AARON CATTOIR

Overview

Ambisonic Systems was purchased by my employer, Origin Acoustics, between 2019 and 2020. This was a small company building custom loudspeakers in Lake Havasu City. While the company was over a decade old, they had yet to gain traction beyond a handful of custom A/V integration firms.

The company needed to rebrand and re-position as luxury to fit their pricing schedule to our business model. Origin Acoustics is a premium brand that borders on masstige luxury. We needed to attract even wealthier and larger clients, this company was to be the vehicle. Ambisonic Systems had never hired a marketing consultant or even a designer. Still, their handcrafted speakers and insistence on using the highest quality components lined them up squarely with aspirational luxury branding. Luckily they had not deeply penetrated any market either, so I had a blank slate, nearly.

As a total brand tear down, I had to design a new logo, visual system, writing style, and positioning research and documentation. Then, we needed to expose the brand to our network of clients who service the highest echelon of society.

I broke the task down into several categories, each one being developed concurrently with each other. First, build a visual system for the brand that was unique but felt familiar. Most people will be hearing of this brand for the first time when it is offered to them, and it will most likely be part of a much larger quote. With a minimum spend of roughly $10000, we had to legitimize the brand in the consumer's eyes. So, I created a straightforward, clean, Vignelli inspired typography and layout guide then matched it with ultra-processed, dreamy product imagery. The goal was to instantly put a new shopper at ease with the familiar, vintage, feel of the design while telling a branded story of performance-minded, handcrafted luxury. You can view the style guide here.

Secondly, I had to position this brand within a mature market full of competitors. I spent hours combing competitive catalogs, building semiotic charts, reading copy, and trying to understand the type of person that resonates with our product. Who wants $2500 each speakers for their backyard? I listened to probably 100 hours of music on their speakers. I became fully immersed. Here is some of my semotic research. And a comptetive pricing analysis.

Finally, I had to create all the content. This company had collected no high-resolution photography, had an unstyled website and never thought about marketing beyond publishing truly impressive specifications. With a team of engineers running the show, I understand the aversion to design and marketing's murky nature. They needed a sales and marketing staff to take hold truly.

While my knowledge of both the CEDIA industry and loudspeakers is reasonably in-depth, I needed to know the forces behind his company to build an authentic brand. You know, one that could pass a sniff test. So, to begin, I recorded a three-hour interview with their founder and industry pioneer Jeff Coombs, who had already founded and sold the custom audio brand James Loudspeaker before founding Ambisonic Systems. You can watch a rough cut of that interview here.

We never released the interview publicly, but we sent it to our sales representatives and required them to watch. This video helped position the brand in their minds as a legitimate contender to James Loudspeaker. And they told the story contained within, in their own words, to each client during the pitch, I guarantee it. As a marketer for B2B, my goal is to put words into the mouths of my salespeople. They need stories to tell, and our customers need stories to believe. And if I don't give them that truth, the correct values, salespeople will inevitably make up their own.

Once we built the story and wholly-owned the brand, we began a national tour to show off the performance. We scheduled regional demos in high-end private venues and made hype for these demos by placing flagship model reviews in both retail and industry magazines. We also began to position ourselves as experts in Ambisonic's main category, outdoor audio, by writing articles for trade magazines, like the one I wrote here.

The style guide and the brand positioning were accepted by the CEO and campaigns generated from this work are being implemented over Q1 2021.