The State of Sonic Branding [ENCORE]

Welcome to the Sound in Marketing podcast. The Sound In Marketing podcast explores and defines sound on purpose in marketing and in advertising. I'm your host Jeanna Isham, owner and founder of Dreamr Productions and Sound in Marketing Learning. I create, consult and educate brands on the power of sound in marketing.

As we close out season eight, sonic branding, case studies, context and clarity. I felt it appropriate to encore an episode of the AD Infinitum podcast that I produced. Stew Redwine, the executive creative director at Oxford Road and host of AD Infinitum, brought me in to produce this episode. If you hadn't already discovered or clicked on any of my show notes mentioning it, here is your chance to witness or listen to some great content.

This episode is filled with special guest interviews like the Intel Guy. (Intel sonic logo) And the Apple Startup sound guy. (Apple Startup Sound) As well as amazing information you can't get elsewhere. It's a crash course in sonic branding, history and future tells.

It's my magnum opus, as one listener called it. In the race for brand attention. Sound on purpose makes all the difference. As heard in the Transaction Tone episode, Sound Done Right (The Transaction Tone episode POS sound) is a brand's best friend.

Sound done wrong (generic POS sound) is a brand's worst nightmare. So sit back, relax and enjoy the state of sonic branding. Take it away. Stew.

This is Ad Infinitum. AD infinitum is the award winning podcast solely focused on audio ads. The creatives who make them enter the latest thinking that informs them how the space is evolving. And my favorite part a roundup of recent audio ads with analysis by yours truly, Stew Redwine and each episode's guest.

But for the final episode of season two of AD Infinitum. We have a special treat in store for all Ye Mighty Chief Audio officers. Today, we're diving deep into something that's been dramatically undervalued in advertising pretty much for all time, which is sonic branding. Only 16% of advertising is remembered and correctly attributed.

That's across the board. But here's where it gets interesting. Sonic brand cues deliver 7 to 8 times better branded attention than ads without them. That's a massive increase in what is a problematic space that only 16% of advertising is remembered and correctly attributed.

There is a incredible power when it comes to sonic branding and it's not just another asset, it's not just something else to do. It's not an afterthought, because sound is processed in exactly the same part of our brains as emotion and memory. Long story short, when we hear, we feel and we remember, and the numbers back this up, 64% of listeners feel a stronger pull to brands with a cohesive sonic identity. And we've seen here at Oxford Road 13% higher response rates for shows running Sonic branding, and it jumps up to 30% when brands commit to heavy Sonic branding versus Light or None.

Our sense of hearing and the way that Sonic branding interacts with it, delivers fame fluency and feeling in reverse order. The brand makes me feel good. The sounds make me feel good. The brand is fluent, I understand it, I understand it's the brand that's communicating with me and fame.

It comes easily to mind and sound is a shortcut to all of that. One fortune 100 company called Sonic branding the most leveraged item on their balance sheet. That came from the AD Infinitum episode, where we featured Joel Beckerman from Made Music talking about branding with your eyes closed, which is what really began, in a sense, the journey towards this episode. Where to really unpack this?

We've brought together nine experts. Nine is a good number. You've got the nine writers of the Nazgul or the nine members of the Wu-Tang clan. Here we've got nine sonic branding experts, including Jeanna Isham, who we worked with to produce this episode.

From the writing to the interviews and putting together the initial edit Jeanna Isham of Dreamr Productions and the host of Sound In marketing podcast. Check it out. Then we have Roger Sho Gerhmann, Dallas Taylor, Colleen Fahey, Joe Sauer, Joel Beckerman, Steve Keller, Walter Werzowa, Jim Reekes, Lisa De Stefano, and Chelsea Campbell. You're going to hear from them throughout the episode as we explore the state of Sonic branding.

Enjoy this special episode of AD Infinitum. Take it away Jeanna Isham, owner and founder of Dreamr Productions and Sound in Marketing Learning and host of Sound in Marketing and My Friend. Enjoy. You can read along with me in your book.

You will know it is time to turn the page. When you hear the chimes ring like this. Sound and branding go together like a wink and a smile. It's been a part of marketing for hundreds of years and global culture for thousands.

We just haven't been paying very close attention. Before the days of TV commercials, radio and print ads, marketing happened by speaking. Modern media and the printing press weren't around yet. And the average person couldn't read.

So they shouted or saying what they were selling or telling the world about. As early as the song dynasty, there were records of peddlers in Peking using distinctive calls and songs to notify people that they were coming down the road. Different peddlers sold different things, so these calls told the people if they even needed to step outside their door. This was a big deal as the streets of Peking were a tangled mess back then.

Just walking to the nearby 7-Eleven was not so easy to do. Flash forward to modern days. These distinctive calls still exist. Roger Sho Gehrmann, VP of integrated partnerships at SongTradr, remembers a similar story from his childhood in Tokyo.

The sound of street vendors that would go past the house. Either they were selling these roasted sweet potatoes, or they were selling sweets like mochi, and they'd be kind of saying the product out loud as they walk down the street. If you think about it, have you had a similar experience? What about this one?

