Case Study
SoundCloud: A cultural Brand Audit
A Cultural Brand Audit
In partnership with Brandwatch, a leading AI-enabled social listening tool.
What is a brand cultural audit?
A cultural brand audit maps how a brand actually lives in the world. Not through surveys or focus groups, but through the unfiltered signals people leave across conversations, shares, and everyday mentions.
This process uncovers hidden strengths, exposes misalignments, and establishes a foundation of truth from which meaningful strategy can emerge.
the Challenge
SoundCloud felt big but misunderstood. The home of what's next in music was struggling to find its identity in a world reshaped by TikTok. (51% of 16-24-year-olds naming it among the main places they discover new music, MIDiA, 2024) Emerging Gen Z artists criticized the platform relentlessly. To regain cultural traction, the company needed to realign its growth efforts.
The Approach
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Tracking conversations, trends, and audience behavior to understand organic brand associations.
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Surfacing internal perspectives, legacy, and priorities to clarify brand identity.
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Translating insights into a clear, actionable growth strategy anchored in cultural relevance.
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Bringing insights into action through workshops that explore strategic options and test alignment with cultural opportunities.
The Process
2+ years’ worth of data | 10M+ mentions | All major platforms, including Instagram, X/Twitter, Reddit, TikTok.
A two-year deep dive into multi-platform social data revealed the network of cultural influence and the forces that define the brand's growth and context.
Sixteen major forces were identified and mapped against occasions, music genres, times of day, and types of engagement.
We tracked direct customer references, variations, misspellings, and contextual appearances. Using Brandwatch, one of the industry's leading social listening tools, we processed over 10 million mentions across Instagram, online news, X/Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok. These perceptions were then mapped against stakeholder interviews.
Gap analysis identified the distance between brand effort and market impact.
The Insight
SoundCloud’s brand perception suffered when associated with big-name artists. The disconnect between internal ambitions and external reality became clear: the brand celebrated artists who made it big after starting on the platform, while audiences felt that highlighting such successes betrayed the platform's core values.
The Impact
An innovation workshop with executives across teams revealed that SoundCloud could not win emerging artists by competing like Spotify. The session focused on managing strategic conflict, exploring each potential growth strategy, and debating the pros and cons of each path.