Sonic Branding

Sound is a very strong communicator. It does some very special things that no other communicator does. If a brand can identify opportunities for sonic communications and applies some of the art of sonic branding, it gains access to a whole world of communications opportunities that it never had before - like a café in Capri. Maybe your audiences are not in a café but on the beach or in their cars, listening to the radio, or in the kitchen, making a cup of tea but listening to the TV. Perhaps your audiences are on the telephone to your call centre or on your interactive voice recognition (IVR) portal. Perhaps your clients are in the cinema, watching and listening to ads or to the film and taking messages from them. There are other places your clients could be. They could be at their computer, visiting your website or they could be anywhere with a third generation mobile phone downloading content. They could be at a conference or an exhibition or watching a corporate video or opening sound-enabled product packaging. There are so many touchpoints today where we have the opportunity to communicate through sound that the imperative for putting some investment into how a company uses these channels has never been stronger.

The history of marketing and advertising is full of fascinating examples of how companies have employed music as a part of their communications activities. Though in many areas they were copying existing art-forms such as the movies or commercial radio, in some instances the ad industry actually lead the cultural development of the western world.

We have seen that jingles and music have long been employed by the advertising and marketing communities to help get their messages across but there is much, much more to sonic branding than the 30-second TV or radio spot. Indeed, the most important area of our culture, in relation to how music and sound influence how we feel, is far removed from the world of advertising.

The development of the marketing and movie industries over the last 100 years informs much of what we call sonic branding. The obvious connection is the way in which these two industries have used the power of sound in its various guises and in the following chapter we will start to unravel the medium of sound itself. The goal is to understand its mechanics and its relationship with humanity, so that we can fully harness the power of sound. Just before we get into things, it is worth stating that for our purposes the words ‘sound’ and ‘sonic’ mean the same things. Sonic branding has been chosen by the industry as the generic for little reason other than it just sounds sexier than ‘sound’. Why this is so is a matter for phonetics and linguistics and possibly another book.

Sound has a number of qualities, most of them extremely useful and all of them interesting in their own way. One of the most remarkable aspects of sound is that it is a science. Understanding its nature requires some very brief lessons in physics and biology.

If we were to treat every sound in the world separately then this book would be a little on the large side. There are millions of sounds out there that human beings can perceive and differentiate between. It is more useful for this book to put different types of sounds into categories so that we can make some general points that relate directly to our subject.

The three elements of sound give us an extremely large palette for sonic branding and technology gives us an almost limitless number of locations and media where the palette can be employed by a brand. Given the diversity of the opportunity, it is unsurprising that most brands are yet to approach their use of sound from a consistent brand perspective. The choices available are vast and the experience, information and research required to make the right choices are highly specialized. As a result, the vast majority of brands have a hotchpotch of sounds representing them. Approach almost any brand and you will discover that the sound for each touchpoint is completely different. Some of it is good and ‘on-brand’, some of it is bad and ‘off-brand’. Our clients most often ask us how we approach the difficult issue of creating consistency across the many media channels and physical touchpoints of a brand.

We will start with a couple of traditional definitions of a brand. First, ‘an identifying mark burnt on livestock’; and second, just as prosaically ‘a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name’.¹ I work with many brands but the last time I checked I was working with no cows’ arses. Therefore, interesting as the history of domestic cattle may be, I think we can ignore the first definition and go straight on to the second, that a brand is a type of product manufactured under a particular name.

Way back in the dark ages of 1960, the American Marketing Association (AMA) put forward a definition of a brand that is interesting to note. They describe it as: ‘A name, term, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors’.¹

One brand, more than any other has shown us that trademarks and brands are different. This brand set the agenda for how we perceive brands today but it took 40 or more years for the lessons to filter through and even now, the branding industry is dominated by businesses that sell graphic design and trademarks… but not for much longer. The brand that helped the world see that a name, design and trademark were just elements of a brand and not the essence of a brand was growing slowly and quietly at the same time and in the same place as Landor Associates. During the 1940s and 1950s, largely unknown to the marketing fraternity, a new, great brand was being bom in the sunshine state of California. It too rode the economic boom of the post-war years but it and a few contemporaries were to set a new agenda for creating and defining brands.

What McDonald’s did better than anyone else was to create belief among their customers that they were getting decent food at a good price and that the chain would always deliver the same portions in the same wrappers in the same type of environment. McDonald’s promised all of this and when customers walked through the doors, this is exactly what they got.

Belief: Opinion, view, viewpoint, point of view, attitude, stance, stand, standpoint, position, perspective, contention, conviction, judgement, thinking, way of thinking, thought, idea, theory, hypothesis, thesis, interpretation, assumption, presumption, supposition, surmise, postulation, conclusion, deduction, inference, notion, impression, sense, feeling, fancy, hunch, faith, ideology.¹

If we accept that brands are centred on beliefs then it makes sense to define branding as the generation of belief: a process whereby we ask stakeholders to make a positive emotional investment (PEI) into a brand. In trying to discover how to convince people to believe, we find that our subject crosses the paths of religion, philosophy and psychology. The former, because no other movement in human history has generated more belief than the evangelizing religion of Christianity and the two ‘P’s because the great thinkers of the world have spent a lot of time over the centuries working out the nature of belief.

We have taken some wide-ranging views of brands, from people, to religions, through to McDonald’s. What we have shown is that anything that starts with a belief can become a brand. Well, actually we have not shown that at all. We have asserted brands require a positive emotional investment (PEI) and this needs a little more explanation because it is the ‘positive’ that determines which beliefs can become brands.

