Skip to content

Unlocking the Power of Premium: A Wireless Speaker Company's Journey Into Headphones

Our client, a premium wireless speaker company, was looking to enter the high-end headphones market – a space where they did not yet have any equity and was dominated by a few major brands. How could they differentiate themselves? Make a splash? Earn a big slice of the pie right out of the gates?

What We Did:

The Big Village Digital Hives Online Communities team created a 2-day Hive filled with our client’s current high-end speaker customers as well as prospects, who all owned premium headphones. They were asked to do an image collage of what premium means to them, show us on video how they use their headsets, give us detailed brand impressions and format impressions (over the ear vs ear bud) and to ideate what headphones from our client might need to be like to dominate the game. We were able to uncover with great speed, depth and emotion, how and why consumers chose their premium headphones, the specific features that were the most important to them, and how these headphones were incorporated into their day-to-day lives.

We then invited 6 members of our Hive into a live innovation-based video focus group and sent them a selection of materials (think titanium chopsticks, kinetic fabric, high-end sneaker foam, etc.) to handle and consider. Our client’s core stakeholders were in a room watching as we discussed the items at length and dove even deeper into what makes a product “premium” and what their expectations would be for a set of over the ear headphones from this brand.

The Result:

When it was all said and done, we were able to develop core mindset-based consumer personas and identify key entry points for our client, namely leaning into the interoperability and elite sound quality associated with their brand. We also discovered that premium was connected both to the functional experience of the product (high quality sound, comfortable fit, durability, portability) as well as to the aesthetic design, and was all underpinned by a deep emotional sense that great headphones offer the ability to enhance or escape one’s life, depending on the person, the physical space and the use case.