakers. But they can also (and have) undertake grants and charitable activities, and advocate activism. They could potentially expand product offerings in multiple directions; they could become a sharing network, or music distributor, or app developer, or advocacy group, or recording studio, or artist agent, or…. the mandate is so broad that it covers everything they do or might want to do.
Benefits of Experiential Marketing
Quick side note here, because Sonos does a ton of experiential marketing. Real-world, face-to-face encounters with a brand are exceptionally effective. When well done, these experiences generate results on multiple levels throughout the funnel:
- Awareness: These events are often newsworthy in traditional media, and almost always generate a lot of social posts & shares, boosting brand awareness even for people who aren’t physically present for the experience.
- Discovery: An appealing brand experience tempts people to check it out even if they don’t intend to buy anything. A cool booth or tent, a crowd in a queue, an attractive giveaway tend to engage people who may not otherwise be actively shopping.
- Evaluation: The brand experience creates the opportunity for a brand to thoroughly explain or differentiate their product. Actual demos, actual samples, and real-world comparisons are deeply engaging, persuasive, and memorable.
- Intent: Brands can add value to the experience by offering discount codes, sweeteners, or giveaways.
- Purchase: Finally, experiential marketing allows brands to convert sales into leads on-the-spot. Or, as Sonos did a couple years ago, they gave away speaker systems to the first 200 people in line, and discount codes to every one after that.
Altogether, live events have more power than TV ads, with 98% of event attendees more inclined to purchase. And fully 98% of people create social content at brand experiences, and 72% of their friends online report increased purchase intent towards the shared brand. Experiential marketing is the way to go, assuming you can plan a great experience.
Mission-driven brands
The Sonos example is fascinating because it allows them to not discuss their competition at all, if they don’t want to. They aren’t locked into an endless cycle of brand and product comparisons. I mean, they do that, and they are able to do that, but the broad mission allows them to do other things. They don’t have to produce content that is endless point-by-point comparisons, because they are free to talk about things that are bigger than their products.
Also, every freakin’ brand has a mission statement that goes something like:Respect: we treat our customers with respectHonesty: we strive to be honestblah blah blah they read like stupid motivational posters and don’t communicate anything of value to the employee or the customer. Why people bother going through the process of documenting that stuff? It’s utterly meaningless.
Looking at the example of Sonos and a couple exceptional B Corps (more posts on those to come), has me thinking a lot about my own mission. I’m really clear on what I believe:
- I believe in supporting and encouraging entrepreneurship, passionate ventures, and risky dreams
- I believe that actively encouraging consumers to support those ventures makes the world a more ethical and interesting place
- I believe that it’s possible for passion-driven brands to find passionate customers
- I believe that passion-driven brands can make good money, while simultaneously deeply improving their customer’s lives and the world at large: people don’t have to choose between money and love
But then, I’m a starry-eyed American, so it’s natural for me to believe these things. I still need to work on condensing those beliefs down into a mission, into my own mandate. But, thanks to some great examples, I’m getting more clarity on what my mandate needs to do. More to come…
Featured photo by Steven Jones on Unsplash
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