What Happens When No One Knows About Your Great Product?

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Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to marketing spark, which features conversations with entrepreneurs and marketers about business, sales, and, of course, marketing. In an ideal world, marketing puts the spotlight on your brand and products to drive interest and purchase. Well, that's marketing one zero one. But many companies, even ones with great products, struggle because the spotlight is elusive. Maybe they don't don't have enough money to do marketing. Maybe their product doesn't capture the imagination of consumers. Maybe there's too much competition. What happens when you make a great product that no one knows about? How do you become a viable company? What are the different levers that you can pull to generate attention? These are questions that we're gonna explore today with Andrew Grubb, CEO with ThinkSound. ThinkSound is a company based in Toronto that makes personal audio equipment, including headphones. Welcome to MarketingSpark.

Guest: Hello, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start with some background on ThinkSound and your journey to the company, which was somewhat a little unorthodox given your background?

Guest: So I actually started, as a customer of ThinkSound maybe six or seven years ago. And I remember, I I I still remember kind of how I stumbled across it, and it was really through, you know, the kind of audio file forums and looking for even just, like, a set of earbuds or headphones. It didn't really matter. But I kinda had this ink this kind of, like, inkling to try something new to kind of, like, elevate my game. I didn't really know what that meant. And so I bought a pair of ThinkSound earbuds at the time, and I and I I refer to it kinda jokingly, but it's also all too serious that it's the most expensive $150 I've ever spent. Because it it it really opened on my ears, but opened my mind to kinda what music should sound like. And and, you know, it was a it was a really hard journey after that because I had to you know, my car stereo, my home stereo, everything had to change. So it really made, like, a profound difference in my life because I've always been a huge fan of music, but I just never had experienced it in that way. And so, you know, that was kind of my my personal obviously, like, massive personal impact. But then I found, you know, I guess, maybe, I guess, it was around a few years after that. You know, when you're traveling a lot and a lot of virtual meetings were that was kinda picking up then. And I found that there was, like, a, you know, the the kind of the the standard kind of, I guess, speakers in my laptop would kinda bug me, and and I would go towards kinda more higher end audio products because it represents the voice a little better, and I wouldn't get fatigued. And and I realized it made, you know, kinda made a big difference for me. So I would buy ThinkSound earbuds for, like, everyone on my team and people in my company, And it just I just felt like people deserve to give it a shot. And then maybe yeah. About two years ago or so, I reached out to the founder because I've been the customer forever, and I bought tons of stuff from them. And I was just kinda wondering what was going on. He said, yeah. You know, he's, like, getting a little tired running the business as solopreneur and, you know, wasn't really sure what the the future was, and I convinced him to to kinda, you know, I guess, let me and another person, partner in with the company and sort of bought a big chunk of it of it off of them and moved it to Canada. And it's now a kind of like a we call it like a repatriated company. It's now a Canadian firm. So very much out of, like, personal interest and passion.

Mark Evans: It's kind of that old story. I think it's Victor Kayam who bought Gillette, and he ran these commercials for years around the idea that I love the company so love the product so much that I bought the company, and that seems to be the path that you took. Provide some background about you. Like, you're not a music executive by any means. You're not even a like, I don't even know if you play music for that matter. What was your professional journey like before ThinkSound?

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. So no. You're right. I mean, what I when I pick up an instrument, I don't think many people would call it music. So so I don't have a lot of, like, talent in music music production, let's say. No. My background is funny enough. It's, you know, started off as as engineering, but quickly switched into, you know, management and entrepreneurship. And I was, you know, I've been in corporate innovation for a number of years. I I also still run a, you know, boutique consulting firm around employee experience design. So very b to b working with, you know, Fortune 500 companies in a management consulting context.

Mark Evans: Why don't we talk a little bit about ThinkSound? What does the company do? What kind of products does it make? Where does it fall in the scheme of things? Because, obviously, you can buy some cheapy headphones off Amazon for $10. And at the high end, you can buy Beats and Bose and, you know, all kinds of really amazing products. What does ThinkSound do and where does it fall on the spectrum?

