When a new campaign is launched, people in the industry often ask if it is a brand campaign or a product marketing campaign, but for Beats’ CMO and head of product, Chris Thorne, it shouldn’t be either/or.
“The best campaigns are the ones that do both,” he tells Marketing Week. They should combine “amazing storytelling” while putting the product, and its features and benefits, “at the heart of that story”.
While he admits it can be “really hard to do”, this dual focus on brand and product takes centre stage in Beats’ latest campaign for its in-ear headphones, Powerbeats Pro 2.
Thorne describes ‘Listen to Your Heart’ as Beats’ “biggest” campaign to date. It features footballer Lionel Messi, basketball player LeBron James and Dodgers’ baseballer Shohei Ohtani – three “goats” as Thorne puts it (the greatest of all time, for those unacquainted).
Despite product being one of the 4Ps of marketing, few marketers have control of it. It’s something Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson has urged marketers to increase their influence over and while he’s not the first person to make this case, it’s something many marketers are struggling with.
Thorne, who joined the brand in 2019 as CMO before adding responsibility for product to his role is, in Ritson’s words, a marketing “outlier” – a rare CMO with direct control over product.
The “connection” between marketing and product is “really important”, Thorne says.
“I think marketers are often closest to the consumer, they’re doing the consumer insights. They’re understanding what products, what features really matter to the consumer. And the best marketing and product organisations get that feedback loop, that information,” he says.
“What you learn from the consumer, what really matters to them, that’s fed back into product development – and you’re making amazing products that you know are going to be hits with consumers.”
Thorne’s job at Beats is to “figure out, what people need to enhance their lives, and how we make that product”. He reiterates that the “connection between marketing and product is so important”.
Product is the P all marketers should strive to influence
He describes the team structure at Beats – which was bought by Apple for $3bn (£2.4bn) in 2014 – as “very entrepreneurial, very fluid”.
“There aren’t hard lines between the different teams,” he says. “It’s a very flat, fluid structure”. It means “great ideas… can come from anywhere”, he adds. “That’s the coolest part.”
Ideas are generated through a “tonne of brainstorming meetings”, which is something Thorne has experienced throughout his career having worked previously at Electronic Arts, The Honest Company and medical firm Forward.
“I was at growth stage companies, early-stage companies, and you just see this entrepreneurial culture really work. It empowers people. Amazing ideas can come from anywhere in the organisation, and I think we have that at Beats,” he says. “Beats has not lost that since its early days, and I think that’s been part of our secret sauce in making these great campaigns.”
Bringing those two together for that discussion, lots of discussions and very frequent meetings, I think that’s the key, and whether the org chart changes, to me, isn’t as important as [asking] are those groups coming together?
Chris Thorne, Beats
For marketers wanting more influence over product, he says it’s “less about control” and “more about input”.
Marketers having input on product is “key” in bringing the two areas closer together, whether that’s “in an org chart” or just having conversations between teams.
Marketers should be “sharing information” on consumer insight, what they “expect in a product” and want, and asking about what matters to them. Meanwhile, product teams should be asking “What can we do? What can we build? What does the technology allow for?” in return, he adds.
“Bringing those two together for that discussion…and very frequent meetings, I think that’s the key. Whether the org chart changes to me isn’t as important as [asking] are those groups coming together?” he says. “Are they having an open dialogue and speaking each other’s language and sharing that information?”
Putting the fun in marketing
The outcome of having a unified marketing and product team is highlighted in Beats’ latest campaign.
The new earphones have a built-in heart rate monitor, a first for Beats, which gained insight from 1,000 athletes to hone the product, leading to this sports-focused spot.
“Knowing we had a product that’s special, we really wanted to match that with a campaign worthy of it,” says Thorne.
The common theme for the three athletes in the ad is how “in the most pressure-packed moments in life and sports, when your heart rate rises and everybody gets nervous, somehow these three greats are able to calm their heart rate to perform at an unbelievable level,” he explains.
Thorne wants audiences to learn from the message of the campaign, but at the same time learn something about the product.
Customers are evolving when it comes to fitness. More people want to access data about their health, which they can do now with a range of products from different brands tracking heart rate, sleep and cardio fitness.
Beats CMO on Dr Dre, ambassadors and unconventional marketing
“It’s been such a cool trend to see across all age ranges and geographies,” says Thorne. “You see people really focused on fitness and wellness, and a lot of that is getting information into your hands. Heart rate monitoring is an amazing step for Beats to do that.”
In late 2023, Beats ran a campaign with footballer Erling Haaland and LeBron James – ‘The King and The Viking’.
“We saw consumers loved it because it was unexpected,” he says.
The campaign opened up customers to “the excitement of athletes doing unexpected things in campaigns”.
“It gives us a fun playbook or roadmap for the future of really looking at unique combinations of talent to tell really powerful stories that have not been told before,” says Throne. “That’s the most fun part.”
“Ads for a long time have repeated very similar stories, and we’re really trying to [ask] how do we tell something different? It makes marketing a tonne more fun, to really try and do something new that hasn’t been done before,” he adds.
