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An anti-Beats idea that married engineering passion, sound superiority with powerful emotion.

The idea focuses on the experience of feeling closer to your music: people dedicated to their passions, completely in the moment, without distraction. The opposite of flashy celebrity Beats.

“Dancer” shows a dancer in impossibly empty London streets, expressing her passion through a mesmerizing dance – completely in her own world.

The second round continued to build on the idea showing purely the emotion of people’s faces as they got closer to the music they loved.

Café, Bus Ride, Aaron Rodgers (2018) show Bose headphones removing the distractions that take people away from the things they love.

It was deployed through all touchpoints from mass market media, digital, social, to packaging and point of sale.

We looked for people in our audience who did care about sound quality. We believed, if we could find what mattered to them, we could unlock the same in others.

For them, quality of sound was not about distortion figures or decibel curves - but about how sound connects you to the world. As the author Helen Keller once wrote: “Blindness cuts us off from things, deafness cuts us off from people”

“There’s pleasure to be found in going really deep into something, it’s absolutely about living it, felling it, hearing it.”

Musician

“Listening closely will allow you not only to hear something, but also to feel the emotions, warmth, and skill that went into that sound.”

Photographer

Neuroscientists told us this is a physical truth - sound signals are literally wired closer to our brains and emotional systems than other senses. Sound is our first warning of danger. Sound can make us jump or even dance.

In all of this we saw that sound is the most profound connection. It isn’t just an audible wave of pressure but something that positively brings you closer to things you love.

Our Insight: SOUND BRINGS YOU CLOSEST TO THE THINGS YOU LOVE

We beat Beats.

Business Impact

• Total headphones: Bose overtook Beats value share in France and Germany, and matched in the UK

• Premium headphones: QuietComfort 35 Headphones became the best-selling product in all 3 key markets

• Value sales where +40% in Europe and +78% in the UK

• ROI on media investment was +49% vs the previous year

Consumer Impact

• Bose awareness rose on average 6% in our key 3 markets

• Facebook’s Brand Uplift report showed exposed consumers had:

o Extremely high recall of the advertising across 3 key markets – avg. 230 Index