Sonic Branding: Going beyond colours and shapes, exploring the power of sound
Contrary to popular belief, branding is not about a logo.
Many people believe a brand only consists of a few elements — like colours, fonts, photography and messaging. The human brain is so attuned to visuals, which explains why the clearest way to define a brand is visually.
But gone are the days of two-dimensional words and images on paper.
Today, the world around us is evolving at an incredible pace, and this transformation is impacting how consumers behave and engage with everything around them, that includes brands.
From static logos defined by colours and shapes, brands now have to adapt to the changing needs of its audience and explore flexible identifiers that can live in diverse screen platforms like desktop, mobile and wearable tech devices.
With the rise of digital technologies and smart objects, sound is playing an ever more important role in our everyday life interactions with brands.
The Power of Sound
The history of mankind would prove that there has never been a society or culture discovered that did not use music and sound in some way. One of the oldest ways music has been utilised by humans over the millennia, and is still used today, is as a form of communications.
Music transcends all barriers in language, culture, time and all things visual. As a universal feature of the human experience, music helps mankind establish lasting connections across geographical and linguistic boundaries.
While visual branding coordinates fonts, colours and shapes to create recognition, audio branding coordinates music, voice and sound effects to achieve the same goal.
A well designed sonic brand identity helps project a brand’s image in an instant.It immediately tells an audience who you are and what you stand for, making it one of the most powerful ways to attract an audience and invite them along as your brand evolves.
Why Sonic Branding?
Every brand should be recognisable through more than just the visuals.
While people are used to seeing corporate designs and recognising brands via their visual styles and colours, now more than ever, it’s also crucial for them to be recognisable through music and sounds. And this goes beyond just a jingle — these days, brands are looking for sounds that describe their personality and goes hand in hand with their various identity assets, here’s a list of great reasons why:
Sound triggers emotions. Sound has the ability to trigger emotions more than visuals, and that’s because music is a language: the language of emotion. Music has structure, progression and syntax — just like language. Tempo is usually considered the most important structural aspect of emotion in music, but other factors, like mode, volume, and melody can also influence the emotion we read into music. In fact, the brain processes musical syntax using the same area it uses to process language syntax.
Sound gets more attention. With the availability of huge information database, attention has become the asset which is most scarce. The use of sound or music adds another dimension to brands, as it produces additional layers of emotional response that still imagery cannot reproduce. Blending this with videos and engaging content formats allows brands to have more sensory inputs to work with, helping it establish deeper emotional states with the audience through multi-sensorial experiences.
Sound enhances brand recall. Humans are constantly experiencing sound. As we already know, there is a strong cognitive connection between what we hear, and our memory. Early this year, Mastercard released its own sonic branding — a new sound that will help consumers recognise the brand when they make purchases with their Mastercard or when they see an ad for the brand on TV. But this isn’t something totally new for the industry, for many decades, sonic branding has been helping brands strengthen recognition and recall. Think of brands like Nokia. Windows, Mac and AOL, what sounds do you recall?
The role of sonic branding is constantly increasing in our everyday lives, sometimes in a subconscious way. New audio mediums such as smart speakers, voice assistants, and podcasts are establishing themselves as an essential part of our life, making sonic branding especially relevant in today’s world.
At the end of the day, branding isn’t just about logos, slogans or audio clips.
Branding starts with the boldest gestures of a corporation in terms of ideas and works down to the tiniest iterations of every communication touchpoint.
Visual designers and sound designers are not ‘doing’ branding, instead they contribute in the composition of many important elements that when combined as a whole can result in the development of a brand. When practiced to its full vision, branding helps demonstrate authenticity, unify people within organisations and create strong differentiation.