(ice cream truck song) One could say this would be an example of a sonic logo. A sonic logo is usually something that is short maximum up to a couple of seconds long. Very distinctive. It could take the form of a melody or a sound effect, or a spoken word or phrase, but we'll come back to that.

When you hear these calls, you instantly know where you are, what the message is, and whether or not you are interested. Sonic logos like these way back when. Examples and Sonic branding in general is one of the oldest and most appreciated forms of storytelling. Think of bird calls and animal sounds for a minute.

Even there, you've got a story. As David Attenborough says in the Netflix documentary Secret World of Sound. For some animals, sound is the key to their survival. They warn when there's a predator close, they tell their friends there's food they make, come hither sounds and back up sounds.

The most dangerous sound in the wild. Is no sound at all. Sound is one of those things that keeps you mindful and present, and it reveals itself in every passing microsecond. And that's a really powerful thing.

That's Dallas Taylor, host of the 20,000Hz podcast and creative director at Defacto Sound. Things come alive when sound is added and everything becomes much more vivid. It almost feels like the picture has been colored just by adding sound. From a storytelling standpoint, that certainly happens just by adding in sound.

It brings personality and character to this visual icon that then represents this whole entity behind it. It can help heighten emotions, guide people to understanding what the story's about and how they should feel about it. That's Colleen Fahey, U.S.

managing director at Sixième Son and coauthor of the book Audio Branding Using Sound to Build Your Brand. You have something about to happen, and you can build anticipation with the sound. Then something scary happens and suddenly you can make it more stressful and a little bit more dissonant. And then a solution arrives, and then suddenly there is a glorious moment of success.

Sound can amplify, especially music can amplify and guide your feelings around all the parts of storytelling and make it much more satisfying and much more emotionally complete. If we are going to sell anything, we have to tell a story. But not just any story, a branded story. Stories are how we build relationships and trust with a thing like products and businesses.

Sound stories help us to remain present in what's happening right there in that moment alone. Storytelling through the voice is something that our brains love. Something that you want to lean into biologically. Why is it that sound stories are so delicious for our brains?

And why is it so important to incorporate them into the customer's brand journey? For this, I went to Joe Sauer, a quantitative researcher focusing on the impact emotions have on consumers preferences and choices. Think about how you became aware of a brand in the first place. Odds are sound was accompanied with that awareness.

You either saw an ad for it that included a sonic logo, or a voiceover, or some catchy music or word of mouth from a friend or family member or a colleague. This isn't by accident. At least a few marketers out there make these sounds on purpose. As we'll get into later.

Although the cat isn't completely out of the bag yet, branded sound has been found to be specifically impactful when it comes to getting into the consumer's brain fast. And here's why. Our brains are essentially lazy. They like to avoid working.

As a survival mechanism, the more brain power or brain processing I can conserve for higher order processes, the more likely I am to survive. And so our brains use things like mnemonics and hints and heuristics to draw conclusions. Over time, that sound becomes familiar, which is when it really kicks your brain into gear. When something is very, very familiar to us, it tends to generate a stronger emotional response than exactly the same sound.

The first time I heard it when it was unfamiliar. Now you have a familiar brand story, a double whammy of brand equity. It's certainly one of the wonders of music and sound to be able to create stories. That's Joel Beckerman, CEO and founder of Made Music.

How do you get a story across in 2.5 seconds or three seconds, or at most 3.5 seconds? Good question.

If you look at Bach or Beethoven, there were certain examples of things that they would do over and over again. A lot of it was about tension and release. If you feel a certain set of tension and then a release from that, where you're no longer feeling the tension. That's a story.

It has a beginning, a middle and an end. You can also talk about the colors of the sounds. There are specific kinds of sounds and chords and melodic content that we all kind of have in our collective memory. Some of those things go across cultures.

There's the pentatonic scale. Create a melody that's in pentatonic scale. You can tell a story that actually is consistent throughout the world. A global reach, hmm.

Instantaneously. It's primal. It's automatic. It triggers our emotions and our instincts before we even realize it.

And that's what really makes it such a powerful tool for grabbing attention and evoking an immediate response. But over time, with maximum exposure and usage in the real world, they come to encapsulate the essence of the brand in this little tiny sound bite. Instantly recognizable, instantly memorable and trigger a whole range of neural associations with that brand. That was the end of the story.

So now we have a familiar brand story that can touch a global community and reach us within seconds, while also triggering a neurological good vibe connection. Pretty spectacular when you think about it. But not all sound is good sound. If you're not careful sound, just becomes noise.

It's important to follow the research. When we test sounds using neural network research methods, we can quantify how good or bad a sound really is. Naturally occurring sounds tend to generate more extreme responses than any composed sounds do, or engineered sounds. So what's the range between these good and bad sound responses?

The strongest positive emotional response is actually the laughter of a baby. And the strongest negative response is scream of pain. And those are the extremes of the good bad spectrum when you're composing sound. Odds are, the emotional response that gets triggered will be somewhere along that spectrum between a scream of pain on one hand and a baby's laughter.

On the other hand, just like with our visual logos, we want to repeat these branded sounds and songs so that they can be memorized. So beware of screams. Repetition helps with customer recall. We've been doing this for years.

