In the heavily cluttered world of tech innovation, Bose needed a way to not only break through the noise but to appeal to the next generation of Gen Z and young Millennial audiences on TikTok. The next generation doesn’t want to be advertised to; they want to be seen and heard, as well as entertained. Our brief was simple: how can we find simple human truths that relate Bose to their community, and ultimately make consumers feel understood? By establishing this connection with our audience, we built valuable relations to prove why Bose is the right fit for the consumer. Every post put out was evaluated through the lens of driving follower growth, engagement, and viewership.

Despite the innovation that the audio electronics industry has made, there are simply certain universal human struggles that we can’t escape–like getting ear wax stuck on our earbuds or the feeling of your ears overheating from wearing your over-the-head headphones for too long. To poke fun at the absurdity of innovation within our own industry, we created an “Innovative Product” TikTok content series featuring entirely fictitious products that address entirely real human struggles–all of which were sourced directly from our community via comments on our social channels. From a 29.9 Foot Rope to ensure you never step out of range of your Bluetooth speaker to ‘Steven’, a fake character who would take your earbuds out after you fall asleep, our line-up of faux Innovative Products are meant to complement our real Bose products.

Community was at the core of our strategy. We had a lofty goal of capturing the interest and attention of Gen Z and young Millennials – a group that notoriously tunes out advertising. In order to do so we knew we couldn’t show up like every other brand. And above all else, we knew we couldn’t just sell to them. We had to entertain them. Given Tiktok’s resonance with Genz Z, we used this platform as our chosen conduit for launching this series. We threw branded best practices out the window and let the community set the guardrails for us. Every single piece of content was rooted in comments in our videos, or conversations happening in culture on TikTok. In addition, we showed up with a self-aware tone that was authentic to the way the audience speaks to each other.

We first set out by posting on TikTok consistently (at least twice a day) with a breadth of content themes and formats, and made a home in the comments section of our page by replying to nearly every commenter to leverage our community to drive further engagement, all while leaning into platform tools and trends to stay at the forefront of culture. We posted over 400 pieces of content in 11 months and each post was tracked against follower growth, comment sentiment, and viewership by post in order to analyze trends amongst our content. Ongoing content ideation was fueled by comments from previous posts, creating a snowball of content themes and categories expanding past our “Innovative Products” and into neighboring territories to continue growing the brand voice on TikTok.

Over the past 11 months, we’ve reached 24M+ TikTok users organically, which has driven over 28,000,000 video views, 3,700,000 likes, and 34,000 comments. As we’ve built our community through continuous creative testing, leveraging real-time consumer comments as fuel for creative executions has been at the forefront of our organic strategy. As such, we grew Bose’s organic TikTok following by 271% in the last 8 months alone, with 85% of followers now representing their key business target of A18-34. Additionally, when we translated top performing organic viral content into paid media to drive qualified traffic and product consideration we saw costs over two times more efficient and rates over 1.5x stronger than traditional content on the platform indicating we truly found a way to advertise to TikTok audiences. We’ve hit our stride in driving connection and engagement on Bose’s TikTok handle, and we haven’t stopped at our “Innovative Products” series. We’ve