Guest: Primarily, like, the number one kind of condition we have to satisfy is does it sound good? Our kind of internal goal is to make, to to make sustainably made portable audio products, that beat our competitors at three to five times the price. That's sort of like our internal mission, if you will. The way we go about it is a lot of a lot of companies have manufacturing set up overseas, whether it's Taiwan or or Korea or China. We're we're no different. The difference here is our original founder, Aaron Forney, he spent five years in in you know, overseas, primarily in China, working for high end audio houses, you know, the infinities and Klipsch's of the world, setting up manufacturing and product development and design. And and he actually, that's when ThinkSound was born was out of just a sheer disgust of how few companies actually used engineered products and they just took off the shelf, you know, how expensive everything was, you know, how inaccessible kind of audio file level qual like headphones were, and also that everything ended up in a landfill. And so those are kind of I call I call it it was like this thing sounds kind of based off of three disgusts. Not not necessarily a passion, but, like, a, like, a violent reaction to kind of how the world is working. And so so where we sit is there's a pretty linear relationship, like, in the market between, you know, cost and quality, like, sound quality. I'm gonna air quote that. Because there are as soon as you as soon as an audio file hears this, like, ah, there's so much subjectivity inside. Of course, there is. There's tons. And so what we do is we try you know, our goal is to kinda disrupt that that that curve a little bit. And and there are there are other companies doing it, of course, but, but we try and sit kind of in the I don't know if know Bowers and Wilkins. We're kind of in the BMW range of audio quality and a little bit less expensive. So our headphones, like, I'm I'm wearing our o v 20 ones right now. They're they retail for $500, and we regularly compete against, you know, 1,500 to $2,000 Klipsch headphones as an example. Our our kind of internal mission is for more people to hear music the way it was meant to be heard, and there's two parts to that. There's music the way it was meant to be heard, so it has to sound great, and more people, so it has to be more accessible. And that generally means lower price.

Mark Evans: Where's the company at in terms of its growth? You repatriated the company back to Canada. You're making product. It sounds like the the portfolio is expanding. Where are you from a sales perspective?

Guest: It's interesting. I on one hand, it's, like, not encouraging at all, but it's very much by design. When we kind of reset when we joined the firm, we reset the entire company, you know, rebranded absolutely everything. Like, redid all of our product line. And we so we started in our r and d. So we basically took everything off the shelf for about a year. And then we and then we started with kind of what we could get quickest to the market, which was a wired earbud. And then eventually, we came up with these over ears. We have a couple other products in development. It's been very challenging. So I would say right now, quick answer, two products in market, both wired, one in ear, one over ear. We have multiple wireless as well as in home. We have a pair of bookshelf speakers that we're we're kinda designing. It's COVID has been incredibly challenging, not only with the global global chip shortage supply. So all of our Bluetooth products just, like, ground to a halt a year ago. We can't do any more research and development on them. Dealing with manufacturers overseas without being able to go and sit there in the factory, that's difficult. And so things take a lot longer. So we're probably we probably lost a year of development in the past two years, which I know is a common story. But but for us, it's kinda it's kinda frustrating when you put everything on hold. Like, you just you completely reset the firm. And then when you start, it's a lot slower than you want it to be as far as development. Luckily, so when we launch a new product, we always do a presale with our existing customer customers, and the uptake's really good. Like, we, you know, we have we have a a loyal group of customers, and I'm always I'm always overjoyed that, honestly, that anybody buys a product without hearing it. Like, that that that's all it's always always makes me happy.

Mark Evans: So what kind of marketing has ThinkSound done over the past year or so? Obviously, when you've got supply constraints and development challenges, you probably wanna throttle back on marketing. Are you doing any right now? And if so, what kind of marketing is happening?

