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Brand Insight in association withLBB's Brand Insight Features
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Good Vibrations: How Bose Is Showing Its Human Side

01/06/2023
Publication
London, UK
341
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Bose’s CMO Jim Mollica chats to LBB’s Laura Swinton, revealing his lifelong love of music and sharing how artificial intelligence, data and influencers are helping the brand share its human side with a new generation of fans

“The very first speakers I bought, when I was 15 years old, were Bose,” recalls Jim Mollica. “They looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. I knew they were created by music people who were super passionate about it.”


Jim Mollica may have only joined Bose as the audio brand’s first global CMO two and a half years ago, but in truth, Bose and Jim have been together for much longer than that. From saving up for his own speakers when his teenage music taste began to diverge, Jim levelled up with bookshelf speakers in college, which followed him around for years, followed by the Bose Wave radio and CD player. As his career progressed - Jim’s impressive CV includes stints at Nissan, Viacom, Ralph Lauren and Under Armour - Jim found himself travelling more for work, and so it was to Bose and its noise-cancelling headphones that he turned to.


A guitar player who collects records and was in his fair share of ‘bad bands’ as a kid, to say Jim is passionate about music might be an understatement. His love of music and affection for the brand ran so deep that when the chance to head up Bose’s marketing came up, he didn’t give it a second thought. Jim confesses that, for any other brand, the prospect of coming as the first CMO with a remit to change the entire culture of an organisation that hasn’t historically prioritised marketing would be a daunting one.


But Jim knew exactly what the brand needed to do. “Bose needed to really move from more of the cold and sterile aspect of the technical features. Yeah, they make great products, but the plains are littered with great products that didn’t resonate with people because they couldn’t understand what role they would have in their life, right? What underlying wants, needs and desires is this product satisfying?”


Despite the brand’s tendency to focus on the dry, tech specs in much of its marketing in the past, the roots of what a more emotional story might look like actually lay internally. Behind a cool, mechanical surface Jim discovered, through the interview process, an organisation harbouring a polyphonic spree of musical passions.


“I realised the entire organisation is built by music fans. They play in bands, everybody plays instruments, they collect records, they go and actually see live music, sound is really important,” says Jim. Through his new colleagues, he saw a deep appreciation for the collective explosion of live music, the contemplative solitude of listening alone, and the pure passion that is released around music. “When I saw that, it became abundantly clear to me on the way we need to talk about this brand and the way we think about its position as very different from tech. Tech is an enabler to help people achieve an emotional state.”


What Jim saw internally at Bose was replicated out in the wild. One of the key things the team did in order to figure out their roadmap ahead was to do deep consumer research all over the world, both qualitative and quantitative. The big focus was on Bose’s key markets of the UK, Germany, the United States and China - and despite some very slight nuances, the perception of the Bose brand and the role that music played in people’s lives were nearly universal.


That allowed the team to identify seven distinct listening occasions, which were then bucketed into three general groups - on the go, at home and in the car. From those occasions and the 


For all the talk of universalities, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that the one thing that has changed in the way we enjoy music is the way that social media and platforms like Spotify and iTunes are enabling ever-more individuated and eclectic playlists. That creates an exciting tension for Jim and his team, between navigating the mass reach storytelling and more personalised, granular content.


That specificity is achieved through the weaving together of three strands. First of all, there’s a purposefully diverse and fluid approach to ambassadors that allows Bose to go deep into all sorts of musical genres and fan spaces, working with artists like US singer songwriter Charlie Puth or British producer and songwriter PinkPantheress. Jim points to their partnership with footballer Jack Grealish, whose eclectic tastes and use of music to train makes him a relatable and surprising choice. “You don’t have to be a musician to be a crazy music fan. And that’s how we go from macros down to bespoke stories that resonate with people.”


Jim says there’s a fluidity in how they work with influencers and creators. They are of course thoroughly vetted and it’s the Bose team’s job to make sure they get the brand - but from there, it’s a matter of faith. That, reckons Jim, is the only way to ensure that the content really connects.


From there comes the second pillar, data. For their social content, it means tracking performance and being able to lean into what’s working or tap into emerging trends. Data’s an area where Bose has a solid track record, having historically built up a strong direct marketing practice and a sound foundation in what Jim calls the ‘linear mechanics of marketing analytics’. Now, though, the team is breaking out of data silos and rigid processes for a more 360, complete view, which pulls in real world data, allows speedy response and tackles the knotty challenge of pulling together cross platform data. “We’re not done. It’s an evolution. But where we are is a much different place than where I walked in, both from what’s informing the content to the distribution of the content to the measurement of how that content is performing.”


