Concept Description

HYPER ISLAND

THE HEADPHONE GENERATION

Every generation has a youth movement and every youth movement have different styles and ideals to them.

If the eighties was all about clinging to a genre - rock or synth - then today is more about creating your own, both in terms of music and lifestyle.

It all comes down to being an individual, to have your own ideas, beliefs and means of expression.

An important part of this is your style, the way you dress and there is no denial that headphones are becoming a big part of this.

As a result, the headphone market is booming, but Philips is one step behind.

Their reaction to this is to launch a new line of headphones that will be targeted towards the youth of today.

The brief we received explains more about this problem and asks us to create a campaign that will help them with this.

Urbanites &Tastemakers

The first thing we did when we got the brief was, to research the target group that Philips is aiming for. They call them “young urbanites”, but who are they? What do they do in their everyday life? Where do they hang out? What are their interests?

We researched online and went out on the streets to talk to people. And, since we are the actual target group, we also examined ourselves. This way we were able to apply a lot of the questions that Philips is stuck with and answer them from our perspective. We were then able to create personas that we think will speak for the entire target group.

The Competition

We also dug into to the competition that Philips is facing and found that there are two different kinds of headphone brands - the audiophile and the music lover.

The first one consists of brands similar to Philips, like Sennheiser, Bose and Shure. These are all brands that are known for their high quality products, but they often fail to attract the young audience.

The other one is made up of new, cool brands that make stylish products. They don’t always deliver the best sound, but they never fail to attract the youths. Why? They create value for their users and give them bragging rights.

One of the main conclusions our research led us to, is that the target group is all about being first. The other side of this story is; Philips has no bragging rights about their products and therefore fail to attract these people in the aimed target group.

So how do we create bragging rights for a brand that is known for playing it safe?

target group

technology

In other segments of Philips the brand seems to be more known as forward think-ing and technologically innovative. We think that technology should be more connected to Philips Headphones as well, as it stands for quality and a sense of knowhow. That way Philips won’t be seen as a follow-er of what the popular brands are doing, but rather as an interesting brand with new insights on how headphones should be used.

The product line that Philips is launching in September is called CitiScape. Translated into full words, you read City Landscape. We thought around the insight of using the landscape of your city as a platform.

From there we came up with the concept; Your City, Your Sound.

With the target group consisting of young Digital Natives with a love for music, who all consider themselves to be early adopt-ers, we wanted to bring them an audio visual campaign based around this concept that triggers some of their key touch points and in that way create bragging rights for the brand.

The campaign Your City, Your Sound will be all about Augmented Audio (Augmented Audio is defined as live audio being modi-fied and/or enhanced by computer-gener-ated sensory input) and includes an offline event in the centre of the city and a digital solution.

Website

the campaign

The website will be all about seeing your city in a different way with Augmented Audio. Select one the personas that resemble the different types of headphones out of the CitiScape collection; every persona has a different sound. You then drag the persona into the view of Stockholm.

When you do, you will be in a streetview position where you can walk through the streets and hear the actual sounds of the city combined with the Augmented Audio. The audio is connected with your micro-phone and will use your sounds to blend it with the city sounds.

THE CAMPAIGN

THE CAMPAIGN

THE CAMPAIGN

THE CAMPAIGN

The Box

the campaign

To take the website into an offline experi-ence, we created the Your City, Your Sound street experience.

The new line of headphones will be attached to an art object that uses light mapping and Augmented Audio combined.

The more people that put on the headphones, the more you experience the art object in an audio and visual way.

You can interact with the cube by touching it and making loud noises.

Production

This project relies on a few key components that need to be created in order to succeed.

The key components are the campaign events that are mentioned earlier.

In order to create and deliver the best possible user experience, a test group consisting of 5 to 10 people from the desired target group will be brought into the project. This will allow us to tweak the products and make changes as we go along.

To set up this campaign, we used the exist-ed visual language that is given us such as monograms and a combination of graphics of the products. The color base is clearly connected to the colors of the headphones

and working with this base, the whole project will look unified which is very important to get the message out to the target group. The aim is that they start recognizing the colors and the visuals as part of the new line of headphones.

Philips will use their resources of other projects to support their choice of third parties that need to be involved. We will be working closely with the head of the Headphone department and the web man-agement of Philips to see what is possible within the company.

Content The website will be developed like said earlier, with a close collaboration of earlier resources, using the existing content provided by Philips.

It will be coded by the in-house agency that they have. We will provide wireframes and additional comments.

The making of an interactive cube will be supported by technology of a micro- computer programmed with Augmented Audio code.

Several microphones are already installed in the headphones, which are attached to the cube and led down to the microcomput-er.

A third party needs to be involved to create the technology behind the cube, the coding of the website and printing visuals.

Production