Guest: So it's interesting. I was kinda thinking about this. Like, in kinda preparing for our conversation, the company was was found the growth of the company, let's say, was founded on kind of word-of-mouth grassroots marketing. And and literally what that means is, Aaron, our original founder, he's a bassist, for a metal band. He's a huge metal head, and he would kinda almost roadie with a lot of metal bands. And he'd go to these festivals and concerts, and everyone would kinda get along. And then the musicians would start using the headphones, and then it would kinda circle through cycle through the network. And then, you know, fans of those of those types of music would would kinda, like, catch on. And so we have, like, a diehard metal and jazz following. So people who listen to certain bands would kinda have an affinity to to our products, which is very which is you know, I think that's like a it's a wonderful feeling to know that you our growth is authentic. It's through authentic relationships. And when we kinda translate that to, like, the last couple years, that wasn't possible. There's nothing about that that was possible. There's no music festival. There's no concerts. None of that has happened. So we've experimented with kind of sponsoring at home concerts, very limited success with that. We've also sponsored music festivals. You know what's interesting because there's there's kind of two sides to it. One is, hey. What kind of reaction do we get from artists? Like, so so different from hip hop and r and b artists. What kind of this is this one festival in Toronto. What kind of reaction do we get from them? And then b is how many sales do we make as a result? And it's hard because as fans of music and obviously fans of our of our product, we get caught up in just caring about artist feedback. And when people listen to it and they say, this is amazing, I I would rather hear a compliment than make a sale. It's almost like we're, you know, we're being a little self sacrificial by saying, let's put ourselves into a place where we develop interest and validation in what we're doing, but those aren't the same people who buy our products necessarily. So there have been a lot of, like, commercially, maybe unsuccessful ventures in in marketing and sales, but they feel really good, which is which is really funny. And and considering this is very much a passion for all of us, it's not necessarily our core source of income. We don't really question that maybe enough, but but we but, you know, it it aligns with our philosophy. But as far as what has worked kinda commercially, we have, again, kind of thinking about networks and musicians. There's a lot of musicians kind of that we're, you know, friends, friends with, and they they've promoted our products on their channels and and, you know, we're we're we're allowed to kind of promote their their new album releases and tour dates on ours, and we have kind of a bit of a collaboration that generates a lot of interest, which is good. Funny enough, because we have such a loyal following, anytime we release a new product, that's where most of our sales come from is people who already know us.

Mark Evans: Couple of places where I wanna go. One, there was an article written about ThinkSound, and I think the title was how do you sell a product that no one knows about? How do you sell a great product that no no one knows about? So from a marketing's perspective, what are your thoughts about the fact that this product is so good? You have raving fans who obviously upgrade every time that you launch new products. The bang for the buck obvious it sounds like it's amazing, which makes me believe that there's lots of people who like the combination of of good prices and great quality. Where does that play in terms of the whole marketing and sales scheme? How do you get that message out to the marketplace?

Guest: Well, I think I think embedded in that is a bit of education. If we're trying to disrupt that curve that I referred to a while ago, you know, there's the idea that you we need to kinda educate some of the market. And I know this is something that we've we've spoken about is, you know, do you spend all of your time and effort educating and then hoping that that gets attributed to you? That you don't just convince people to go look for better things and they go buy somewhere else. We obviously want both. We want people to make an intelligent purchase. We also want them to make that purchase with us, part partly because we're a business and partly because we believe in what we make. So there's there's, you know, there's kind of like a synergy there, if you will. If I had a good answer, I I think that'd be too simple. It's a it's a really tricky question because there are you know, I guess my my kind of, like, more skeptical side would say that we've kind of fallen into this this this sort of expectation within, you know, b to c goods that advertising is the way that people learn about things, and advertising is the way that companies reach people. And those with bigger advertising budgets will get those people, and that can be true. And and so the question we have to ask ourselves is, does that align with how we wanna grow our company?

Mark Evans: In the b to b SaaS world where I spend a lot of time these days, most of my time these days, a concept that is rearing its head is community. And community is sexy right now because it's a way of doing marketing and sales, but having other people do it for you. So rather than having to spend the money on advertising and content and going to conferences, you nurture these communities where you have raving fans, and they become evangelists and advocates, and they amplify the brand and spread the word. And it strikes me that the marketing asset that ThinkSound does have is a community. What are your thoughts and plans to leverage that? People love your product. People love to talk about your product. How do you activate them so that they become, in some respects, a marketing and sales army?

