How Sound Design can transform the future of branding
The world around us is transforming at an incredible pace, impacting how consumers engage with everything around them, and that includes brands
Close your eyes, and you’ll know it’s an Intel ad from its famous chimes. “I’m Lovin’ It” is synonymous with McDonald’s. And we all know what the “Green Giant” sings.
Sonic branding has been around since the dawn of radio, yet its power and importance has often been marginalized by companies that would rather put their money and creativity behind visually driven campaigns and advertisements (currently, 83 percent of advertisers rely on the sense of sight). But recent findings suggest that sound alone has the power to create deep consumer connection.
In an article published in the Harvard Business Review, research from the Audio Branding Congress demonstrated that “the strategic use of sound can play an important role in positively differentiating a product or service, enhancing recall, creating preference, building trust, and even increasing sales.”
So What is Sonic Branding?
For those of you new to the field, Audio Branding (sometimes referred to as Sonic Branding) is the strategic alignment of sound and music to strengthen brand awareness and enrich user experience.
A proper Audio Branding should have two main goals:
- Consistency in the messaging
- Emotional relevance to the brand.
In traditional Audio Branding, there are two main deliverables designed to lay the foundation for consistency.
1. Brand Theme
An overarching musical backbone is instrumental in establishing an Audio Identity which is called as the Brand Theme. This is a musical representation of a brand’s values and can act as the cornerstone of advertising or live as a special-use theme for brand pieces or internal communications.
Though brand themes are not public-facing, it functions as a treasure for the audio DNA created with a strong connection to brand personality. Sound design, melodies, and instruments are deployed across other touchpoints.
Here is a wonderful example of Mastercard’s Brand Theme designed recently after the company got it’s first Chief Design Officer.
2. Audio Logo
The most iconic touchpoint is the condensed fingerprint of the fully-realized audio ID aka Audio Logo. Audio/ Sonic Logo will often be composed with sound design elements and melodies present within the Brand Theme.
Typically a 3 to 5 note melody, this asset functions as a short, but memorable, tag aimed to become an earworm and to ensure an emotional connection to the brand. You may already know the Audio Logo from brands like NBC, Intel, and T-Mobile.
While Audio Branding has been a marketing tool since jingle-writing emerged in the 20’s, the brands that succeed today adapt to the evolving user base and think the beyond the mastery of the Brand Theme and Audio Logo.
Real Examples with Explanations
(Forbes)
IMAX
IMAX wasn’t getting credit for their role in what they bring to their experience. In the theaters, their brand was surrounded by amazing trailers, commercials and of course the incredible film experiences that they make possible. But they weren’t able to ‘show up’ in an effective way to get credit using the sound effects of their trailer alone and they had no sonic identity system for premiers online or in other forums to signal their value. They came to us for help. The brief we wrote for ourselves was “IMAX sounds like pure experience”. So what does pure experience sound like? We had fun with that!
CBS Evening News
CBS was looking for a new identity system that captured the spirit of energy and drives they bring to their very important work — uncovering important stories and bringing facts and analysis to their audiences. The theme was originally written for the last election cycle, and we all quickly realized that it had ‘legs’ to be able to express the mission of the news division overall, as well as their broadcast-of-record, “CBS Evening News”. It features several thematic concepts that intertwine to represent the myriad of new gathering resources, people, talents and world-class experience that is at the heart of what they do.
The Super Bowl
We evolved John Williams’ NBC Football theme — adding new melodic information in an electronic/orchestral hybrid mashup arrangement to add an ‘epic’ feel for the last three NBC Superbowls. We also created a wide variety of storytelling arrangements that expressed all the emotion of the players and fans to be ‘scored’ live during the game to mirror the ebb and flow of suspense and gameplay. It was like scoring a movie that had not yet been shot.
If you’re like most people, when you hear these sounds, you have pretty strong feelings.
But over the past decade, we’ve lived in such a visual world that disproportionately rewarded video content and images over everything else. In a Facebook and Instagram world, it’s important to have captions on videos because a lot of people don’t even have the volume turned on when they scroll through their feed. But it matters for one care reason:
Speed
Normally, to capture the attention of the end consumer, cement your brand identity in their mind, or stimulate recall. you’d have to run a 10, 15, or 30-second advertisement on a relevant channel to capture their attention.
Ultimately, sonic branding is the audio equivalent of a brand’s username. If a company plays its tag alongside advertisements or content that match their brand’s positioning, eventually that audio tag by itself will conjure up the intended feelings around that brand.
Hope this gave you some insight about audio branding and how it can help your brand. Please clap 👏👏👏 and leave your comments. Here are a few articles about design which you might be interested in:
