Move Slow, and Break Things

This week, we have a company already on a roll preempting their much larger competitor and resetting the bar, and a once-beloved brand taking another hit to its reputation. Is it permanent? I check in with guest contributor Will Valentine to try to answer that question.

Winner: OpenAI, for its huge week. On Monday, OpenAI held a virtual event at which it launched ChatGPT 4o , its new flagship model, featuring simple yet compelling demos, given by their own engineers, in a simple, scaled down living room-style setting. No doubt many of you have read all about it, or watched it live. The livestream of the event got a massive amount of day-of media coverage (one day before Google I/O) and day 2 through day 5 (and counting) stories. Then, on Thursday, the company announced a wide ranging partnership with Reddit to bring content from the social platform to OpenAI's models. Again, waves and waves of coverage, for both OpenAI and Reddit, which I guess makes Reddit a winner of the week too?

Learnings: 1) If you can preempt your competition to win the newscycle, do it. At Realtor.com we used to do this to Zillow and Redfin every year with most of our anticipated reports, including our annual Housing Forecast, and it worked like a charm. 2) If your story is compelling enough, you don't need to rent out the Sphere, Carnegie Hall, or any other known venue. Just set up a camera with a simple stage and go. 3) Show, don't tell. 4) When possible, leverage partners that are already riding high for the halo effect. 5) Be the most interesting company in the world. This last one is really hard.

Loser: Sonos, for its botched app update release and subsequent response. On May 7, Sonos released a highly anticipated update to its primary S2 controller app. The response was a swift and blinding tidal wave of negative feedback from users and reporters . Complaints of missing features like sleep timers, broken local library management, and inability to edit playlists and song queues immediately flooded the Internet. In response, Sonos released a LONG (four paragraph) statement, in which it complimented itself for having the courage to release something clearly not ready for prime time as part of a larger effort to rebuild the flagship product from the ground up. "Courage” is doing some seriously heavy lifting there.?

This is personal. I have been a Sonos fan for more than a decade. We became a fully-in Sonos household that long ago, and have been adding to it periodically since. So it pains me to see them suffer yet another self-inflicted wound. My friends and family have tired of hearing me complain about the lagginess of the app with the hardware; about the fact that they split their app in two because their hardware will only work with one or the other, not both; and about how “it just works” has devolved into “why won’t this work?” on setup and when moving speakers to different locations. What Sonos had going for it at one point was something that few companies could ever hope to achieve – a rabid and passionate fan base that adored the simplicity and quality of their products. From where I sit, only Apple has ever sustained this for any period of time. And if I am even remotely representative of that base, that reputation is on life support.?

Live shot of Sonos engineers reading app feedback in real time

Curious about what the actual trend of Sonos’ reputation in the media has been, I turned to friend and colleague Will Valentine of Valentine Advisors and Publisher of The Repute . In addition to being a well respected Fractional Chief Communications Officer, Will has built a really cool and innovative way to measure brand reputation in media using a proprietary AI model. Turning it over to him to explain what he sees:

Well Hani, in terms of your comment about Sonos being “on life support” I see things a bit differently.

If I had to sum up Sonos’ current situation in one sentence, it’d be: “This too shall pass.” As long as Sonos quickly addresses customer concerns and shows accountability, I believe they have a high chance of bouncing back to their usual pattern.

Why do I think this? First, I analyzed their top 100 stories on Google News, which showed a stronger than expected pattern of positive sentiment leading into this crisis. They’re starting from a position of strength. While it’s true that they have a history of self-inflicted wounds during launches, they also have a history of solid recoveries.

Next, I’ve been experimenting with analyzing stories to see what they reveal about a company’s lifecycle stage and trajectory, focusing on the specific language reporters use. My hypothesis is that the terms and structure used to describe a company in articles can tell us a lot about its perceived situation. While this form of analysis is still in beta, here’s what I found:

Clearly, most companies aim to be seen as “leaders” rather than “incumbents” (and certainly not “dinosaurs”). My take? Sonos is still typically viewed as a rising leader, with some hints of incumbency creeping in. While the old saying “past performance is not indicative of future results” holds true, in my opinion, their usual position is quite strong, current crisis notwithstanding. If they fix the product problems, they should recover. And then longer term, they’ll need to keep innovating!?

Fair enough, and thanks for the data-driven look, Will. Maybe it is just a stubbed toe, and Sonos is just the loser of the week. But one can only stub their toe so many times before it turns black and falls off. I sure hope not, because I don’t want to have to trash and replace my entire system just so I can have my weekly listen to Outlandos d’Amour .?

Learning: Where do I begin? When releasing a new product that is less functional than the old product, maybe stop and reconsider. If that doesn’t solve the problem, when pre-briefing reporters on said new product, either give access to the whole thing, or be up front about what it’s going to be missing, and why, upon launch. Sonos only gave a short demo and an overview to media, according to Chris Welch , a prominent personal audio and home theater reviewer. If that doesn’t work, and everyone takes turns dumping on your new product, don’t call yourself “courageous” for launching it. And finally, when confronted with angry customers, don’t release a four paragraph statement.

I'm Hani Durzy, president and founder of Red Dog Strategies, a senior level communications consultancy. We fulfill fractional and interim comms lead needs; handle distinct and specific projects around crisis comms, corporate narrative development, M&A/financial communications, change management, and building editorial content capabilities to augment storytelling; and execute "wellness check" assessments of existing comms programs to unlock the power of the function. If you want to talk, please reach out at [email protected] .