Remember the alphabet song? We'll come back to that too. The important thing here is to find a good sound and find ways to repeat it in a non annoying way. Because humans recall and associate these sounds fast, like in a second, much faster than what we see.

When a sound wave enters our ears, it's converted into electrical signals. These electrical signals travel almost instantly to the part of our brain that's responsible for interpreting sound. When we see something, light enters our eye and it's converted into electrical signals in much the same way. But these signals have to go through multiple stages.

It typically takes about 30 to 40 milliseconds longer than sound processing. 3 to 4 tenths of a second doesn't sound like a long time, but in neurological terms and brain processing terms, that's an eternity. The quickest way to get a consumer's attention through sound is through mnemonics. Also known as Sonic logos.

A Sonic logos is short, distinctive sound, or a series of notes that really represents a brand. The motif that runs through your sonic identity. The visual logo is made up of a color, an image, a font. A sonic logo, similarly, is made up of different sonic elements, so timber, pitch, interval, and so on.

When they're initially used, try to reflect the desired brand architecture. People begin to recognize it from repetition. A distinctive sonic asset that does for your ear. What a visual logo does for your eye.

That's Steve Keller, audio alchemist and sonic strategy director for studio Resonate at Sirius XM media. When you hear it, you think of the brand. However, operating off of just one element like the Sonic logo isn't enough because the beauty and difficulty of sound in music is that its fleeting. Sound is something that doesn't exist, exists, and then it's gone, just floats off into the air.

The logo needs to play into something bigger, something branded, and branding doesn't happen in siloed spaces. This takes us to the all encompassing branding element that we call sonic branding. There are a lot of feelings on the truest definition of Sonic branding, so much so that I've never found just one definition. So I asked my interviewees for their definitions and I found some common threads.

Sonic branding is essentially using sound in a very deliberate and strategic way to either reinforce or build or extend a brand's identity to bring a brand top of mind. Sonic branding is the audio encapsulation of visual branding, instead of in colors and typefaces and logos. It's done in music, sound and voice. Sonic branding covers the entirety of music and sound that you would hear across a brand, both branded and on brand music, and sound.

The components, the elements, the way that those elements are used in a smart way, really. Strategy first to focus on any one element is actually to miss out on the full range of benefits that sonic branding and sonic identity can bring to your company. Just all about creating a cohesive and intentional sound or soundscape or melody that reflects a brand's essence and values. I took this opportunity to consolidate my guests definitions into one big, all inclusive one.

They since approved and have given their blessing. This one crosses all the T's and dots the I's. Sonic branding is the strategic and consistent use of on brand sound that evokes emotion, enhances recognition, reflects brand attributes, reinforces values, and shapes the overall brand identity. And for the final word.

Let's turn to Stew Redwine, head of creative at Oxford Road and host of AD Infinitum, aka what you're listening to right now. Sonic branding is simply the expanded answer to the question can they recognize your brand with their eyes closed? Let's say it's yes. Then Sonic branding expounds on that.

Yes. How do they recognize you with their eyes closed? (montage of sonic branding and logos) (montage of sonic branding and logos) (montage of sonic branding and logos) (montage of sonic branding and logos) It's about committing to your branding. Finding those sound attributes that connect with your brand, owning them, believing in them, and acting on them over and over again.

It's the same as with a visual logo. Eventually you just have to commit and go for it. Here's Steve's advice on the ideals when creating that good sonic strategy. It should be congruent.

Memorable. Distinct. It should be flexible to adapt to different use cases. It should be appealing.

It should be likable. That needs to be unable, not just in the sense of you're owning the sonic space, but in the sense of you're owning the assets themselves. You're owning the intellectual property, the copyrights of all of these. And then ideally, you are consistent in the application of those across multiple channels.

And then you think about how you can bring them to life in experiences, and you codify them in some type of a style guide that becomes part of your brand book, again, reinforcing consistency. Although sonic branding may be a semi new word, it is in no way new. The concept of sonic branding has been around for a long, long time. I think Roger wins for the strangest birth of sonic branding example.

Sex workers used to wear a certain type of sandal that would make a certain type of sound, as they would walk along the stone streets of ancient Greece. That is probably the first ever recorded intentional branding of a, I guess, a line of work. Joel mentioned battle cries. Sometimes it was to strike fear into the heart of your enemy.

When you think about horns that were blown at the beginning of a battle or something, that specific sound might be owned by a particular tribe. It's a very ancient practice. Historically, there are tribes or communities that used certain songs or rhythms to identify themselves, and that's more of the natural practice of sonic branding. And we've continued to see it used through history to brand everything from goods and services to communities, political parties and anything else that you can think of that you can associate a sound with.

Although all of these examples are good and there is no right answer, I have dubbed Dallas's as the winner which he tells me he stole from Stew Redwine. Your name, and it's happened to billions of times. It's a sound that labels you, that you learned really early, that that sound means me. And then we get into a little bit more modern day ish.

The earliest examples of Sonic branding were really in the 20s and 30s in the radio era. So if we've been using sonic branding for so long, but not calling it that, what did we call it? Radio ads were really miniature art forms. The birthplace of the jingle was radio advertising of the 1920s.

