Oticon

Product launch brings a new perspective to the hearing care industry

Four years after the enormous success of Oticon Opn™, Oticon teamed up again with Kunde & Co to shake up the industry with the new Oticon More™ hearing aid.

About Oticon: An industry-leading hearing aid brand with a mission to change the lives of people with hearing loss in more than 130 countries. Headquartered in Denmark and part of the Demant group, the company has more than 16,500 employees globally.

Task

To launch the organisation’s latest hearing aid, Oticon More, to the market.

Solution

A bold, research- and insights-based campaign encapsulated by the concept ‘The new perspective’.

Result

The concept helped to successfully introduce Oticon More into global markets.

Challenging the hearing care industry

Back in 2016, Oticon created a paradigm shift in the industry with the launch of the Oticon Opn hearing aid and in doing so, positioned the company as one of the hearing care industry’s leading and most innovative manufacturers. A few years later, its successor, Oticon Opn S™, entered the market. In 2020, Oticon introduced yet another groundbreaking innovation designed to challenge the conventional approach to hearing care – Oticon More.

Science-based product innovation

Development of Oticon More follows Oticon’s unique philosophy, BrainHearing™, which focuses on the role of the brain in hearing. A recent scientific breakthrough showed how the brain needs access to the full sound scene, highlighting the importance of giving the brain more of the sounds available in every sound environment.

From lab to real-world discovery

Meeting the brain’s needs was paramount to developing Oticon More. This meant breaking out of the lab and into the real world to better understand the details and complexity of sounds from real life.

Using what’s known as Deep Neural Network – an artificial neural network – Oticon trained the new hearing aid with over 12 million sound scenes from daily life. This resulted in a hearing aid able to recognise and process any sound with extreme precision. But the company faced one challenge: how best to communicate this in a compelling but easy-to-understand way so that both hearing care professionals (HCPs) and users found it attractive.

A bold campaign concept: ‘The new perspective’

The concept development process comprised workshops, qualitative interviews with HCPs, and quantitative market research involving HCPs and nearly 3,000 hearing aid users from Germany, France, the USA and Denmark.

Insights gained from this research were used to create and test a number of value propositions, product concepts and communication directions. This subsequently led to the development of a compelling concept to communicate the complex research: ‘The new perspective’. This bold concept and its storyline explain the BrainHearing™ research and the technology in Oticon More in a way both HCPs and users can understand. Campaign elements included a product launch film, brochures for HCPs and users, a product landing page and social media content.

Impressive sales figures and brand momentum

Since its release in 2020, worldwide purchases of Oticon More have been very successful. ‘The new perspective’ has proven to be a solid campaign platform, not only for the first generation of Oticon More, but also for the line extension, resulting in an increased value for the Oticon brand.