New Sonos campaign aims to win back trust after the app fiasco

Love the Sound. Feel the System. is the first campaign under new CMO Colleen DeCourcy, and it repositions Sonos as a whole sound system two years after its app update backlash.

A Sonos One wireless speaker
Sonos One speaker. Photo: Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sonos has launched what Adweek calls the most significant repositioning in its history, two years after a botched app update turned some of its most loyal customers against it. The global Sonos campaign, “Love the Sound. Feel the System.”, is the first work under chief marketing officer Colleen DeCourcy.

What went wrong for Sonos in 2024

In May 2024 Sonos pushed out a redesigned mobile app that users attacked for its visual design, weak accessibility support and the removal of basics such as alarms and the sleep timer. Chief executive at the time Patrick Spence apologised publicly that July. For a brand whose entire promise is that the system simply works, it was close to the worst failure available.

What the Sonos campaign is saying

According to Adweek, the campaign argues for the first time that Sonos is not a speaker company but an end-to-end sound system. The first 30-second film went up on Sonos’s own channel on 14 September under the title “Feel the system”, described by the brand as “a sound system to puncture your calloused soul”.

DeCourcy joined Sonos in November 2025. She previously led marketing at Snap, and before that was chief creative officer and co-president of Wieden+Kennedy, which makes this a campaign with serious creative pedigree behind it.

Can a campaign rebuild trust?

Apology advertising has a short list of greats, and the best of them made the failure the idea. KFC’s FCK owned a chicken shortage in three letters and came out more liked than it went in. Sonos looks to be taking the other route, repositioning around the whole system rather than apologising again.

That can work, but only if the experience has genuinely caught up, because a confident campaign that runs ahead of the product tends to remind people of the grievance rather than bury it. It is a neat contrast with Dyson this month, which sold pure engineering to justify a new product. Sonos is selling a system to justify trusting it again, which is a far harder brief.

Max Rottier

He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.