We called it a jingle. The jingle was Baby Sonic branding, and we loved it. Intentionally designed to be catchy and memorable. It's in service of promoting a brand or a product or service.

Usually it contains the name of the brand in it. You can recall it easily, or you can sing along to it easily, so it can create kind of a lasting impression. Repetitive, designed to get into your brain and keep you singing it long after you're not hearing it. They were super effective in their time.

They sort of went out of style for a little while, and now we're starting to see them creep back in. And although they may seem interchangeable, it gets a little more complicated. Jingles were popular when commercials were very long, 60s even 30s where you had time to develop a verse and a chorus and now you can't go on and on and on with your music. You have to find ways to be more telegraphic, or to put it in the background of something else you're saying.

When you think about the impact of the growth of TV in the 60s and 70s, and then through the 80s, we started to see jingles be transformed into much shorter form sonic logos. I think there's more of a focus now on strategically using that jingle, or strategically thinking about what the brief might be, or how writers are sent in a specific direction. So I think it's a little more refined and a little bit more on that new era of deeper strategic thinking, looking at measurement.

Audience research, which was not really done quite as extensively back in the heyday. Jingles became more than just cute and fluffy. They started taking on a more strategic tone. This is when things got interesting.

Brands were attributing sounds to their identity, and they were doing it consistently for decades and generations on end. The Swiss Railway, has a chime sound that is used to signal the arrival and departure of a train. This one apparently goes back to 1905. There's also a sound of the Royal Mail in the UK a four note sound around the same time in the 20s.

The MGM lion. That is an auditory signature, and it dates back to the earliest days of film production. They're still using it and it's instantly recognizable. If you hear that roar.

You know that that's signaling that a movie is about to start. The NBC chimes, the dum dum dum. It was functional, and it also came from what people had on hand. And I think it was used tremendously effectively and continues to be tremendously effective with NBC for years and years and years.

Wherever there was something that was meant to be sold or an idea or a message that meant to be conveyed. There were creative people trying to make things to associate with those things, whether it was a color, whether it was a picture, whether it was a sound. So there's probably something out there that's older that just hasn't been documented. People started calling it by name in the 60s.

Back then, it was used to describe branding in a radio context, and then it sort of disappeared again. It comes back up again in the 90s. Five distinct tones hit our ears in 1994, bringing Sonic branding mainstream. (Intel Sonic Logo) Intel Pentium processor chip created a Sonic logo.

Definitely like a chapter in the Sonic branding book. And everyone who had a TV in the 90s heard it about ten times a day, possibly more. It was pretty much the first big mnemonic. That’s Walter Werzowa.

Owner and founder of Musikvergnuegen and Health Tunes. He also just happened to write. (Intel Sonic Logo) Intel was trying to find a way to describe a product that wasn't something you could see, smell, hear, touch. You can't say what Intel is in three seconds.

They used a sound that kind of sounded like the inside of a computer. As you could imagine, it, I knew I needed Intel inside, even though I had no idea what a processor chip was, did, or looked like. But music told me it was important and so I had to have it. Intel created - a tangible impression of their very intangible product.

So how did such a small hint of music make its way into the corporate zeitgeist and pop culture? The task was we need some music for Intel. It's a very short piece of music, and I've never thought of writing a 32nd piece of music before. And I realized you can't even say a smart sentence in that brief time.

And I tried to whistle melodies and think of melodies. Everything sounded forced and not complete. And I thought, this is just impossible. I looked again at the board and it had the tagline Intel inside.

Clearly in front of me. And so I thought, if this was a song, it would be four notes, because it's engineers, it has to be almost in a Germanic-like, orderly mathematical ... very straight, organized, even, symmetric. They wanted to have the music as powerful positive as possible, but with no aspect of cultural emotions.

And so I thought, The fourth and the fifth is probably the most powerful. Open two intervals we needed. It was not really composed. It was constructed.

And I think that's the strong idea behind it, that you construct those things and don't compose them. I was flabbergasted that somebody needs that little music. I was astonished how difficult it was. I was super surprised I worked for three months on the sound.

I was lucky to find a methodology to make it work, but a point where everybody could recognize it, whistle it and every two seconds it ran somewhere. Then I thought, oh my God, this is impactful. This is huge. All of a sudden, a computer chip exploded into pop culture.

Those five notes made a comfy, cozy home in the back of our brains to be recalled at any moment. Then we kind of forgot again. 90s advertising music wasn't exactly focused on long term brand identity. They were in the moment.

Strategic use of sound wasn't really as part of building a brand asset. I think it was more about supporting a story in a commercial. Although marketers may not have been thinking too hard on sound strategy, they did realize that music was catchy when it was unique. Marketers were playing around with bright neon colors that have no business being together.

Neon pink and neon yellow, and shapes that were just very overt. And that also extended into music. People were picking a lot of classic rock. Everybody was using borrowed interest.

Instead of building your interest in that brand itself and what made that brand distinctive? Everything was just like radical and over-the-top and just loud and lots of yelling and lots of distorted guitars or synthesizers and just anything that would just like, flash sonically to get your attention. It was all very distinctly 90s, but not necessarily distinct brand by brand. The focus was on fast and loud and energetic.