Guest: Yeah. It's a great question. And I would say we've actually done a decent job in activating it. Our problem is our community is small. And and I think our core challenge right now is to grow the community, which I can't really speak to the success of that because we are literally just starting that. In the past couple months, we started trying to grow a community. And a lot of that is through influencer marketing. It isn't necessarily like, I'm not not a huge fan of paying people a ton of money because they have a ton of followers. I'm more of the nano and micro influencers because they tend to have more relevant and aligned followers, and and people pay attention to what they say. In general, I I would say my response, it's a bit of a fictitious and imaginary response because it's what we plan to do. Talk talk to you in three months and tell you how it goes. But we need to go create a network of I say influencers, but I don't wanna use it in the same term that we're like, as our kinda common balance. Like, people who can influence others, and we want to incentivize them to influence others. A lot of these people aren't necessarily music lovers. So we know that, you know, it used to be that headphones were used for music, and and headphones started being used for, like, work and travel, and and gaming is massive. And we have to kinda we know we have to branch outside of music in order to kind of really broaden our community.

Mark Evans: When I think of influencer marketing, it sounds kinda slimy. It sounds a little dirty. It sounds like there's a lot of pay per play, and perhaps a lot of influence in marketing is not authentic. These influencers don't necessarily like the products or love the products that they're promoting. What's your approach to influencer marketing? How do you identify them? How do you attract them? And how do you compensate them? Because you want people who are obviously music lovers or video game lovers or they're always on Zoom and they want a better approach to using audio. How do you discover them and how do you get them on-site and how you how do you keep them?

Guest: Three months from now, I'll let you know. I have guesses. Like, this is where we're starting to experiment with that, but I absolutely agree. So considering you know, I know I've said it a couple times, but we kinda demand authentic growth out of ourselves. And so we don't wanna convince people that don't wanna be convinced. We don't want slimy influencer marketing. We don't want to grow through channels that don't believe that we actually have a good product. The idea of pay for play without alignment of of, like, why the product exists, I'm not into that. You know, I I can't I can't say exactly how we're gonna do it because I don't actually know yet because we have to try a few different ways. But, absolutely, one of our goals is to grow through grow like, let's say, influencers specific specifically, have the have people who believe in it and who agree that our product is good. Those are the ones we want to to work with. The hard part for us is that means we have to send out a bunch of free headphones a lot of time, and that can be expensive. That's kind of our commodity. That's our currency, I guess. Not a commodity. It's our currency at the moment, which is, in honest in all honesty, no different than the reviewer space. If you think about how, like, how I first found out about ThinkSound was through Stereophile, which is an audio file publication. And how did ThinkSound get reviewed on Stereophile seven, eight years ago is is kind of the same question we're answering now. And when you go to reviewers, there's we have, luckily, Aaron Aaron has been a part of this community for many, many years. There's a lot of reviewers that really like him and really trust his product, and they'll they'll they'll they'll put us ahead of line from, you know, whatever is coming out of, you know, Sony or Klipsch's lab. They'll say, yeah. No. We know this is gonna we know that we're gonna have an emotional reaction to this, and we're gonna have thoughts about it. So we'll we'll write a review on it. And that's great. There are still a ton of reviewers that say, yeah. No problem. Just give me $10, and I'll review your product.

Mark Evans: Right. No. Thanks. Right.

Guest: I have zero interest. We've had we've been approached by so many publications for, like, Christmas Christmas wish list. Like, to get onto Oprah's, you know, kind of, like, holiday gift giving guide, you gotta cut a $50,000 check. Like, to me, that's not authentic. That isn't that isn't, you know, the the the kind of the channel believing in the product. That's the channel believing in the paycheck. And I'm that that doesn't interest me.

Mark Evans: Well, that's the reality for a lot of companies, particularly startups who have a limited marketing budgets. They are the Davids trying to battle the Goliaths. What are your thoughts from a management perspective, from a strategic perspective, in terms of the levers that David can pull to battle Goliath when you don't have the financial resources to go head to head?

