Business 2 CommunityHow Sony India’s Project Resound Upgraded Ears Rather Than Headphones And Reached Out To Fans From 70 Countries
In the last quarter, Sony embarked on a quest to get music lovers to go for better sound. Most of us hardly invest in a good pair of headphones baring a niche audience of true music lovers. Sony wanted to grow this mass but it wasn’t an easy task since the initial dipstick research showed that today’s playlist generation was really not investing in headphones, and music was under the cloud of the pirated environment, as a result of which the category of quality headphones was the least in demand.
Hence the simple problem statement the Sony Marketing team shared with its digital agency OgilvyOne, the digital arm of Ogilvy & Mather – How do we grow this category?
Upgrading the ears
After several rounds of discussions and brainstorming, the digital team at Ogilvy came up with the idea that rather than asking the audience to simply upgrade their headphones they should ask them to upgrade their ears. This led to the birth of Project Resound, which focused on the changing behaviour of a music lover by emphasizing on the good quality of music and that too by showcasing what an upgraded sound experience means.
“People will change the device but the habits won’t change so we focused on the behavioral aspect by focusing on upgrading ears,” added Sanjeev Jasani, Sr. Vice President and Head Of Delhi Office at OgilvyOne, while sharing about the initial strategy of the campaign.
Tying Kailash Kher & Shreya Ghoshal for the project
In India, Bollywood is where the mass is so the digital team opted for the duo – Kailash Kher and Shreya Ghoshal for the project. Apart from being highly acclaimed singers and having a great fan appeal, the third reason for getting them was the way both the musicians sing. “Kailash sings at a very high octave and Shreya signs at a lower octave with a much softer voice which helped the project to bring in two different sets of music experience for the ears of the music lovers,” Sanjeev informed.
The duo were briefed by the agency that the next phase was about creating a new song which captures best quality music that would be appealing for a high end quality headphone. Besides this another major idea was premiering the new song on September 12 through a web concert on the Sony microsite.
Simultaneously, it was also decided that the making of the song will be showcased as a webcast in the form of a journey of music creation on the microsite. So ten webisodes were launched which focused not only on the making of the song but this also gave the great musicians a chance to discuss about music in the country, share their knowledge and also problems that are being faced, among others. In other words, the webisodes had enough content for a true music lover to be glued to the microsite.
Social media strategy
Talking about the social media push for the project, Sanjeev shared that their strategy was to push content from the celebrity handles as well as the brand’s social media channels. Both Kailash and Shreya are quite popular on social media so relevant content about the show was pushed from their individual handles. This way the agency received a good response from fans on social media.
Nice pic on stage with cute n stunning @shreyaghoshal Before unveiling #NainaChaar such time in lifetime pic.twitter.com/DWkqVllIAp
— Kailash Kher (@Kailashkher) September 12, 2013
Yay yay finally I got @shreyaghoshal‘s autograph via #ProjectResound :’) happy, yeppi, yay, bliss :) ) pic.twitter.com/QuPjPdzgat
— Manish Saha (@ManishSaha5) August 27, 2013
While on the brand’s handle, content pieces were pushed from both Facebook and Twitter. While the web episodes were spread out for a longer duration, the agency ran some interesting and simple contests to keep the fans engaged. One of them was a quiz contest that had the correct answers in one of the videos of Kailesh Kher so fans had to watch the video to win goodies. Another one was to find out how well fans know their celebrity and voting for their favourite songs for them to be added in the playlist at the concert, apart from the new song launch.
As Sanjeev puts it, video was the heart of the campaign, so the contest on social networks were structured around in a manner that it had the involvement of videos too. Besides this there was a tie up with Telibrahma to create an augmented reality app which allowed people to try out different headphones and decide what looks better on them.
Numbers that speak
Finally the much awaited official song Naina Chaar was created and launched at the web concert. The official song has been uploaded and is gaining bigger reach with every passing day.
According to Unmetric, the social media monitoring product, the official song is one of the all time top five videos listed on Sony India’s YouTube brand channel. The video uploaded on 16th September, 2013, has got more than 322K views, 433 likes and a mere 18 dislikes. The below screen grab shows the spike the video has gained from the beginning of November.
Rest of the web episodes uploaded on the YouTube channel of the brand have got a decent response from fans. The video with invites from both the stars, which was uploaded in the beginning of September 2013, has got more than 526K views. The below screen grab gives a quick look of the campaign insights too.
Lessons from the campaign
While discussing about the learning’s from this campaign, Sanjeev highlighted the fact that, ”Video content and fresh content are going to play a big role in digital communications but brands will have to invest to see results.”
The other major highlight of Project Resound – which had very less hard sell except for the in-store packaging – was the association of the two renowned singers on one platform. Sanjeev shared that the duo apart from being popular in the country had a global appeal too. The campaign received traffic from 70 different countries apart from India which reflects the global fan following of the singers.
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