It's probably why we now have an attention span shorter than a goldfish. That microsecond attention span started happening significantly in the 90s. How can we orchestrate as much attention grabbing things second by second during an entire 30 minute program, plus the advertisements? I think the 90s were the early equivalent to thumbing very bright.

TikTok videos. Sonic branding has gone through a lot of evolutions evolved from the jingle to now the Twitch economy, where attention spans are sub three seconds. All of us have divided attention these days. It's called continuous partial attention, and it was identified by Linda Stone when she was working at Microsoft.

Our continuous partial attention is just our reality now. Our devices and technologies are just going to distract us more and more as the tech gets cooler and better. But all is not lost. This is actually great timing to demonstrate the power of sound.

Our sub three second attention spans are exactly where Sonic branding wins. We don't need to combat our short attention span. Remember what we learned about how fast and efficient sound is? We need to find our brand sound and communicate with it.

Why borrow a sound when you can make your very own? Add something to this brand new world of the Fast and Furious. What happened when Sonic branding appeared on the scene was that suddenly you weren't thinking about something that I can borrow from the culture, but what can I add to the culture? Your brand and its best self.

And then a moment of accidental sheer clarity. My name is Jim Reekes. I'm pretty well known for a couple of sounds. One in particular is.

(Apple Startup Sound) And my camera. (Apple Screenshot click) It's currently the sound of the Mac doing a screen shot. It's also the sound on your iPhone when you take a photo. Jim was the senior software architect at Apple back in the mid 90s.

I was pretty much the only person writing the software for the audio at the time, and I took it upon myself to get rid of the startup sound. I hated it. As a musician, Jim saw a real problem with the existing sound. The previous engineer who designed it mathematically created a perfect set of intervals based upon tri tones.

Literally, the most dissonant sound that you could think of. There was a cartoon called Quickdraw McGraw, and he had an alter ego called El Kabong, and he would hit you on the head with a guitar. That sounded like all the strings around a tune. And the Mac startup sound at that time was an El Kabong sound.

I just had to replace it, and I set about designing a sound that sounded like the Apple brand to me. I had no input from anyone, and then it got released. And the rest is history. That sound is a great example of how you can put character and identity into a product and a brand.

Now we are getting somewhere. This was beyond catchy and unique. A brand is the promise of your benefits. It's what I think, it's what I feel.

It's what I have in my mind. Even without ever using or even experiencing your product. It's the promise of your benefits. You can help to convey that promise with colors, fonts, logos, and sound.

Sonic branding, iconic and equitable. Jim shared his experience with friends. After I created the Startup Sound. I got to meet one of my great inspirations, Brian Eno.

One of the things that he is greatly responsible for is establishing ambient music. We had a long conversation and I was describing to him how I had just did a composition that was very difficult exercise of conveying an emotional response within two seconds. He thought it was a very interesting challenge. Microsoft finds him and hires him to compose the windows 95 startup sound.

(Windows Startup Sound) After you buy something, sound continues to play a critical role in shaping your ongoing relationship with that product. That startup sound is purposefully designed to reinforce the feeling of having made a good choice. Using music to influence preference and choice was nothing new to one specific industry. They've been positioning their auditory ROI safely in the back of our minds for decades.

We all know them, and just like the Intel chip, we never think about them till we hear their sound. Any guesses? When you need insurance, you hear that jingle? That's right.

It's the insurance jingle. They seemed to learn early on the power to produce some positive feelings, to connect with culture, and to make their brands be preferred by listeners. And that's why 20,000Hz did a whole episode about it. Produced by yours truly.

Most insurance commercials go out of their way to give you a feeling of comfort and support. Think about the slogans like a good neighbor. State farm is there. Nationwide is on your side.

Are you in good hands? When you watch these ads, you're supposed to forget about copays and deductibles and premiums. Instead, you're supposed to feel like choosing this company means they're personally going to have your back. One way to do that is through a reassuring jingle.

Another is through a warm, friendly mascot. Whether it's the Geico gecko, Flo from Progressive or Jake from State Farm, because this is such a non tangible service, personalization helps. So bringing a human or even a duck (”Aflac”) into the picture can help it become more concrete and tangible. When jingles like the insurance jingle are done right, they are magic.

(Insurance Jingle Montage) (Insurance Jingle Montage) And last for a long period of time. But this only happens when you fully understand the point and the purpose. Sonic strategy. For me, that's blending sound science and sound art to help us make sound decisions.

This is what Steve calls audio alchemy. In attempting to define what sonic identity was or a sonic strategy, I looked at this idea of the importance of blending science and art. This is not something that we have to guess at. There are a lot of resources at our disposal to figure out this perfect blend to effectively emotionalize the sound.

Cognitive, and auditory sciences. Cross-modalism, psychophysics. Psycho acoustics really can help us understand how to combine sonic building blocks in ways that can more accurately target emotions that we're trying to evoke. Make things a little easier to remember and associate.

It’s understanding the physiology and how we're wired, and how we can use sound to hack our other senses. All of this extra work is worth it. Music that matters makes money. But this doesn't happen all by accident.

