Audio Branding
Sonic Branding | Sound Branding
Audio branding, also known as Sonic branding, describes the process of brand development and brand management through the use of audible elements. These can include an audio logo, music pieces, and sound design for different products and apps.
What is Audio Branding?
The definition of Audio Branding is the strategic and conscious use of sound and music across all brand touchpoints to create more engaging, meaningful, and affective communication. It’s a parallel to a visual identity.
A company’s audio brand refers to the sounds or songs associated with a brand, product, or service. It is developed or adopted by the company as part of an intentional strategy that helps its audience associate those sounds with their brand. So, to put it in short, audio branding is the sound of your brand. Read our guide on how to get started using audio branding here.
Audio branding aims to build coherency and a solid brand sound representing the brand’s values and identity distinctly, connecting the business’s brand and the audience. In addition, it can open up new communication opportunities to reach consumers with a unified message on various brand touchpoints. Read more about how Sonic Minds works with audio brand management here.
The Advantages of Audio Branding
Sonic branding is becoming a strong tool through which companies convey memorable messages to their target audience. From catchy snippets of different tunes to non-lyrical sounds, audio branding takes advantage of the most powerful memory of the human brain – sound.
There are numerous advantages in using audio branding:
- Triggers emotion: Sound and music affect our emotional state the most – much more than visuals. It affects our moods, feelings, behavior, pulse, and can make us feel sad, scared, happy, and affect the way we feel, think, and act. Knowing this and knowing that most of our decisions are made unconsciously, audio branding can play an essential role in creating meaningful, affective, and effective brand communication.
- Enhances brand recall: Studies show that listening to sound or music helps correlate with the message and helps in improving the verbal memory of the audience, which leads to an improved brand recall.
- Gets more attention: As consumers, we are exposed to an average of 5000 ads per day, and the number keeps increasing. As a result, we have become experts in tuning out the excessive stimulation provided by a saturated media landscape, and our attention span is shrinking by the minute. Adding in a sound or music option reinforces brand identity and will be very helpful in gaining more attention from the target audience.
The strength of audio branding also lies in its subtlety. While visual advertising broadcasts through phones, billboards, and print ads can feel highly intrusive in our daily lives, audio can be consumed separately. Audio content requires less effort to follow than visual content, which explains why podcasts and other audio-first mediums are so popular.
The Importance of Audio Branding
The use of audio is growing. All brand touchpoints and digital platforms use audio, and the number of people owning smart speakers and voice commerce sales is in rapid growth. With voice-activated devices edging closer to dominating the market, most brands are now making sound, one way or another.
Modern multisensory marketing is growing rapidly with audio at the forefront, and it is giving the visual-oriented world new challenges to face. Audio is becoming an integral part of our lives while liberating us from our previous involvement with screens. As a result, creating a viable audio strategy will be the key to future customer interaction.
Audio Branding Examples
The branding and marketing field is filled with examples of excellent audio branding. Just take the classics, Intel and Mcdonald’s, or newer ones like Mastercard. You can read more about some of them here.