Sonic branding is everything from ringtones to hold music. Cue your chance to build a memorable company identity.
If music be the food of customer experience, play on. That's the tune hummed by a rising chorus of marketing and advertising experts. Instead of an afterthought to the visual and written parts of a branding campaign, sound has become central.
Just listen to sonic branding specialist Vijaykumar Krishnan, a former executive with J. Walter Thompson who now teaches at Northern Illinois University business school.
"First, the consumer today is available for auditory interface more than ever before," says Krishnan. "It starts with cell phones and iPods, then sitting next to a computer, then a car radio or GPS, then what is being piped into a store, and so on. Current generations have grown up completely immersed in music."
Second, says Krishnan, "You can shut your eyes, but you can never shut your ears."
On that note, here are some factors to consider for sonic branding your business.
How to Add Sonic Branding to Your Business: What is Sonic Branding?
Audrey Arbeeny is founder and executive producer of the Emmy-winning firm AudioBrain, which is based in New York and has designed music for NBC's Olympics, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Virgin Mobile, among others.
She defines sonic branding as "The strategic development of a brand's attributes through sound and its deployment across a multitude of touchpoints to create a seamless, cohesive and authentic sonic presence."
Arbeeny, who began her business in 1995 and also teaches sonic branding at Pratt Institute's undergraduate communications design program, says that's a shift from three or four years ago. Clients back then usually wanted just a sound logo – a short pattern of notes like NBC's chimes or the "Intel Inside" tune.
Now, she says, "They want their entire customer experience connected. Companies have a main phone number, a mobile phone number, a website, all with different sounds that don't make sense together. They realize customers are using these products and want something cohesive that also makes them stand out."
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Sonic branding doesn't yet have a ton of market data to back its efficacy. However, a growing body of academic research attests to the powerful emotional and psychological bonds between music and listener.
Much of it is from Europe, where sonic branding is better established partly because music surmounts the challenges of marketing to a multilingual continent. For example, 2008 research at Leicester University in the United Kingdom found companies that match their brand to music are 96 percent more likely to be remembered, and that 24 percent of customers are more likely to buy from a store that plays music they liked hearing.
In the United States, Dr. James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati has popularized the term "earworm" to describe those hooky little tunes you can't get out of your head. Ongoing surveys show many earworms include company themes and jingles, which has excited marketers no end.
Goldsmiths University in London currently is in the midst of a project to isolate what makes earworms effective. Its leader, Dr. Daniel Mullensiefen, was made "Scientist in Residence" at ad agency DDB in London last fall, a first for the advertising world.
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How to Add Sonic Branding to Your Business: Determine if Sonic Branding Fits
Just because you can get a custom ringtone or website theme doesn't mean you need one. Consider your customer base and sales environment.
One of Audiobrain's clients is 1st Advantage Federal Credit Union, which is headquartered in Newport News, Va., and has 11 branches with 60,000 member customers throughout Eastern Virginia.
Jim Craig, vice president of marketing, was referred to Audiobrain while conducting a re-evaluation of the credit union's brand image. "We were working on other touchpoints – our website, marketing materials, etcetera – and it made sense to consider sonic branding in light of all the work and money we were putting into everything else."
Still, he wasn't pre-sold on the concept. That changed after Arbeeny challenged 1st Advantage to describe its brand personality in order to create a rapport through music, forcing the company to think through just how it wanted to sound to customers.
"It was revelatory," says Craig. "Sonic branding may not be for everyone. But our lesson was, if your business is about delivering an experience to customers, music should be part of it."
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