Creative Brief.

Brand: Sony

Positioning: Be Moved.

Marketing Objective: Grow market share by 20% in the premium noise cancelling headphone category.

Audience: UK Millennial Music Lovers.

Marketing Issue: Sony is losing volume to competitors, Bose and Beats are outspending and outshouting them by a factor of 10-1. Insight: Music makes us feel powerful emotions. But competitors are only talking about their audio products through a lifestyle lens. This massively side-lines the emotional experience and act of listening to music.

Single Minded Proposition: Music makes you feel, Sony makes you feel more.

Strategy: Get millennial music lovers to consider Sony noise cancelling headphones by showing them that we are the brand for superior music experiences.

The idea: Music as an escape

Description:

Millennials are faced with cultural, societal and financial problems that are unique to their generation. They are privileged in many ways, from their access to technology and modern medicine, to increased admissions into higher education to name a few. However, they are also faced with problems that are very different to the issues their parents tackled. For example, they bear the burden of environment change, they struggle with housing which interferes with family planning, they have more debt than they can imagine long before they’ve even entered the workforce and politics is messy with the rise of populism, deep social tensions and the distrust in establishments and political figures that can be seen not just regionally, but globally. Of course, these problems impact every member of society at some level or another, however, millennials are disproportionally affected compared to older generations.

The solution? Enter music cancelling headphones. For many, music is an escape. You slide your headphones over your ears and the music that follows is an opportunity to reflect on and engage with your own mind as it allows you to cancel out everything around you and just sit with your thoughts. Music can be soothing and can accompany your mind as it goes on a journey, even if it’s just for a short period of time. The idea is that these headphones not only cancel out the noise around you, they cancel out real life and allow that space for an escape. Music takes you away from the stresses of real life and offers you an alternative reality, for a little while each day.

The headphones can allow you to tap into something each day that you can’t get from the outside world, whether its relaxation through a much-loved playlist or meditation by listening to your favourite motivational speaker or podcast.

Inspired by:

1) Trying to highlight and solve a problem present in my own generational, millennial experiences through the love of and interest in music.

For this to work:

1) People (millennials) must feel a connection to the story being told.

2) They must also feel that the product offers a solution to this.

3) We must tap into the emotional side of listening to music.

4) We must highlight that millennials are on a journey and give this journey a positive ending, one that can feel achievable and real with the product.

5) Must show that they have control of their own world when listening to music, even if they don’t have control of the real world.

6) Tap into current trends that relate to improving mental health like meditation.

What we should do next:

1. Think of a compelling story to tell through this ad.

2. Give a stressful societal problem a positive solution.

3. We should target those who do not currently own headphones.

Deniz Karaman Response To Brief