When your brand is all about listening, is there room to add physical products to the customer experience? Or is it best to stick with what you know and leave the rest to Dr Dre? Spotify is planning to delve into the world of hardware to enhance what it offers its customers. But will it add enough to the experience to be worth doing?
**The details.**
Spotify has recently announced it is looking for an Operations Manager. The job ad explains: “Spotify is on its way to creating its first physical products and setting up an operational organisation for manufacturing, supply chain, sales & marketing.” It’s plain that Spotify will be diversifying into physical products – design, manufacture, marketing, the whole shebang – to complement the audio streaming service it already offers.
**Snap and learn.**
When Snap Inc., the owners of instant messaging app Snapchat, added ‘Spectacles’ to their offering in 2016, they missed the mark. These ‘smartglasses’ could record short videos, then sync with a smartphone to share them on Snapchat – in theory, adding a whole new dimension to the Snapchat experience. But the expensive gimmick never caught on – the quality of the image was not good enough, and the price point was too high.
Spotify might be thinking about their own brand black-and-lime headphones, attempting to rival the brand popularity of Dr Dre’s Beats. Or perhaps they’ll go for less sexy (but still important) essentials like cables and adapters for on-the-go listening. Whatever they choose, they’ll have to make sure they’ve got their ducks in a row in terms of quality, price, inventory management and supply chain. And that’s a lot to take on for a company that, up till now, has traded purely in zeroes and ones.
**Make a splash.**
Most interesting (at least to us) will be the potential for a big, memorable physical launch. To make the connection between the Spotify streaming service and the new physical products – and to thereby expand people’s brand loyalty to the new range – Spotify needs a larger-than-life launch event, perhaps with giant headphones, listening pods, pulsing beats and strobe lights.
