How Does Your Brand Sound?

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All brands understand the importance of visual identity. Brand guidelines often dedicate multiple pages for the logo alone. But there is an equally important brand asset that is often overlooked or ignored. It’s sound.

Sonic or audio branding is a powerful tool that can be used to create mood, act as a memory peg, reinforce values and strengthen an emotional bond.

Think about how a movie score impacts your experience, or the music that’s playing in your favorite store or restaurant. It’s an important sensory element that impacts how you feel about a product or experience.

Jingles have long been a staple of advertisers. But sonic branding has evolved to include more sophisticated elements like brand mnemonics – little ear worms that burrow into your brain and remain with you throughout the day. Things like the four electronic notes that identify IT products with Intel chips inside. You get a feeling of reassurance knowing that the product is made with top quality components. Like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for your ears.

It’s the reason why whenever you hear, “We are Farmer’s,” you automatically go “Bom-ba-dom-bom, bom-bom-bom.” Or the app on your phone plays the ESPN audio brand whenever a score is updated. Auditory assets like these make the brand more memorable and help to communicate the brand’s essence to your target audience. It becomes your audio logo. And it works whether you’re watching or not. Which is super important given the multi-screen habits that has become the norm for most consumers.

Fact is, audio surrounds us every day. Not just on radio, but on TV, video, podcasts, music-streaming platforms. It’s virtually everywhere. A recent survey by Pandora found that 50% of all Americans listen to streaming audio weekly. They spend more time listening to streaming audio than they do on social networking. And it’s taking on a greater role than just entertainment.

As voice-powered personal assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home have become part of our everyday lives, audio branding has taken on an even greater role. Juniper Research estimates about 3.25 billion voice assistants are in use today and predicts that number will grow to 8 billion in 2023. These new technologies don’t just talk at consumers, they have enabled brands to have a two-way voice dialogue with customers. It’s another opportunity to use your sonic brand to make a sensory impression that sticks with your customers.

That’s why it’s so important to develop a consistent sonic identity that can be used to create a consistent sound across everything from ads to on-hold music and the sound played at trade show booths. More and more brands are dedicating time and effort to how they sound and how their brand is heard online and beyond. If you aren’t leveraging your audio brand, you’re missing a powerful opportunity to forge a stronger emotional bond with consumers in today’s connected and voice-activated world.

Smart Creative Requires Intelligence

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Creative people often cringe at the word. Data this, data that. Data, data, data. It’s not just a trendy marketing buzzword. It’s a building block we use to create bigger, bolder, more effective ideas.

Based on the right brain – left brain theories of old, you would expect creative types like me to run from the onslaught of data. Don’t squelch my creativity with numbers. Math sucks the life from people like me.

I’m happy to say that it’s a brand new world where data inspires us to explore new ideas and change outcomes. Our creative folks not only welcome the benefits of data. We embrace them with mind and soul. While other “right brainers” may feel constrained by data, we find it liberating.

Maybe that’s because we don’t look at data in raw form. We use what we call data intel. It requires a deep dive and analysis that often confirms an important brand truth or uncovers an actionable insight. That’s what gives data value.

When applied with empathy and insight, data intel opens new doors and frees our minds to explore more deeply. It’s this balance we strike between creativity and data that makes us unique. It’s part of our DNA, embedded in our methodology.

If your brand is data rich but you don’t have the time or energy to mine it, that’s where we come in. It’s our specialty and we thrive on intelligence.

Brick and Mortar Isn’t Dead Yet

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Mention online shopping and the first name that comes to mind for most is Amazon. What started as an unassuming online bookstore has morphed into the world’s largest Internet-based retailer. A millennial mall of sorts. In 2015, Amazon even surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States.

So why is the e-commerce innovator that brought us the Kindle, Echo & Alexa, and Fire TV now expanding its strategy into brick and mortar stores? Well, it turns out that a lot of us still want to see, hold and play with items before we buy them. Anyone who has waited for an hour for an appointment at an Apple store can attest to that. And, while online shopping continues to grow at an impressive clip, as many as 90% of Americans say they still do the majority of their shopping at physical retail locations.

Smart companies are taking notice. Amazon launched its retail strategy by opening its first retail bookstore in late 2015. They are currently testing a retail c-store called Amazon Go. And this week, the company announced plans to test an electronics store that would feature their own devices.

Amazon is once again leading the industry as a growing number of internet based retailers are recognizing that a strategy mixing online and offline retail is crucial to continued growth.  But don’t expect to see Amazon stores popping up on every street corner anytime soon. The online retailer is taking it slow, testing the concepts to see which will gain the most traction with consumers.

Marketers can learn from Amazon’s vision, too. The opportunities for an all-digital strategy can be limiting. We find that our most effective campaigns utilize a strategic balance of digital, traditional and non-traditional platforms. We test. We learn. We optimize. And, like Amazon, we deliver.