Seamless Link Between Brand, Design and Marketing at B&O
January 2015 – Marie Kristine Schmidt describes Bang & Olufsen as a brand of passion. People working for this company have passion and pride, they thrive. “You wouldn’t believe how many people work at this company for as long as 40 years” she states.
She had been working in the fashion industry before she joined B&O. Ms. Schmidt has been with company for 3 years. Now she holds the position as corporate Vice President, Head of Brand, Design & Marketing. She was recruited for this position by B&O to work on the brand, concept, and design; to create a design for next generation of the products.
This job has a pretty broad span of control, but what we do here is for a reason. Before we build a product, we always ask ourselves why we are doing this. We build our concepts and manage our brand with a clear understanding of our history and our goals to be the best in high-end audio-video products. When we move forward we need to know who we are and we continue to treasure our heritage as we move to the future. We go out and ask the customers, we spend time with them in their living spaces, and we are getting insights into their preferences and desires which we deliver in the products. Then, instead of just throwing things to the marketing team, we want to be sure that these factors are in the stories that they communicate to the customers. Building the relationship with customers is crucial. We want to be sure that there is seamless link between the why and what we are doing and what we are telling to the people” she said.
The trend that she sees is that market is being more bipolar. People are buying luxury products or affordable products, while the middle section is suffering. She also sees that people, instead of “buying and throwing things away” are more likely to decide to purchase a product that lasts longer, that means something to them.
She comments that although the European market was always the biggest market for B&O, the US market has a large potential for growth, even though it is currently a fairly small market.
Marie was leading the B&O event to provide the background on the new BeoSound Moment. The product is the new flagship core of the whole house music system bringing intelligent and insightful sound to match your mood. The design incorporates features that follow the history of simplicity of use, elegance of design and most importantly functional enhancements of the music listening experience.
The design of the Moment has a technology driven aluminum touch screen driven side and a first in the industry wooden touch screen side. The default use is with the sleek wooden outside on the outward face. These two faces drive the interactive experience with the product that used to exist in the days of vinyl playback, but with the access and continence of digital.
Marie indentified how the Moment fits the history and heritage of the B&O brand while addressing the new market trend of luxury and convenience at an affordable price. The product is operated by an intuitive single finger touch and features both auditory and visual response to the controls. These actions control the Intelligent PatternPlay feature. This is an intelligent feature in the product that adapts automatically by memorizing your musical preferences and making your listening experience both familiar and explorative. These listening patterns are then augmented with suggested music or radio programmes that fit with the relevant day of the week and the time of day. The music presented by PatternPlay includes your own media library of your own preferred favourite artists and playlists plus an extensive online catalogue of music in the cloud supplied by leading global music streaming service Deezer.
The B&O team continued with the introduction of the technology side of the Moment which is a MoodWheel. Following the single finger control concept synonymous with the brand, a single touch on the multi-coloured MoodWheel activates an automatically generated playlist defined by your finger’s position on the wheel. The MoodWheel is divided into a colour gamut that ranges from melancholic blue over a passionate red zone to an energetic yellow area. It also has a dimension of familiar music in your collection and playlist to more unfamiliar songs in the mood. The combination of these two dimensions on the MoodWheel offer unlimited possibilities for the selection of music.
While the Moment is a new product, it integrates with existing B&O speakers and in-home controls supporting the trend of extending the life of quality products in the home, rather than replacing them for novelty’s sake.