Guest: It's so funny. I used to have this a similar conversation. So I used to work for Mercer, a big HR consulting firm, and we would talk about market research all the time. And and it was always you had to pay a bunch of money to get market research, and you had to pay to get all these opinions. And there's a coffee shop at the at the Bottom Floor of the building. And in that coffee shop is 25 people every fifteen minutes walking in that are our our customer. What does it cost us to go down there and ask them questions? It's free. Some would call that guerrilla marketing, because you're you're going out and getting in people's faces. Guerrilla marketing is absolutely free, and it's a great way to go. You you don't necessarily have to pay through the traditional channels. You have to, you know, you have to start I mean, I guess the question you have to answer is, like, so what works? And you can either figure out what works through paying for a bunch of different things, or you can go talk to a bunch of people. And sometimes it costs money to talk to people. So if you have no budget, then you have to assume you have no budget, and you have to figure out a way to do it. You know, it's it's hard to say in this kind of virtual world we've been working in for the past while. But as as humans start interacting with each other more and more, we can start actually walking down the street and having collisions. That being said, Reddit is a fantastic place, and there is no advertising allowed on Reddit. But you have to be ready for the feedback on Reddit.

Mark Evans: So what is the marketing plan for ThinkSound in 2022? Obviously, community will come back, and you've got some plans for community, which will be fueled by the fact that we'll see concerts come back. I guess in The States, it's already happening in Canada. We're we're waiting for that to happen. Festivals, that kind of thing. If you're not gonna be leveraging advertising, which it sounds like you that's not gonna happen, what are your marketing plans? What are the channels that you're gonna exploit? How you raise the company's profile? How you educate consumers to ultimately drive revenue. Because, I mean, you can run this thing as a hobby for a few years, and if it's as long as it breaks even, I guess that's okay. But I suspect your aspirations are mixed. On one hand, you're an audiophile who loves the product and just want to have some fun along the way. And the other hand, you're a business guy. You know, you can't, you know, allocate time when there's no ROI. So I guess that's a long winded question about, you know, what are we gonna see from ThinkSound as far as marketing is concerned in 2022?

Guest: Oh, for sure. Yeah. So there's two two easy answers, but I'm gonna start with your last comment about the hobby. I I agree that there is there's, like, kind of, like, an internal personal conflict. Right? But at the end of the day, if our mission is for more people to hear music the way it was meant to be heard, and if I believe in the product that we've designed, then people people deserve for me to try and grow the company and for for not just me, but the team. Like, this is what if I believe this is what the world needs, then the world needs it. And and I you know, it has nothing to do with me finding time or investing it and running it as a hobby. Like, I have to believe that there's a reason why we created this product. That's not just for me. As much as, like, I joke that I'm really getting the company designed products for myself because this is what I want. And, like, it's the most expensive pair of headphones I could have bought, which is kinda stupid. Right. Thought, you know, design a whole freaking product. Yeah. No. So so there's, a little piece of me that's, like, a little bit, like, kind of rebellious to your to your your perspective, but I agree with your perspective completely. So the two way the two ways that we absolutely plan on on growing. So, you know, going back to kind of the influencer marketing side Mhmm. I don't wanna call it that. So building that community, but key is building going deep on a narrow community. Instead of just spreading ourselves really thin and saying, hey. Let's go talk to gaming people. Yeah. I know. Like, that's that's way too wide. So we need to go very focused on where we're going to be leveraging. Let's call it, like, personal individual brands to to kind of, like, amplify our our our brand. So that would be my my kind of maybe PC way of describing an influencer. So that's number one. For sure, we're doing that. We and we we've lined actually, I'm gonna go and give you a bonus third, which I don't know if it'll generate money, but it it's really interesting. The second is is through through music festivals. And and, again, this isn't necessarily for the attendees of the festival, but we've already kind of lined up with a couple different festivals to be kind of backstage with artists talking to them. It's been a great avenue for more hardcore hardware producers. Like, there's a I I know the CEO of the the Sound and Music Festival here in Burlington. He was telling me the story about a guitar designer and a guitar maker that got backstage with a bunch of bands. Like, he just was like, you know, the guy loved his guitar. He's like, yeah. Come on backstage. Hang out all day. And he sold, I don't know, $50,000 worth of guitars that day just because he was there with a product that people loved. And they said, yeah. You know what? I love this product, and I support you, and I appreciate that you're here. So that's that's partly what that's this kind of the second main kind of lever for us, if you will. The third one, which I'm not sure if it's gonna make money, like, really don't know and I really don't care, is I I I'm starting to talk to a couple different artists and, like, musicians about kind of, like, limited run versions of of headphones. And the idea being and this is where it sounds good on paper, but I really don't know how it'll go. Is a lot of a lot of our a lot of bands have kind of, fan clubs. And so these fan clubs, you pay a nominal fee, 40 or $50 a year sometimes. And you get early access to tickets. You know, you get, you know, certain, like, limited edition merch and things like that. And and really the idea is like, hey. Can we can we give bands another way to get in the home of their of their fans? And so right now, the way bands get get into kind of physical interaction with people's lives is you buy their record, you buy their T shirt, you go to their concert. The concert is the only musical piece of that. Like, the record is there for sure, obviously. But none of that I shouldn't say none of it, you know, kind of connects with an experience, but the a headphone is another way to kind of to kind of bring the band into someone's life. That's something we're exploring. I like the idea of helping the bands establish a better connection. Don't know how beneficial it'll be, but it's something that I wanna do.

