Connecting to the EMEA market: the Sonos challenge

Sonos is on a mission: to help the world listen better, bringing people together to share experiences. Sonos offers a smart home sound system, as simple to set it up as it is to use. Present in more than 60 countries, Sonos is considered a pioneer in wireless audio since they invented most of the technologies used to bring music into every home, in multiple rooms, from any device, with a high-quality sound experience.

Strengthening Sonos’ digital presence in the EMEA* market

Sonos has established its digital and online presence via its two websites: sonos.com covers the brand’s main markets while learn.sonos.com ensures its presence in its emerging markets.

The purpose of these websites is to present the brand, showcase its products, and direct clients to distributors which sell its products.

Sonos was looking to better develop its digital presence in EMEA (Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa)*, by improving the learn.sonos.com site online experience.

The main challenges of this project were:

• Giving new markets the same premium experience as found on sonos.com
• Aligning the website with the business development strategy in EMEA

Pixel Alliance: in tune with Sonos

Sonos’ goal was to improve the EMEA site, which – at that time – was out of step with its main website. For Sonos, improving its online customer experience was a way to better reflect its premium brand positioning while offering easier access to its products and services.

To meet this challenge, Sonos collaborated with Pixel Alliance. Pixel Alliance, part of the Mantu group, gathers a collective of creative and digital experts to support companies in their digital acceleration. Pixel Alliance specializes in designing and developing custom corporate websites, helping its clients with brand strategy, creative design, technical choices, and site implementation.

To best meet Sonos’ expectations regarding its EMEA website, Pixel Alliance’s experts first took in the brand’s graphic assets and design system and the current state of its EMEA website.

To maximize ease of use and performance, they chose to combine several technologies.

The purpose was to have an appealing, dynamic, and inviting website, for a better user experience and interface (UX/UI). In this way, Pixel Alliance used NuxtJS, a front-end development framework to provide an optimal user experience.

Redesigning the website for Pixel Alliance’s experts also meant giving Sonos full control over the content, without compromising on performance or creativity. To do so, Pixel Alliance used a data-centric content management system called Strapi. This allowed them to integrate all content related to Sonos’ 80 product references and to translate them automatically into seven target languages including Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek.

One of the main reasons for redesigning and reworking the site was to make it more relevant to the evolution of the brand, as Sonos’ ambition was to establish itself in the EMEA market, especially by translating it into all the languages of the target countries. learn.sonos.com is now available in Arabic, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, and Romanian.

The challenge was to position Sonos as a global player but also a local one, allowing for cultural adaptations that suited local contexts.

The success of these adaptations is due to the combination of efficient technologies and great collaboration between Pixel Alliance’s experts and the Sonos network which brought its local expertise to the table.

Redesigning the Sonos EMEA website was not just a project management success because of the quality of the relationship established with the Sonos team, it was also a technological success! The goal of having a website with a sound technical foundation that can evolve in symbiosis with the brand’s growth and the market was achieved.

“The new version of Learn Sonos has allowed us to upgrade our digital presence in our emerging EMEA markets by offering our customers the same premium experience as on the corporate Sonos website.”
Maud Mareschi – Retail & Business Marketing – Expansion Markets