Sonic branding, also known as audio branding, may be the multi-sensory key to unlock consumers’ memory recall in an increasingly saturated landscape across fragmented advertising channels.
Today, brands are competing with one another across television and radio streaming platforms, social media and retail media networks, where a sonic logo may boost consumer recognition, according to John Taite, EVP, global brand partnerships and development for Made Music Studio, which has designed musical identities for companies across tech, media and food and beverage.
“Music is the fastest processed sense by the human brain. It creates an emotional connection,” Taite explained.
Crafting cohesion through sound
Creating a sonic logo is more complex than writing a catchy melody, rather it maps emotion to sound, Taite said. The strategic and layered process identifies a brand’s personality traits – playful vs serious, bold vs understated – and translating those into musical components, like tempo, instrumentation and tone. The end goal is a musical logo that is as consistent as a visual one, Taite said.
“There’s a reason you can hum the McDonald’s ‘ba da ba ba ba’ jingle from memory,” he noted, emphasizing the near universal tune that mirrors the brand’s objective to create a sense of lightness and familiarity for consumers.
A sonic logo may connect the dots between brand identity and consumer attention in an increasingly crowded and noisy media space where brands are looking for novel ways to show up consistently across platforms.
“It’s about cohesion,” Taite said. “You need that music to evolve in different settings while staying true to the core emotion. Otherwise, you risk sounding like five different brands depending on the platform.”
Case study: Kroger
When working with a client, Taite describes Music Made Studio as “musical method actors,” immersed in the brand’s purpose, personality, culture and impact on consumers to develop a sonic logo unique to these traits.
For example, Music Made Studio’s work on Kroger’s “Doin’ It Fresh” animated commercial features a diverse group of shoppers interacting with food in their daily lives. The sonic identity “is a welcoming, encouraging and playful memory trigger for the joy of shopping and pride in choosing Kroger,” according to Music Made Studio.
One key aspect of the musical composition was its mood-boosting melody featuring a jazz-inspired “blue note” (also the color of Kroger’s logo), which Music Made describes as “an expressive note played slightly lower than the rest of the musical sequence, adding an additional layer of playfulness and emotion to the piece, and riffing on Kroger’s ownership of the color blue.”
The music was included across Kroger’s marketing channels, including advertising (integrated tv, digital and social campaigns), retail environments, on-hold music, events and sponsorships and internal communications.
“Whenever and wherever customers hear the ‘Doin’ It Fresh’ theme, they’re reminded that Kroger is the place for them,” according to Music Made Studio.
What makes sonic branding work, according to Taite, is the ability to trigger emotion quickly and memorably.
“You don’t just hear the music. You feel it,” he said.
