The Beats brand was born from music insiders and built a following by being seen on the hottest artists and athletes and associated with the coolest scenes in music. This non-traditional marketing approach drove a generation of young people to covet the products and respect the brand. But time passes and now Beats is trying to speak to a new generation who aren’t growing up with the brand and don’t see it as inherently connected to the things they love. To appeal to this generation, the brand needed to showcase its world in a new, more digital way. We set out to reimagine the website as a home of cultural storytelling, not just product information, where people can discover and follow the brand, not just shop it. The goal was to drive engagement with new and repeat visitors and ultimately entice them to click to Apple to shop and buy.

Culture moves faster today than it did when Beats was created. And it’s much more diverse in subject and format. Today, culture is small and big screens, audio and video, music, podcasts, shows, games, and everything in between. So Beats needs to be about more than just music - Beats needs to be the sound of today. This idea drove us to come up with a format for short form storytelling that can be kept fresh almost daily, captures the spirit and creativity of the worlds the brand lives in, and is always dimensionalizing the brand world and product range. This dynamic storytelling is designed to speak to Gen Z, who reject labels, are curious, bend genres, and seek social connection from brands and versatility from products. Part blog, part news, part product page, park hype machine, the new website captures the sound of today and has something for everyone.

As Gen Z come of age and their influence and habits become more well understood, the brand has been moving to adapt and stay ahead of these emerging desires. Research amongst our audience revealed that they much more strongly align with peer groups than with the traditional idea of celebrity or mass pop culture. They easily move between different aspects of their identities and interests and engage with sub-communities and personalities within these niches. And this movement between different subject matters and interest and community groups is happening across digital channels and platforms. To be more present and discoverable in these journeys, the brand needed to have more content about more specific topics rather than a few big splashes per year. Creating an editorial platform housed within the dotcom allows the content to show up in searches and social much more naturally and often than traditional marketing.

With the new focus on cultural storytelling from a wide range of artists, we created a flexible design system that allowed their own personality and style to shine through.

Historically the website relied on dark greys and images with moody lighting. Shifting the background to white communicated freshness, typography became bolder, more stylistic and more editorial in feel. A broader color palette was introduced. Imagery got a lot more prominence, the layout was really freed up to allow for self expression. Altogether a whole new language allowed the artists to shine, while also being modular and easy for the content team to produce.

Finally, we advised on the editorial strategy, and played a key role on how the first stories were written and visualized. To make an impact at launch, Billie Eilish and Pharrell both contributed content, setting the bar for stories to come.

Before the site launched, all the interesting things Beats did with musicians, athletes, partnerships, parties, etc. were largely only known to people who experienced them directly or followed other accounts on social media that talked about them. The brand didn’t have a home to catalogue and share all these activations. Now, the storytelling platform captures all that content and gives it a home, intrinsically connected to the brand. Within the first three months post launch, time on site more than doubled, proving the brand’s activities were relevant to the audience and provided something they were looking for (as the traffic remained almost entirely organic). And more so than just engagement, clicks from stories out to the Apple store to shop the products increased more by 4x, proving that the more affinity people feel to the brand the more interested they were in associating themselves with the brand (by buying products).