Smart ring brand Oura on its ‘holistic’ repositioning
When Doug Sweeny took on the role of CMO at smart ring brand Oura in late 2022, he was faced with a suite of issues to get stuck into.
The business had low awareness – 5% in the US, single digits in the UK – and was focused on direct-to-consumer sales and commercial partnerships, rather than working with retailers.
Oura’s brand positioning was “relatively unclear”, focused on how the product acted as a sleep tracker, while the customer base was more niche biohackers than general consumers.
Three years later, the brand has grown awareness to around 20% in the UK and above 30% in the US, repositioning from a sleep tracking device to a “holistic healthcare brand”.
In his first six months in role, Sweeny spent time embedding within the business to understand how Oura was perceived internally before branching out with external changes. Speaking with different employees brought up a range of perspectives on what the brand stood for and where it was going.
What emerged was a core insight that Oura is a “translation device for your body”.
We’re managing the consumer revenue around the world. So, it’s very much a brand and business team. We’re not just doing the marketing piece.
Doug Sweeny, Oura
“It takes these incredibly complex signals from the body – respiratory, heart rate, other biometrics – and it translates it into scores of data that is actionable for you to go and live a healthy life,” explains Sweeny.
The line ‘we give everybody a voice’ became “the foundation” for the brand. As Oura repositioned it broadened its focus to women’s health, with young women now making up its biggest customer base. Insights like cardiovascular age and metabolic tracking have given the brand much more to work with than sleep alone.
Working out the positioning was the catalyst for the business to “completely” pivot to a “fundamentally different offering”, Sweeny explains.
Moving from a DTC focused brand into retail was a “relatively obvious” thing for a brand like Oura, but the firm wasn’t doing this effectively before Sweeny became CMO. This shift proved to be “a real unlock” for the brand.
The core product is the Oura ring, which naturally comes in different sizes. Working with retailers like John Lewis in the UK and Target in the US meant people could discover the product in person and try it on.
“That really has helped us, especially on the awareness side,” he says.
Similarly, sports partnerships have been effective for the brand. Oura doesn’t rely on paid sponsorships and celebrity athletes, but the product has a natural home with sportspeople and coaches analysing performance.
One example is the England Football Association, which supplied Oura rings to the men’s England team ahead of the Euros last year. Headlines were made when players wore the product during training and press conferences, which had a positive impact on the brand without Oura paying for sponsorship.
It doesn’t happen overnight
Founded in Finland in 2013, Sweeny describes Oura as a later stage startup with “a pretty rich history and a story”.
Repositioning the brand and adjusting its marketing to the point where it could be punchier in tone and build tangible awareness “didn’t happen overnight”, he explains. The changes internally have been aided by the wider shift in consumer behaviour towards wellness, which spiked post-Covid.
Today (1 October) the brand launched a campaign for its Oura Ring 4 product, with more data and insights for users to access, a charging case and different finishes. The brand is also launching a concept store in Harrods.
The campaign is geared towards Gen Z and millennials who lean into the fashion side of health and fitness wearables, and ladders up to the brand’s recent marketing activity. In June, Oura launched ‘Give us the finger’, a campaign which embraced the reality of ageing from an aspirational point of view, rather than anxiety.
“Give us the finger wouldn’t have happened three years ago, it was too early,” says Sweeny.
The campaign was rolled out internally first, as it “had to resonate with the company” and feel right before reaching customers. Oura has competitors like fitness wrist strap brand Whoop and the Apple Watch, but the brand’s ambition is to “own the finger”.
“It’s intended to have a point of view,” he says.
Health and fitness device marketing often leans on sport, with brands working with athletes to emphasise a product’s features. Oura took a “fundamentally different approach” by showing what the ring could be like on an 80-year-old person, for example, the idea being “living your fullest life could be the ultimate flex”.
Working together
Sweeny believes in marketing showing up at the “genesis” of product development, rather than slotting in at the latter stages. This is the approach he took at brands like Nest and Levi’s, and continues to take at Oura.
“We’re very early in and it’s very much a partnership across our team, product, engineering,” he says.
In terms of his remit, within marketing Oura has product marketing, insights, creative development, social, communications, PR, growth, cost of acquisition – the “classic functions”. Marketing also manages retail operations, membership revenue and commercial partnerships.
Sweeny describes it as “pods” of specialists working together and coordinating across the different customer bases.
“In terms of revenue, we’re managing the consumer revenue around the world. So, it’s very much a brand and business team. We’re not just doing the marketing piece,” he explains.
Give us the finger wouldn’t have happened three years ago, it was too early.
Doug Sweeny, Oura
The business also works with governments and health bodies, a “big part” of Oura’s operations which demands a different marketing skillset, he adds.
Sweeny’s own capability as a marketer has “evolved over time” beyond pure marketing communications.
“Because we’re managing both the business side and the brand side, it gives us a different perspective,” he says. “Brand drives business, business drives brand – they’re not one or the other.”
It’s a helpful spot for any CMO, Sweeny adds, and helps drive deep partnerships with the rest of the C-suite.
When it comes to pricing, Oura has a “three-legged stool” of marketing, product and finance. Working with retailers helps the team drill down on pricing based on the feedback they receive.
Sweeny acknowledges it’s a relatively complex product to buy, as the customer needs to know their ring size and choose their colour, meaning the team work on that navigation “pretty rigorously”.
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This is coupled with potential challenges in customer lifetime value. Oura isn’t a product most customers will repeatedly buy for themselves, beyond new iterations. To mitigate low lifetime value the team are drive developments through the brand’s app and insights, which customers pay for monthly.
“There’s the ring, but the experience is very digital,” says Sweeny.
While the brand has been investing in large-scale above the line campaigns, like any startup Oura couldn’t go straight in at this level without pulling on performance marketing. The business pays close attention to the measurement of brand activity and performance, says Sweeny.
Three years ago, when Oura’s awareness in the US was just 5%, its cost of acquisition was between $120 (£89) and $240 (£178).
“The company was losing money on every product that we were selling,” he recalls.
US awareness is now 31% and the brand has been “steadily and aggressively” pushing its awareness. As awareness grows, cost of acquisition declines. In the UK, awareness has gone from 5%-7% to 20% in 18 months.
“That’s a combination of great PR, great media, messaging, launching new products, partnering with great retailers that are trusted and loved, getting the positioning right,” says Sweeny.
It’s straightforward maths, but a lot of brands still get this wrong.
“As a team, our leadership team and the board, [we] all know that we’ve got to do both [performance and brand],” he adds. “We can’t just be constantly using lower funnel, Meta, Google and driving sales that way. We’ve got to be driving top of funnel awareness and engagement.”
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