Sonic KPIs are real and measurable. A sonic KPI is a way that you're looking at measuring the impact of your choices of sounds and how you use them on brand perception and behavior. So when I think of sonic KPIs, I usually think of them in three categories. Number one, consumer perception that could be related to identity and emotional connection, the salience or the recall of the brand.

That's all related to perception. Number two behavior lingering time in a retail environment. How fast or how slow you want consumers to move. Sales and how your choice of sound or how you're using it in advertising or in the marketplace could produce sales or engagement with the brand.

And another way, maybe looking for information with the brand, maybe it's tied into a particular opportunity to click on a link that served up with digital auditory pieces of advertising. Number three equity. Here I think of two things brand equity as a whole. And is your use of sound actually helping to build into the brand equity?

But there's also KPIs for equity that could be related to the sonic assets themselves. Sonic logo that you can trademark and copyright, or a brand anthem, or particular pieces of sound design that may be proprietary. The more you use those, the more you build equity that can be collateralized in other ways. Think of a brand, thinks about KPIs in each of these areas, and thinks about how is my choice of this voiceover, or this piece of music, or this sound design, or this audio channel going to serve these KPIs that I have that probably ladder into larger KPIs for the brand overall.

It really does have an impact. Using sonic elements again and again teaches the consumer to remember you through sound. Learning this way is not new to us. Recognition through repetition has been happening since we were 2 or 3 years old.

Give or take a few months. Like the alphabet song, when you have kids and you would not teach them the alphabet by saying just remember A, B, C, d, it wouldn't work. But if you sing the song to them, they have it in five minutes. This same repetition works when it comes to brand recognition.

The sound is much more than a marketing tool. Pre-purchase. It's that red thread that runs through the entire customer journey from that first impression. When we become aware of a product to long after we've purchased and used a product.

It brings back these memories. The physiology is triggered again. We have the association with the brand. The more we hear it, the more familiar we get to, the more familiar we are with something, the more we tend to like it.

And that just becomes this loop that reinforces these memories. Music and sound and voice really powerful memory triggers. With a little bit of foresight and the right creators on board, brands could use sound as part of their marketing toolkit. It would be building blocks for all their audio touchpoints.

And believe me, there are now a lot of touchpoints. Branded audio cues in customer service, such as the music or sounds that play when you're on hold. The unique notification sounds that apps make. Even something as simple as a distinctive sound when you get a message from the brand, an order confirmation, a delivery update, you've got mail.

A brand might be involved in creating products, hold music, corporate meetings, sponsorships. It might show up in a way that would not be expected. There's digital content, social media, and podcasts. Things like TikTok And now it's kind of a whole new realm where branded music is showing up and the list goes on and on and on.

All of these sounds reduce frustration, make interactions seem more seamless, more enjoyable, and essentially enhance brand loyalty. These things create a sense of continuity and connectedness. A red thread of continuity that runs through your entire customer journey means familiarity, a sense of welcomed predictability. Jim.

Use this idea of familiarity when he landed on the camera. Click sound for Apple. At the time, digital cameras were just coming about it. They were using like beeps and buzzes and clicks and all of these little melodies because the digital camera made no sound, which is why I very oppositely did something I used what was expected, which was like the most unexpected thing.

That familiarity is compounded when you own that sound. It gives you that much more control and ability to transmit brand intent through a sound. You can't leave anything out of your quiver a triggered moment in a Sonic logo. I think it's an opportunity that many people overlook as being able to recognize and own it.

That's Lisa DiStefano, former VP of brand marketing and creative at Home Depot. They turned that red thread orange. You might recognize this. It's the orange song.

(The Orange Song) Using borrowed interest exclusively makes your music message less vivid. And it takes away your ability to play. When people use license music, often people have another reference. That's why people use it.

It gives you a feeling of connectivity to a certain moment, a memory. We created that and that energy. And now we get to riff on our own work and own it and be able to play with it and manipulate it, you know, engage with it and leverage it there. Their Sonic anthem.

Which is gritty. It's powerful. It feels like it's moving you forward. That's Chelsea Campbell, group creative director at Sirius XM.

That song makes me feel like getting stuff done. It feels like a ballad that you could work to, that you could accomplish something to. It's not just that it's catchy and on brand, it's that they owned it literally and committed to it's congruency. Commitment is as important, if not more important than the individual assets themselves.

Is the brand's commitment to using them over time, but deploying them across multiple marketing channels and reinforcing these elements of the brand through TV, through audio advertising, through social. That's how you create a strong brand sonic ecosystem. One brand working hard on building up their sonic ecosystem is Mastercard. (Mastercard sonic branding) Its branded sounds are used in both digital and physical stores to help improve the customer experience.

They have led the way in making people think of their brands more multi-sensory than just visual. And the biggest sense that they leveraged was Sonic at the payment terminals, their commercials. They're reproducing it in different types of music from different countries. Most recently, they've even developed a haptic logo for customers to feel while making purchases on their phones.

The strength of that identity is the consistency that's the hero, and that's what makes it work. CMO Raja. Rajamanahar has been a huge supporter of sonic branding and sensory marketing over the last few years. Raja and the Mastercard team even released an album with tracks all inspired by its sonic identity.

