You have convinced your client that aural branding is an important tool in building their product's or service's brand recognition. Now, how do you go about creating a memorable sound or jingle? Several best practices apply.
Emotional Foundation Builds on Uniqueness
The foundation of aural branding is understanding that you are not selling the client's product. You are selling the brand and the emotional attachments the consumer has to it. If no emotional attachments exist yet, you are building them. That means your first job is to determine the emotional attributes that make the brand unique.
Make sure the campaigns your agency designs are as unique as the brands they are promoting. Do not use the same generic music and familiar voiceovers every other brand uses. There are too many bland commercials already clogging the airwaves. Make your clients' work stand out by conveying each brand's emotional attributes. Campaigns that do this engage consumers at an almost subliminal level and earn the kind of staying power that generic work never will.
Cotton Incorporated's "Fabric of Our Lives" campaign is one of the best examples of harmonizing a brand's emotional attributes with audio. Running continuously since 1989, the easy, feel-good, down-home lyrics and music have become synonymous with American-produced cotton. A jazzy, uptown tune would not have conveyed the same emotions or triggered the same ties with consumers because it would not have matched the brand's core attributes of comfort, ease, and durability.
Mnemonics Create Familiarity
Conveying the unique emotions of a brand is a good start. Building recognizability is the next step. How easily is your client's aural brand identified on subsequent hearing?
Three principles drive recognizability: use distinct sounds, compose a theme that carries a mnemonic, and keep the mnemonic to five or six notes. Simple. Hard to execute well. Worth doing.
Jingles have created some of the best-known mnemonics in advertising history. What person over the age of 40 cannot sing the "I Am Stuck on Band-Aids" jingle? Jingles are remarkably sticky. Most people can sing advertising jingles that have not aired since they were children. Music builds strong associative links in memory, and those links hold.
That said, sound is more than music. Many companies have branded the sound of their products: Harley Davidson's engine note, Apple's startup tone, the fizz of a Coca-Cola being opened. Others incorporate an iconic voiceover artist. Tom Bodett and Motel 6 have worked together since 1986, and Bodett's voice is used even in the chain's wake-up calls. Still other brands create soundscapes with branded music in retail spaces, on-hold queues, streaming environments, and online venues. Even the way a company answers its phones can become part of the aural brand. If you can hear it, you can brand it.
Frequency Builds Traction
An aural brand will only work if it is heard consistently over time. Make sure your agency has a strategic plan for the frequency with which its audio will be heard across radio, streaming, podcast, television, and every other relevant touchpoint. Repetition is key. It can take up to two years for sonic branding to gain genuine traction, simply because of the overwhelming amount of noise competing for attention daily. Plan for that timeline and hold the line on it.
Consistency Combines with Elasticity
Even more important than frequency is consistency. We have already discussed consistency with brand attributes. Serving the aural brand consistently across touchpoints and into the future is equally vital.
Useful sonic identities are built to scale across a wide range of contexts, from television to streaming platforms to retail environments to smart speaker interactions, without costly or time-consuming retrofitting. When designing audio branding, make sure it is flexible enough to work on hold during a customer service call, in a 15-second pre-roll ad, as a 30-second television spot, in a podcast sponsorship read, and on a smart speaker skill. The broader the application of a sound, the greater the opportunities for building it into a consistent branding tool.
Ownership Gives Freedom
It is best practice to own the sound. Many companies co-opt popular music for short-term campaigns and gain nothing in the way of brand building from the expenditure. Worse are companies that use sound-alikes: tunes composed to resemble a familiar song, performed by someone who sounds like a familiar artist. Your client may assume that changing a key or altering the lyrics makes such borrowing acceptable. It does not. IP disputes over sonic similarity have become increasingly common and expensive, and courts have grown less forgiving, not more. Even if your client can absorb a legal fight, why use a sound-alike when the entire goal is to emphasize the uniqueness of their brand?
A short, distinctive musical phrase or sound mnemonic that you own outright, and can deploy across every channel indefinitely, is the only reliable path to aural branding success.
Design an original, elastic sound identity that conveys the emotions of your client's brand. Across streaming, broadcast, retail, and every touchpoint in between, sound builds memory in ways that visuals alone cannot match. Start building those memories now.