An idea, stemming from belief, that through its consistent identity, experience and the positive emotional investment (PEI) of stakeholders, creates sustainable benefits.

If individuals are best at brand creation, it is fair to say that other activities concerned with expressing the brand will usually be better handled by those with expertise in their own field such as designers or advertising agencies. These partners to the creators of the brand are involved in ‘branding’, which is a special term all on its own and needs its own definition. We could assert that branding is just everything to do with a brand but that would be overly simplistic. Branding is primarily concerned with consistency between the ideas of a brand and the way it expresses itself in terms of its identity and the experience it offers. It is important we remember this because in the drive for creativity and the new, new thing, consistency is usually the first casualty.

We now have a model for brands and a set of criteria for branding, which is the expression of a brand. It is within this context that sonic branding comes to life and we can see where sound and music in particular can play a great role in the fundamental process. To recap: the dominant and most influential understanding of brands today is that they are, in essence, beliefs that form the basis for ideas.

What we will seek to do in the chapters ahead is generate a model that can be referenced by anyone who wants to make full use of sound as a brand communicator. We call this the sonic branding engine and it is the heart of our strategic approach. Even more important in sonic branding terms than the sheer creativity of musical or effects composition, it represents the essence of the sonic branding approach.

In creating our model, we drew heavily upon our experiences in different realms of communications and creativity. Paul’s training and career in advertising, in particular, were extremely useful in giving Sonicbrand an understanding of the importance of the creative brief to any project. Getting the right brief is half the battle. We realized quickly too that in order to build sonics from a brand perspective, with the flexibility to work across all platforms and media through time, we would have to start with a very solid understanding of the brand before we got near to the creative work itself.

The brand brief gives us an understanding of the brand, primarily through the verbal expressions of staff and the graphic and written expressions contained in documents. The next stage, creative learning, is where we truly start to uncover how the brand will eventually express itself in sound. We do this through a series of audits and group discussions of sonic moodboards.

With the audits completed, we usually have plenty of reference materials to fuel the next part of the process. The backgrounds that Paul and I have in advertising and the media led us to believe that there were great benefits to using visual moodboards as an aid to a visual brief. When describing any creative guide, it is almost always useful to use stimuli other than the written and spoken word to give ideas form. Similarly, our backgrounds in music and theatre taught us that creating demo tracks or listening to preexisting music with the intention of learning from the most appropriate pieces were very strong steps towards the creation of great music and design in sound. Bringing together this knowledge, Sonicbrand developed a creative process around sonic moodboards.

At the end of the moodboard workshops, we are faced with one of two scenarios. If the process is based upon big idea moodboards, then the third stage of the sonic branding engine sees the creative director armed with a musical moodboard and the feedback of the decision-making group. This feedback will have information regarding each component of the moodboard and how closely its emotions match the desired expression of the sonic branding. There will also be some detailed intelligence regarding specific instruments, rhythms or sounds that are particularly liked in the context of a brand communication.

The visual branding world is very familiar with the concept of a language system. This would traditionally be composed of a colour palette, a font, perhaps a photographic style, layouts and shapes that are considered the language of a brand and can be used in most combinations in branded communications. In the world of sonic branding, the language system required is at least as complex, if not more so. What creates the difficulty is the fact that sound has a relationship with the passing of time that visuals, apart from film which is still rarely used in brand communications, do not share. A brochure or a press ad stands still. Sonic branding moves through time. As a result, it is much harder to define than colours or shapes. There is no set classification for sounds as yet devised because the temporal element gives sounds an infinite number of possibilities. Therefore, Sonicbrand is inventing the equivalent of a Pantone system as it goes along, though I doubt we will ever reach the point where all sounds are classified and numbered.

The third component of the sonic brand identity is the guidelines document. In conjunction with the brand score and the sonic logo, this document should contain all the strategic, technical and creative information required to create expressions of the brand that are consistent with the identity and thereby relate back to the belief and values of the brand. Guidelines documents can vary greatly, dependent upon the scope for sonic branding exposed during the audit phase. Each sonic touchpoint will require its own guidelines and as a result, the document can become very weighty indeed.

Particular reference within the guidelines must be given to how and where to use the sonic logo. The visual symbols of brands are important, often viewed with a reverence that dictates they should be used sparingly and sympathetically. The guidelines for a sonic logo must convey the same understanding.

The next section of the guidelines relates primarily to the playback of the sonic logo, which at this stage is the only sonic branding element for external use. It is important that the logo is heard at every touchpoint as it was designed to be heard. The broad range of media and applications make the management of playback a challenge, particularly in relation to the audio quality of playback equipment.

Stage one to three of the sonic branding engine are fundamentally concerned with how a brand seeks to identify itself in sound. These stages lead to the creation of a model and a set of internal management tools that can be referenced by all those who seek to represent a brand to its stakeholders; ad agencies, interactive designers, call centre managers and so on. It is important for all those in control of a brand touchpoint to take responsibility for the relationship they establish with the stakeholders and to ensure it is consistent with the brand and its values. It is crucial to this relationship that a sonic identity is referenced and for the framework it provides to be appreciated if a brand experience is to be effective. To make an analogy with visual branding, stages one to three create the typographic style, a logo and a framework in which these can be utilized. Stage four turns these visual elements into letterheads, uniforms and signage that all communicate something about the brand.