Bose no longer wants to be a product-first brand and is rooting itself in culture instead

The man hired to lead the turnaround was Jim Mollica who joined just over two years ago as Bose’s first-ever chief marketing officer. The marketer joined from Under Armour where for six years he led its customer strategy as SVP of global consumer and engagement. Before that, he served at brands including Ralph Lauren, Walt Disney and Viacom.

“Anytime you're the first chief marketing officer in an organization, it says something about the way the company was organized, and where it puts its priority,” Mollica admits. “Rightly so the priority was always about the engineering and the product and that took center stage.”

But there have been seismic changes in how people discover new products and where they buy them, Mollica says. “For a long time, it was enough for Bose just to create the best product in the marketplace,” he says, but that doesn’t cut it any more.

“All of the competition that came into the marketplace there became an understanding [within the business] that it was important to modernize the marketing function as you modernized the product and engineering functions,” Mollica says.

The challenge for Mollica was to come into the business and establish a modern marketing function, while “internally earning people’s time and attention to elevate the marketing practice to be on par with the other disciplines within the company.”

His relationship with Bose’s chief executive Lila Synder was crucial to implementing his grand plan. “To drive change like this you have to have a partnership with the CEO that understands the value of marketing,” he says. Beyond that, Mollica adds, as a marketer you must be sensitive to the commercial needs of the organization.

“If you can marry the commercial needs, with the same aspects of building a brand, you can be far more powerful and that has allowed us the time and attention to build a modern marketing function,” he adds.

Promote the feeling of sound, not products

Mollica’s plan coming into the business was to pivot the marketing away from messages about the functions of the product towards selling the feeling and emotion you get from listening to music. “It’s not what the product does as much as it’s what it does for you and how it can transform your mood,” he says. “We are creating products for passionate music fans by passionate music fans then it’s not about utility and functionality it’s about emotion.”

Many of Bose’s competitors are big tech companies that sell other products and services beyond speakers. But Bose is only in the business of sound and that means, Mollica says, it’s essential that the brand has a more significant role in the spaces where you would expect music to be. “So that covers everything from fashion week to music festivals, to certain sporting events those things inherently have music as an intertwined moment,” he explains. “We just needed to be able to tell stories off of that. That was the assignment.”

Tentpoles of his strategy have included a platform-specific content plan spanning podcasts to short and long-form video; forging new brand ambassador deals and a creator-led approach that hands over control to trusted talent.

Mollica’s background working for Disney and Viacom has “led to this idea of looking at Bose as a brand that is a publisher and I am creating content around entertainment,” he says. “And then we are distributing that in a sophisticated way, just like a publisher would.” Bose now has a content team, editors, an in-house studio team and production partners.

He told The Drum that TikTok and YouTube are outperforming other channels. On YouTube, for example, Bose is piloting shows and scaling up to full series pilots with high engagement.

On the ambassador side, the strategy has been to partner with “music geeks” and genuine fans of Bose from across all areas of culture. Mollica pointed to the deal with England footballer Jack Grealish as an ambassador with a huge following but also a “wild and eclectic music taste”.

Bose partnerships with groups like the female empowerment organization She Is The Music are also indicative of Mollica’s strategy as he tries to give the company a more robust brand voice. Bose has also been more active in events connected to music, for example, putting on a gig for up-and-coming talent in collaboration with NME at South by Southwest. Mollica says: “That is exactly what you would expect from a brand like Bose.”

For the year ahead Mollica will be refining his music-focused content strategy looking for new places and people to partner up with. He concluded: "Bose has always created incredible products. But the opportunity that I saw for the company was to tell stories about how these products help people fulfill their emotional needs and desires."