More Mystifying Marketing from Beyerdynamic
The last time I complained about Beyerdynamic’s marketing years ago, they were blacklisting reviewers they didn’t agree with and posting links on Facebook to articles plagiarized directly from my own.
Shortly after that, I got word that there was a huge internal shakeup in the company’s marketing team, and they reached out and personally apologized to me. Since then, their efforts have improved. They have a new brand identity, logo, and vibe that gel much better with what the current online userbase expects out of a tech company. I think Beyerdynamic has mostly been successful in their quest to overhaul their image into something cooler and fresher but still backed by decades of audio engineering.
Of course, sometimes that sort of modern advertising can go too far. Today’s tale is both sillier and weirder than last time, with a light dollop of unfortunate misogyny. It’s a look at what happens if you focus too much on buzzwords and forget to really think about what you’re putting out there.
I’m currently working on a review of Beyerdynamic’s brand new gaming headset, the MMX 100. It launched last year during a busy holiday season, and it aims to bring all the audio engineering goodness of the company’s higher end headphone products into a mainstream-friendly gaming device.
It’s pretty good so far in my testing — but the marketing and imagery surrounding it is baffling. And when I say baffling, I mean it is utter nonsense. In a move perhaps designed to play into the hype surrounding the rebranding of VR worlds as “the metaverse,” Beyerdynamic slapped the word “Meta” all over the MMX 100.
The included detachable microphone is called the “META VOICE” microphone. Yes, they used capital letters. It features a nice large mic capsule, and it sounds better than most other choices in its price bracket, so that naming sort of makes sense — though it doesn’t transcend all thought or change my life when I use it. It’s just really good.
