Bose is a Top-5 audio brand in China that built its reputation among the premium Hi-Fi shoppers. With an aging premium segment and expanding ‘on-the-go’ audio, we sought to rethink who was most valuable to Bose.

The audio category grew largely by product innovation led by mobile phone brands along with professional audio brands. Comparatively Bose was on a back foot, having lost momentum over the past 2 years from absence of product innovation.

Halfway into 2020 Bose faced mounting commercial pressures due to the impact of Covid-19. Succeeding at Tencent’s 6.18 mega shopping festival became critical in setting pace for the rest of 2020.

Facing strong competitors who have twice the spend and dominated half of the market, we set ourselves an ambitious ask:

1) Effective targeting

2) Win the 6.18 shopping festival

3) Springboard Bose to be a Top-3 brand by sales

Bose’s brand platform is ‘audio for life’. And live quality music experience is often a complement used for premium audio products. With famed clubs and live houses like Shanghai’s Mao Live House, Hangzhou’s Happy Honey Badger, and hundreds of others across the country empty, Bose sought to bring ‘music to life’. To a nation starved of entertainment and music discovery during the onset of Covid-19, what is audio for life, if absent of sound? We launched“Bose Love Loud”.

New social behaviors emerged in the year of Covid-19. To capitalize on the trending social behaviors, we offered a musical experience worth discovering, sharing, ultimately getting potential customers to desire Bose over the category competition. We did this by unlocking an INDUSTRY FIRST collaboration to launch Tencent’s TME Live platform through which budding & undiscovered pop singers are invited to hold a mini concert hosted by Bose.

Find the most valuable audiences.

We embarked on a mission to recast our audience segments. Through our collaboration with mPlatform, the DMP solution from GroupM, we developed a quantitative view on qualitative segments draw from Bose E-Commerce customer data, which was a CHINA FIRST.

Succeed on EC.

Guided by JD.com+GroupM, m-Insights data modelling we executed three strategies to succeed.

1. Understand cross category shopping behavior and target new segments outside of the audio category.

2. Pair each segment with the most relevant Bose products.

3. Shift budgets from the expensive 6.18 shopping festival “on-day” awareness, to more cost-effective pre-campaign period to load JD.com shopping carts with Bose products.

Create unique Bose music experience and drive traffic from out-site to in-site.

We did this by unlocking an INDUSTRY-FIRST collaboration to launch Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) Live platform with Bose for the 6.18 shopping festival. (Tencent&JD Ecommerce-site sit in the same eco-system.)

Lala Hsu, a raising Taiwan singer was invited to the concert. Event news and celebrity previews were released on social to create excitement. The event was also promoted in Tencent eco-system including the Tencent QQ MusicAPP where fans could book live event ticket and participate “Bose Love loud” H5 game to Karaoke with their loved singers.

The concert went live on 6June, where Bose invited Lala to share her passion & life stories of music. Special section took place to tribute to Wuhan heroes who sacrificed their own safety for the good of the wider population. The concert was livestreamed through all 4 Tencent music APPs.

Joining our effort, Tencent’s PR team, supported the activation giving Bose incremental earned exposure valued at RMB1.26m.

Bose promotion was placed along the Bose Love Loud music experiences. With joined effort inside JD.com E-commerce site, we achieved 79,563 JD shopping-cart pre-loads prior to 6.18.

The campaign resulted in 79,563 customers pre-loading their shopping basket prior to the shopping event which resulted in a net-saving of RMB 0.4 million for Bose.

We brought people back to Bose.

Over 10 million people joined the TME Live event, which was 178 times higher than the last Bose livestreaming event

Readership of related Weibo topics exceed 24million, plus #TME live# official topic readership on Weibo: 210million. Whereas Weibo average topic readership was just around 100million.

We sold more product than our competitors.

Beat all the other competitors and ranked no. 1 on JD.com headphone category in 2020 6.18 and are well on our way to become a Top 3 brand in 2020.

Sales achievement: +13% sales increase with +3% of budget vs. 2019 6.18.

ROI increased by 10% vs. 2019 618 shopping festival.

Bose JD official store traffic increased by 12% with -5% of CPC version last year