Mark Evans: Two final questions. One hard, one easy. I'll start with the hard question. If someone were considering the purchase of earphones or over the ear headphones right now, why should they buy ThinkSound versus a Sony or Klipsch or Sennheiser or Beats? What makes ThinkSound better?

Guest: Dollar for dollar, we're gonna be better sound sound quality. Absolutely. That's the easy one to me. The other one is maybe this connects with, like, a secondary reason people people make purchases, especially for our over ears. Everything is made with an incredible focus on sustainability. So our over ear all of our packaging from, like, from ground up, zero single use plastics. Everything is is paper or recyclable or made from recycled materials. I I can't confirm, but we tried getting biodegradable ink even. Like, it's it's something we really strive for. The, the plastic on here, as, you know, as you make bigger products, you need to use more plastic. We actually partnered with a company out of The States called Eastman Chemical, and so our plastic is made out of a bioplastic called Treva. So it's even our plastic is made out of wood, which is kinda funny. So if that's something that you believe in, you know, good luck finding a sustainably made headphone for many of the big companies. See, that to me, that's the easy part is if if sustainability is your focus and you're an audiophile, there are very few options.

Mark Evans: The easy question thanks for that question. The easy question. Thanks for that answer. The easy question is, where can people learn more about you and as important ThinkSound?

Guest: Thinksound.com. You could follow us on Instagram. We we don't we're not super active on Instagram. We we really wanna stay away from being spammy, so we kind of maybe over index on on kind of only only, like, posting every now and again. But those are the best ways to to kind of find out about us and engage with us. We're super responsive. Because this is all of our passion, you know, our turnaround time on communication is pretty instant. If it goes a day without a response, that's kinda like it's kinda sickening to us.

Mark Evans: A comment and a and a final question. The comment will be for anyone who is an Instagram fan and a music fan listening to this podcast. I'm sure they're gonna circle back with you and tell you that you can enjoy the best of both worlds. You can be on Instagram. You can have an active presence. You can build a community, and you can avoid being spammy. So prepare yourself for the barrage of social media strategists who will come to you with, with services. Maybe maybe they'll maybe you can do a little barter swap, you know, headphones for headphones for free advice, something like that. The other question well, see, Andrew, has it welcomed you if you're a social media strategist and you want a free pair of headphones for exchange in exchange? I'm sure it'll be you'll be all ears. The other question would be, where can you buy ThinkSound products?

Guest: So currently, we're we're direct to consumer. Thinksound.com is our primary source. We basically do you know, we have three main sources, direct to consumer, Amazon, and then, like, high end audio retailers all around the world.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to mark@markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn.