18 | Brands Used by Creators
and the interesting storytelling strategies at play.
Dolby Laboratories inhabited one of those anonymous high-rises on Market Street, a few 100 meters from the Twitter HQ that saw a smug Elon Musk waltz in with a kitchen sink a few years later.
Unlike many of its upstart tech neighbors, Dolby and San Francisco had a relationship going back to 1976, when Ray Dolby moved his 11-year-old audio tech company from London there. By that time, Dolby had already made a name for itself with a noise-reduction system used by record labels and, soon, Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange. Later, Dolby Surround Sound became shorthand for audio quality for an entire generation of moviegoers.
But not recent generations. That was my assignment a few years back when I was asked to develop a brand storytelling voice and content strategy for Dolby. Flagging brand awareness among younger generations meant that the special oomph Dolby’s brand name once had in informing purchasing decisions was fading. And that’s an issue if you’re Samsung and expecting people to shell out more for a flat screen with Dolby technology inside.
So much of brand storytelling in the business to business world feels like a tacked on bullet point in an internal brief. The creative and strategic ambition is lacking, and the messaging is intentional and often opaque. There’s a series of billboards not far from Market Street along I-80 from the Bay Bridge heading south to Silicon Valley featuring taglines understandable only to engineers.
Here was an opportunity to think of Dolby as its own content studio. We looked at the areas — like gaming — where it could develop a strong voice by telling stories, and developed formats for different platforms that showed the difference the technology made. In researching, I came across surprising examples of storytelling from the audio technology world, microphone and mixing board manufacturers whose core customer base used to be engineers and sound technicians.
That changed a few years ago as a whole generation of podcasters and streamers began heading to their local Best Buy, or Media Markt, or, well, pick your big box electronic retailer based on your current geography. Their message and positioning was all of a sudden challenged to become more accessible to a new customer base.
They had to find new language and style to tackle what has always been audio technology’s biggest customer acquisition challenge: showing how easy-to-use and difference-making good audio products can be. Two of the bigger brands in the creator space take slightly different approaches in this respect. So let’s take a look at them now.
Shure 🎙️ has been making the podcast industry’s favorite micorphone for … well … how long has podcasting been popular? Interestingly, when S.N Shure opened up shop in 1925, his first product was selling AM Radio kits. Almost 100 years on, the idea is the same: be the go-to brand for a new generation of creators. During the in-between years, Shure mics ensconced themselves as the most popular in the world: used in WWII bomber planes, serving as the official microphone of the White House, and sung into by the world’s iconic artists. Much like Doc Martens trying to honor its musical history, Shure does a more credible job of telling stories from the music industry it serves. A lot of its team are amateur musicians and tinkerers, which is useful when you’re creating mixing boards, monitors, etc. Its Signal Path podcast, hosted on occasion by friend-of-the-letter Marc Young, serves up Interesting, surprising anecdotes from the people behind the mics (George Clinton), behind the boards (FINNEAS) and backstage. Its socials are a predictable mix of product shots, artist collabs, and unboxing content (from its community). In its collaborations, the brand seems to prefer a singer-songwriter type, rather than the streamers or TikTok influencers who might be using their products. This feels like a miss in the short term, but a gain in the long — solidifying their authenticity with the creative communities they’ve always served. Absent big name collaborations (their 2020 Supreme mic notwithstanding) or a committed music influencer strategy, it would be fun to see them play around with their world-class product out in the wild. The company talks about the rigorous in-house testing through which it puts its products. How interesting would it be to see how a microphone holds up under their “sweat machine”? Or take a page from their storied history and test their mics in some of the most extreme conditions out there — micing up polar scientists, or Amazonian explorers (and take a shot Stanley bottle video virality). This video on how they record car audio for video games might serve as an inspiration. For a brand that’s heavily expanded into conference room hardware and software in recent years, that durability and quality story might go further.
Røde’s 🦘product story begins in the 1990s, far later than Shure, but it stands out for inclusion here not just because of its reputation in recording studios but because of its decision to jump on the early video blogging trend in creating a compact on camera microphone. They followed this up three years later in 2007 by bringing out the first “podcast microphone” that plugged straight into your laptop via USB. This was 2007, only a few months after the term “podcast” was even coined. Shout out to all the first-adopters using the Podcaster to record their kitchen table musings on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There wasn’t much of a “creator economy” to speak of back then, but Røde has been very consistent in its narrative with aspiring makers, often with the product line to match. In 2014 it launched Røde Reels, a short film competition with product and cash prizes that it continued until 2021. In 2019, it launched the podcast version of it, a year after their Rødecaster Pro, a sort of at-home mixing console for podcasters hit their online store. There’s not much storytelling around those communities, no Røde-conceived podcasts, or a Røde Content Studio spinning out Yeti-like films. Rather, the Australian company keeps to their lane with a how-to content strategy rooted in its role as a guide and sounding board to a vast new universe of streamers. This makes sense. Their current CEO Damien Wilson began at the company by building their marketing strategy back in 2007, when the filmmaking community was gathering on a nascent platform called YouTube. He sent “endorsees” new video mics (and didn’t even ask for them back), to get both reviews and feedback. In 2008, they launched the how-to series Rode University on YouTube. It looks like it’s from the 90s, which means it would crush on TikTok today. It’s well worth a click for its Rock Brø host alone. Their storytelling is rooted not just in the new products created with feedback from the community they serve, but in the consistency of their brand stewardship. And that feels rare these days. And I like their lav mics for my boatcast.