Background
Sonos, the global leader in home sound systems, serves more than 16 million customers and manages over 40 million registered devices. With lifecycles stretching across decades, the company needed a more agile way to engage customers and manage data. Their fragmented stack made it difficult to act quickly, personalize experiences, and scale marketing impact.
Chord provided Sonos with a single, commerce-native data platform—unifying fragmented systems, streamlining processes, and enabling faster, smarter customer engagement.
The Challenge
“The key to achieving lifetime value isn’t just marketing—it’s listening to customers and always striving to provide value when you respond.” - JP Beeghly, Senior Manager of Marketing Technology
Managing complex customer journeys at scale
For Sonos, customer lifecycles don’t just span months or even years—they can stretch across decades. This extended lifecycle brings unique challenges when it comes to customer engagement, especially in a world where disconnected systems and increasing global privacy regulations can make data management a headache.
Sonos needed a more agile way to listen to customers—whether through explicit signals like purchase behavior or implicit communication through app and device usage—so they could respond with meaningful, timely interactions. With complex systems managing fragmented data across various channels, the company struggled to make quick, informed decisions.
The search for the right solution
Sonos knew that fixing these problems would require a comprehensive overhaul of their marketing technology stack. The search was exhaustive—evaluating 25 different Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), data, and analytics solutions. Most tools fell short, unable to provide a unified view of the customer or scale with the team’s needs. The drawn-out development cycles and disconnected teams only exacerbated the issues.
That’s when Sonos partnered with Chord, an all-in-one data platform designed specifically for commerce brands. Chord promised a more efficient way to unify data and provide actionable insights that could be deployed quickly across all their marketing channels.
The Solution
Sonos chose Chord to unify their data environment in just three months—far faster than the 18+ months typical for custom builds. Chord integrated device, transactional, digital, and third-party data into one continuously updated platform.
With a single source of truth, marketing and product teams could finally deliver timely, personalized experiences across every channel—without the burden of siloed data and manual workflows.
The Results
“Chord enables Sonos teams to work smarter, not harder.”
Why Chord Was the Right Partner
Chord’s capabilities go beyond typical CDPs. Their platform combines analytics, business intelligence, warehousing, data modeling, marketing activations, and AI copilots all in one place. This made it easier for Sonos to adopt new marketing platforms without extensive development efforts or complex integration work.
“Chord does what most CDPs don’t,” said Beeghly. “Their expertise meant setting everything up was truly easy for our team. And it’s never easy.”
Lessons for Other Brands: Data is the Key to Customer Loyalty
Sonos’s success underscores a key lesson: long-lifecycle brands can’t rely on duct-taped stacks. They need a clean, unified data foundation to unlock sustainable customer loyalty and ROI.
With Chord, Sonos now has the infrastructure to keep pace with growth—and the agility to turn every customer interaction into long-term value.
Talk with a commerce expert today and see how Chord can help your brand unlock ROI, efficiency, and trusted AI.
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