Cyrus Soundkey
Peek spent over a year working with Cyrus Audio – an award-winning specialist audio company who have an obsession for ever higher quality reproduction. The focus of this campaign work was to introduce the Cyrus brand to a younger audience and hook them onto the brand to revitalise the enthusiasm for a bespoke hi-fi.
SCOPE OF WORK
Brand naming
Brand identity
Product design
Packaging design
Marketing planning
Kickstarter campaign management
Copywriting
Film
Video production
Social Media management
WEBSITE
INDUSTRY SETTING
Cyrus Audio, the award-winning British specialist hi-fi manufacturer was sadly seeing a steady decline in the love of bespoke hi-fi building. Identifying a need to appeal to a younger audience, Cyrus took their expertise and poured it into developing a revolutionary inline DAC.
CHALLENGE
The objective of Peek’s work was to hook a new generation of music lovers into the Cyrus brand through the launch of the new DAC. In an unusual and bold move, a Kickstarter campaign was chosen as the launch platform to give birth to the newly named Cyrus Soundkey.
STRATEGY
Our work started with the creation of a name for the new DAC. To do this we used our naming experience and expertise and ran a Brand Naming Workshop with the Cyrus team to generate names and create a shortlist of options.
The new name had to express that Cyrus had taken their experience and award-winning expertise and squeezed it into the Cyrus Soundkey.
The qualities identified that helped frame the names were:
- Awesome sound quality
- Small and lightweight (around 16g)
- Smooth sleek design
- Robust aluminium casing
- Extremely low current usage, conserving your phone’s battery life
- Compatible with a wide range of audio formats, including MP3, AAC, and FLAC
- And that it would handle High-Resolution audio files up to 24bit/96kHz.
We encapsulated these qualities in the new brand and name along with the key marketing messages:
- If you love listening to your music on the move via your phone then you would love one of these.
- You deserve the best sound quality from your phone.
- Cyrus have poured their 30 years of audio expertise into a new high quality DAC and amplifier.
- We named the DAC the Cyrus Soundkey.
Crowdfunding success: In an unusual and bold move we decided to run a Kickstarter campaign to fund the initial run of the product. Peek’s role was to guide Cyrus through the process and manage their campaign from start to finish. This included:
- Campaign planning
- Pricing structure and reward design e.g. Pledge levels, VIP specials and Early Bird rewards. These all had different timeframes and price points to encourage engagement and participation in the campaign
- Scriptwriting, filming and video production to promote the product and Kickstarter campaign
- Pre-campaign press launch activities to the hi-fi press and to new media relevant to the target audience
- Social media channel content production and management
- Daily management of the campaign across all channels.
“We were blown away by the immediate success of the campaign and couldn't have wished for a better result.”
RESULT
Within the first 12 hours the initial funding target of £50,000 was smashed and the pledges kept rolling in with the final campaign reaching nearly double the original figure.
1,165 backers pledged £79,962
Following on from the successful Kickstarter campaign the Cyrus Soundkey went into full production and has gone on to win a number of highly prestigious hi-fi awards becoming in the process one of the highest-selling headphone DACs available on the market today.