(Mastercard Album) Ten artists from all over the world integrated the Mastercard Sonic logo into their custom built songs inspired by the sound. This album demonstrates the vibrancy of sound branding usage, while also supporting up and coming artists from all different cultures and countries. McDonald's is another great example of branded sound. Their sonic identity has been building up their brand equity for decades (I’m Lovin’ It sonic logo) Trojan horse type of marketing, where they got Justin Timberlake to make a whole song called I'm Lovin’ It.

After JT fans fully embraced the song as his the truth was revealed. Surprise! I'm Lovin’ It was actually McDonald's in disguise and it's been around for over 20 years. It is constantly reinventing and adapting itself.

You could put it in any sort of instrumentation or voice. I believe. Even just any language to say I'm Lovin’ It could be adaptable into virtually any country. And I think that's brilliant.

It remains relevant and on brand to Mickey D's all over the world. I think it's one of the gold standards. You know, it came from a jingle in and of itself was really a good solution. But if people had just kept banging that exact version over and over and over again, it would have gotten tired after a while.

But I think the reinvention of it that's consistent with the particular messaging or the particular way that a communication is being brought forward, just the fact that it's done in so many different ways, and each one of them sort of has some kind of an element of the brand personality of McDonald's. I think that really makes it a complete home run (Montage of I’m Lovin’ It versioning) (Montage of I’m Lovin’ It versioning) but everything has room for improvement. The one downside is it really only works in advertising.

There are so many others now, and I think more as we moved into digital and products and activations, the less that becomes sort of relevant in those other touchpoints. McDonald's might be better off if they had one sound that always came home to and then let everybody play one consistent, recognizable element. But they have a wonderful, welcoming, casual, friendly sound that, as far as a melody, works very well for them. If you want a fuller story, check out the 20,000Hz Podcast episode.

I'm Lovin’ It! Great breakdown. Another company using Sonic branding in a clever way is Coca-Cola. They don't have a Sonic logo per se.

At least not one that they've stuck with, but they do have a strong branded sound. Their highly immersive sensorial experiences are supported by their highly strategic sound design. I think they do a magnificent job of making the sensory aspects of their brand come to life through sound. When you see a Coke ad, you hear it too.

They have the opening of their bottle sound that makes you feel the refreshment, and you can hear the pouring liquid. You can hear the bubbles, just like their visual imagery where it's so sensory. They're always emphasizing the sensual aspect of their brand. They do it very well and with great discipline through sound.

That process of classical conditioning, where the Coke brand always appeared in advertising associated with the sound, creates a familiarity of the two together. The visual logo, visual identity, and sonic identity. Do all these sounds sound different than a Pepsi or a Dr. Pepper?

Nope. In fact, that sound you heard is actually a Shasta Cola I recorded. Tricked you! But it doesn't matter.

Coca Cola attributed that sound to its brand first. The sound of a cap coming off and the soda fizzing is not unique to Coke, but they own it because of the heft that they've put into the marketplace to associate their brand with that sound. Coca Cola embraces the senses to the nth degree. Even though a lot of creativity is happening, no brand that I know of has fully explored every audio touchpoint and every opportunity for branded sound, yet.

Not too surprising since new technology and social media platforms are hitting the market constantly. New forms of sound in marketing and branding are being invented and defined every single day. There is an increase in engagement with Sonic media in general. Podcasts have exploded.

Streaming radio has changed listening behavior and also the use of smart assistants and voice activated technologies. We are moving forward fast when it comes to voice tech. Voice AI in particular. I know that AI raises all sorts of ethical questions and we'll get back to that in a little bit.

But for now, let's focus on how incredible of an opportunity this is from a creative standpoint. It's amazing because it just means that you'll be able to or you can now generatively create voices on the fly. That sounds basically natural. On the less controversial side of things.

We have voice assistants. And boy, did we get used to that fast. It's not all about screens anymore. It's inevitable that we start moving away from a society that's completely glued to screens everywhere and putting screens in everything.

I think that voice technology may have been a big factor. People could talk to devices and they would say, tell me the news. Tell me the weather. And then they would still keep talking and they'd say, give me some music or put on WBEZ.

There was podcasts becoming so popular. Audio is very good at getting attention. Much better than all the things that are trying to get into your eyes. Brands are exploring the possibilities within their smaller ecosystems as well.

Some brands have developed exclusive sound experiences for customers, for loyal customers, for high value customers, things like audio content that's only available after purchase. Balenciaga has created a song that actually is able to be unlocked and downloaded only based on a QR tag on their shirt, paired with one on the receipt. These are sounds that are focused on deepening that emotional bond and making you feel like you're part of a community. It cuts to the core of the human experience a sense of strong, positive emotion and belonging.

This is just a new take on theater of the mind. We can use theater of the mind to paint pictures in people's minds, to transport listeners to faraway places. The fact that no one has this powerful audio first and audio only social figured out yet should be exciting and liberating. Your brand could come up with something completely new and wildly different that no one else has ever heard.

And you could be the first one to do it. Maybe audio only and social audio sounds too new or big. Let's step back for a minute and think about mascots and spokespersons. Have you considered your brand voice literal brand voice yet?