And, thirdly, all that juicy data is driving something that feels very 2023 but, in fact, has been in the works and under the hood of Bose’s marketing pipeline for some time - artificial intelligence. The Bose team is applying AI to allow them to learn rapidly and scale up their targeted content creation.


All of this is transforming Bose into a content engine, achieving that holy grail of scaled up specificity and the ability to weave together music’s transcendent power with the texture and detail of all the creative communities and genres that music inspires.


“We’re a bit like a publisher because we create thousands of pieces of content a month. Some of it is video, some of it’s not,” says Jim, explaining that that ‘we’ is a group that includes the internal team at Bose, agency partners across WPP (WPP took over as Bose’s agency across creative, media and digital in 2018) and their many ambassadors. “We’re all creating content and we’re measuring everything. We then basically attach metadata to all of our content and through the metadata, we get themes of what works best.”


These three pillars also come together to support the team's mission to build interactive, shoppable experiences. Jim says the brand is at the foothills of this particular journey, but the goal is to use data to enable seamless one-touch commerce that's surrounded by beautiful brand imagery and well-targeted, rich content featuring relevant products, collaborations and ambassadors. Jim talks about the nuanced choreography involved in creating experiences that appear effortless to the consumer. The team will soon launch a new website and deeper, mobile-first experience, which will take the overall CX one step closer to that goal.


For all the sophistication of its data and tech, there’s a big heartedness at the core of Jim’s approach. And that cuts into the brand’s approach to diversity and inclusion, which they’re really - pardon the pun - amping up.


“Music is something that’s highly personal, right? From your musical preferences to how you’re feeling at that moment,” says Jim. “I think, for us, there are people out there that feel like they need to be heard and they need to create - and we need to celebrate that. If we can make a difference by creating programming or opportunities for people to create with us within these environments, that helps shed a light on removing barriers to creativity in a highly creative space.”


One such example is the recent Turn the Dial initiative, which highlights the astounding fact that only 2.8% of music produced today is produced by women. Bose is partnering with female artists like PinkPantheress, Blond:ish, WondaGurl and H.E.R. and connecting them with up-and-coming talented female producers, with the aim of releasing music throughout the year. The project was launched last month at the Billboard Awards, where Bose sponsored the Producer of the Year Award (coincidentally, won this year by Rosalía).


As the brand moves to wrap its arms around those big emotional worlds that music invokes and to dance to each of our idiosyncratic playlists, that doesn’t mean that Bose is ditching all that brand capital it has built up in terms of its reputation for technical mastery and world class engineering. Rather, it’s a more refined understanding of how they both interact.


For Jim, it’s that emotion that creates a brand that connects and the product’s engineering that turns that into a brand that sustains.


“It's an atmosphere, it's a creation. It's the brand codes and signals. Now, those things fall apart, if the product doesn't stand up, if it's not well made, if it has issues,” he says. “ I think that all of those technical features, the specs, the world's best noise cancellation are helpful because they corroborate a decision that you want to make. Right? They make it safe for you to buy the product because you know it's going to work really well, it's gonna give you the best sound in the world. And it's gonna last.


“That makes what we do incredibly compelling. Because as a marketer, I'm sure for many people out there that are marketers that are really good at their craft, it has to be really hard if you don't have a great product. Because marketing will either accelerate the success, or accelerate the end of that product or service.”


It’s been quite some journey for Jim, transforming the audio giant’s marketing in just two years. But it’s also been an incredibly personal journey, helping the brand to reveal the depth and multitudes of emotion that he’s seen within it all along.




Indeed, of all the projects he’s worked on along the way, the one that’s been the most personally satisfying is one that takes him right back to that 15-year-old, crate-digging, garage band playing music devotee. At this year’s SXSW, the brand partnered with NME to bring back its infamous mixtape for the first time in decades, and put together a live music festival. The event was so packed that the fire marshall wouldn’t let anyone else in… and then the heavens opened.


“There was a massive thunderstorm that shut down all South By events. And everyone stated. We waited out the weather… and we came back. There were three or four blocks of people to get in there, “ he recalls. “This incredible experience just made me think again about the power that music has to transform all of these people’s lives that are so passionate that they’re sitting through thunderstorms.”





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