Audio branding is like the icing on the cake. It provides an amazing, rich and memorable tone to your brand identity. Sound can stop you in your tracks and quickly engage you like no other sense can. Music and sounds can trigger memories and emotions. To test your audio branding knowledge, we have created a quiz. Listen to 7 different unique sounds and see if you can identify the brands.
Most retailers already leverage music as a selling tool in stores. In building a brand, the use of sound is underestimated. Few brands are strategically using music, sound and voice to create a magical brand connection.
The Beginning of Audio Branding
Before television, radio was the darling for reaching consumers. I have been told by those who still remember that radio was the entertainment center in households. Entire families would huddle around the radio to listen to broadcasts sponsored by a brand. Well before the trend of radio advertising. Generals Mills aired the first singing commercial back in 1926 entitled “Have you tried Wheaties?” It was an instant success and made Wheaties a national brand.
The art of building brands through jingles reached a peak during the economic boom of the 1950s. Many product categories jumped onto the trend such as breakfast cereals, candy, snacks, pop, tobacco, beer, automobiles, personal hygiene products, household products and especially detergent, advertising jingles were often used. Like the epic musical films, branding jingles lost their appeal by the 1960s. Any Boomer can recite several advertising jingles as they sit dormant in their brains like “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener,” “Ai, Yi, Yi, Yi, I am the Frito Bandito,” and “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”
To be a memorable and enduring jingle Linda Kaplan Thaler, Chairman of Publicis Kaplan Thaler advertising agency, say, “[a jingle] have huge sticking power. A jingle is not successful if you listen to it once and liked it. You have to listen to it and want to sing it. Essentially, you become the advertiser for the brand.” She also thinks today is a perfect time to build a brand through a jingle due to the many social channels to share it on. While Martin Puris, past Chairman and CEO of Ammirati & Puris, thinks jingles are passé. “In a marketing wary world, a jingle seems oddly out of place. Too slick, too contrived.”
Singing a brand message is a beautiful thing.
Big Bold Sounds
“Master of suspense” filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock understood the importance of sound in telling a story. He said, “When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.” He was brilliant at manipulating his audience’s emotions by using sound design to enhance the situation. Remember his movie, The Birds (1963). He used a combination of real bird sounds and electronically synthesized noises, creating an auditory assault that brought the vicious bird attacks to life.
Great sound design is fully appreciated through good quality sound systems and speakers. Since the 1960s, we saw significant innovations concerning sound systems, from the bulky multiunit stereo systems and the iconic boombox to putting our entire music library into our pocket with the iPod. Add a set of good quality headphones, and you are in another world.
Audio Branding – Music
Eric Sheinkop, co-author of Hit Brands: How Music Builds Value for the World’s Smartest Brands, says, “Music brings value to a brand in three ways: identity, engagement, currency. Specifically, using music to establish an emotional connection with a brand increases brand recognition, creates excitement and buzz beyond the brand’s core products or services and can empower consumers, giving them valuable content to discover and share. Music creates the value that brands need to win the war for attention and develop a genuine connection with their consumers. When used correctly, music not only creates loyalty but true advocacy.”
Music has played an essential role in brand building for automotive and aviation brands, where it is all about the emotional state. Music is a universal language that crosses all borders of culture, nationality and languages. It is a personal connection to the brand. Yet, most brands tend to use sound and music to be campaign-oriented, not brand-oriented. Here is an example of a campaign-oriented advertisement by Honda featuring a 60-person choir who were the sole audio track. There isn’t any car sound that they can’t sing.
United Airlines took the brand-oriented approach using music as a key brand element. Since 1976, United has used the familiar George Gershwin’s tune Rhapsody in Blue as a foundation for their brand. The music is played in its television advertisements, airport terminals, and pre-flight announcements. United Airlines uses this piece of music to strategically create a distinct audio identity that expresses its vales at all necessary customer touchpoints. Have you ever watched someone bring on a musical instrument onto a plane? How about the entire London Symphony Orchestra.
Their onboard safety video creatively incorporates the distinctive rhapsody in blue music in various interpretations to emphasize each cultural destinations – brilliant.
Audio Branding – Sonic Logo
The sonic logo is linking your brand logo with a distinct and unique sound that becomes synonymous with the brand identity. The key is using it everywhere the brand is communicated. It takes years of reach and frequency to link a sound firmly to the brand. But, once it occurs, it becomes timeless like NBC’s three-tone chimes, Intel’s five-note bong, and THX Sound System’s deep note. Kevin Perlmutter’s brand strategist and a blogger explain that because sound bypasses the rational part of the brain and reaches the most intuitive level, sound can be the fastest way to heighten brand engagement. Therefore, a brand identity is incomplete without utilizing a sound or music to help develop an emotional connection even if your brand is an unemotional computer chip. You have a better chance to position a brand into the customer’s mind if you use a multisensory approach.
Audio Branding – Product Sound
Some product brands have their very own sounds that can help differentiate themselves from the competition. Kellogg’s Rice Krispies “Snap, Crackle, Pop,” Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz,” Snapple’s “Pop” when opened, Dyson’s unique vacuum sound, Infiniti’s engine sound (check out the ten most distinctive sounding cars) and the “scritch-scratch” sound of a Sharpie marker on paper. The sound of your product can be as unique as its look, feel and smell. Rachael Pink, an acoustic engineer at Dyson, says, “People now expect products to sound good—not just sound quiet, but have a nice quality.”
Frit-Lay, part of PespiCo Inc., introduced a compostable chip bag for its SunChips brand to become more environmentally friendly. Therefore, as a result, the bag became noisy changing the customer experience so drastically sales fell, and consumers complained about the sound. Frito-Lay went back to the old bag. Don’t underestimate the customer’s relationship with your brand and product sound.
Hearing is Believing
Today, visual branding remains the focus of many marketers and branding experts. Even with the increased number of touchpoints (like TV, radio, website, mobile apps, voice assistants, social channels, in-store displays, voice messages, events and in-store), you can’t rely solely on visuals. The trend is towards digital channels (social media, bloggers, podcasts, voice assistants, video) for brands to communicate.
Well, digital has many channels to reach the consumer; it can lack personality and emotional attachment. Supporting this conclusion, Kevin Perlmutter says, “The strategic use of music and sound can dramatically improve a digital interaction by placing a brand’s unique identity and personality front and center to provide clear navigation with proprietary sounds that are simultaneously functional and emotional.”
In our chaotic and over-stimulated communications world, brands need to engage all senses to create a powerful emotional impact that transforms brand experiences. Audio branding could be the magic your brand needs to be believed. Start turning up the volume.