It could be as simple as casting the right personality. Think of Flo from progressive. Progressive was the first to offer online quoting or Jake from State Farm like a good neighbor. State Farm is there.

These actors voices are now so synonymous with the brand that your brain automatically goes there when you hear them. Sometimes it's the way the brand's name is spoken or the CTA is delivered. The rhythm and inflection, like “oh oh O’Reilley’s” or “1-877 Kars for kids”. As we've discussed, multi-sensory experiences are a big deal.

We don't experience things one sense at a time. You can hear a sound from behind you, or from beneath you, or from above you. You don't have to be looking at it. It's very easy to take in when your attention is divided.

That holds true for both personal and brand experiences. We can shut our eyes, but we can't close our ears. We're always reacting to the sounds that are going on around us, even if we've shut out other senses in the process. I'm about to use a big word.

Stay with me. Psycho acoustics. This is the study of how sound affects us within our environment. Sound design impacts our perception of the world and the environment as we move and hear sounds around us.

We can use psycho acoustics to impact our listeners perception. Maybe your industry or brand isn't so sensory. Maybe you can't incorporate every single sense, every single time, but it doesn't mean considering them isn't relevant. We are constantly multi-sensory beings.

We can't switch off most of our senses most of the time. We're always looking at something or hearing something. We're always processing these things constantly and singling those out as like individual things is something that we do when we talk about them and we write about them, but we experience these things all at the same time. When it comes to building our sonic identity specifically, there are two basic elements to pay special attention to.

Congruency and consistency are the two basic elements of any sonic branding approach. How these assets are used. How they're combined, and how we think about the consistent use of them over time. The more congruent your sound is with other parts of your brand and your branding, the more it will amplify that experience.

The other piece is the consistency. You can have some congruent choices, but if you're not consistent with those choices in all the places on the consumer journey, then you're losing impact of actually building a brand. It may just be a collection of sounds that maybe they fit together sonically, but without that consistency, it's not going to build those memory devices that you need. So that's a lot of stuff.

Let's recap. We've learned Sonic branding is beyond just catchy and fun. It's meaningful and incredibly functional. When we're talking about sonic identity, it's more than just a compositional exercise.

It's more than just sound design. It's powerful, memorable, and incredibly persuasive. It's versatile, unending, and constantly being reinvented. It's a must have in a brand's toolkit.

So with all this possibility, why hasn't Sonic branding caught on? Personally, I believe that the biggest reason is education. We've been staring at the standard visual branding, failing to notice anything else. But when we do take the time to notice sound.

We realize that it's been on the brand's journey the whole time. Sound is really an integral part of the entire customer journey, every step of the journey influencing how people perceive, feel about and interact with a brand from start to finish. You don't have to be a sound designer or musician or a neuroscientist to understand that sound matters. The tone of voice in a customer service agent - the sound of the product itself, the ambient music that's playing during your shopping experience, whether the shopping experience is in a physical store or even online, the sounds that the app makes when you go to pay for a product, all of those sounds have an impact on how you feel about the transaction that you're undergoing, whether it's shopping or buying, and how you feel about the brand or the product that you're shopping for or that you happen to be buying.

When people begin to hear and recognize and trust the sound, it's adding to the brand value that you have in the marketplace. That was the end of the story. We now have centuries of case studies and research to draw from, incredible technologies to make our branded sounds as unique or familiar as we want, and more platforms to utilize than we know what to do with. If there was only one thing to draw from this episode, it is this- Sound done right is a brand's best friend.

Like the brand saying welcome to the experience every single time you use it. That is essentially the holy grail of marketing and product experience these days. Sound done wrong. Is the brand's worst nightmare.

Thank you to Roger Sho Gehrmann, Dallas Taylor, Colleen Fahey, Joe Sauer, Joel Beckerman, Steve Keller, Walter Werzowa, Jim Reekes, Lisa DiStefano, and Chelsea Campbell for helping tell the story in the most complete way possible. And a ton of thanks to Jeanna Isham for the hours and hours of scripting, interviewing, and editing. And thank you to Zach Hahn, mixer and sound designer of AD Infinitum, for working with Jeanna and myself in putting this all together. And of course, thank you to our producers, Ezra Fox and Caitlin Spring, without whom we would not have ad infinitum.

And check out Jeanna Isham’s other work. Her podcast, Sound in Marketing is fantastic and there are not a ton of resources out there when it comes to how does sonic branding work? How does sound in marketing work? So check out her podcast Sound In Marketing.

Thanks again. Jeanna Isham, and to all ye mighty chief audio officers out there. In the words of Daniel M Jackson, from the preface to his book Sonic Branding, which I highly recommend. Quote I hope you enjoy learning about this new and exciting discipline, and that you reward the world with more and more better Sonic branding.

For years to come. I couldn't agree more. And remember to have fun making the ads work. I hope you're enjoying the show.

Be sure to subscribe to the Sound In Marketing monthly newsletter for episode releases. Sonic branding resources. News, and new swag. Big thanks to Stew Redwine, Oxford Road and Ad Infinitum for reaching out and giving me the chance to write about something that I love.

Let's do it again sometime, shall we? All links will be provided in the show notes. Let's make this world of sound more intriguing, more unique, and more and more on brand.