“We brought customers into the process through in-home research, beta programs and public previews, and their feedback shaped every iteration,” CEO Thomas Conrad said on an earnings call.
Courtesy of Sonos
Dive Brief:
- Sonos rolled out a series of app updates following intensive customer listening in the third quarter in an effort todrive customer advocacy, President and CEO Thomas Conrad said on a Q3 2026 earnings call last week.
- The sound system company spent months listening to customers to understand how they use the app. It then introduced a number of app navigation changes, including familiar tab navigation, improved core controls like volume, and smart mechanisms allowing for sound systems to show up when customers need them.
- The changes are just as important as how Sonos made them, Conrad said. “We brought customers into the process through in-home research, beta programs and public previews, and their feedback shaped every iteration. These acts of co-creation are core ingredient driving a return to customer advocacy that continues to show up in our own measurements and across social media.”
Dive Insight:
Customer advocacy remains one of Sonos’ main avenues to drive profitable growth.
“I’ve talked in recent earnings calls about the five dimensions through which will drive profitable growth: product innovation, customer advocacy, more intentional marketing, geo expansion and tapping emerging trends,” Conrad said. “We’re making progress on all of them.”
Sonos reportedthird-quarter revenueof $375 million, up 9% year over year and near the high end of the company’s guidance range, according to an earning report. It’s an acceleration from the 2% growth in the first half of the year.
“These Q3 numbers bear out the inflection in our business that I named on our last earnings call,” Conrad said.
The company also reported $29.9 million net income, a marked improvement from its $3.4 million loss a year ago.
The business has turned the corner after abotched app releasetwo years ago led to lost business and itsformer CEO stepping down.
Sonos is seeing success: households are growing and lifetime value is expanding
To return to growth, the company sought to win back former customers and now it’s working to acquire new ones. The team has multiple avenues to engage customers.
“On customer advocacy, you heard us talk about the way that we’ve been working directly with ourcustomers on Redditand our customers in our beta program and all of our constituencies to understand how they’re using our products and improve them based on their real-world feedback,” Conrad said.
The company also teased a product launch event in September. While Conrad didn’t divulge details of the forthcoming products, he spoke about the role of conversational computing andpredictive intelligence in the home.
“Much of the industry conversation about AI in the home is about who has the best model. We think that’s the wrong question,” Conrad said.
“The lasting value is going to be in what surrounds the model in a real home, the hardware that can converse with quality across every room, the system that already knows the shape of a home and the way a family lives in it, the connectivity to reach the speakers, services and devices that turn a request into coordinated action,” he said. “That’s the operating environment for AI in the home, and Sonos has spent 20 years building it.”
