What Is Audio Branding?

Like Pied Butcherbird, who uses her melodic voice to attract mates and potential prey, your brand needs a tone to attract customers.

Audio branding refers to creating a sonic identity that resonates with your audience. You can express your brand through a jingle sound, an audio brand logo, or a whole enticing song.

This blog post will take you through the basics of audio branding, uncover its numerous advantages, and more. So, let’s embark on this journey together, discover the power of audio branding, and review some famous audio branding examples.

What is Audio Branding? A Brief Explanation

Audio branding focuses on electronically produced sounds, like sonic sounds, to increase their appeal. It is the concept of adding an element that triggers the human’s hearing sense to manipulate them subconsciously and lure them towards your business.

However, one must understand its types, objectives, and benefits to make audio branding solid and practical. An example of the world-known audio branding company is PHMG.

Types of Audio Branding

There are four main types of audio branding that you can incorporate into your branding strategies.

1. The Sonic Logo

A sonic logo is merely a 3-6 second tone or melody. It is ultimately short because many individuals’ attention spans are short, and it is deliberately short to engage the audience at the right moment.

Netflix is the most commonly seen example of sonic logo audio branding. The tu doom sound at the beginning of every video indicates that someone is using Netflix.

Also, people familiarize the sound with excitement, enjoyment, and a happy time.

2. The Brand Anthem

A brand anthem is a song particularly associated with a specific brand. It serves as the fanbase’s national anthem.

People stand united for the national anthem and display their utmost support for the country, just as the fanbase displays a united front to show utmost support for the brand.

The most common brand anthem audio branding example is the song of the show  F.R.I.E.N.D.S. The lovers immediately recognize the show by saying, “I will be there for you.” 

It helps the audience and loyal customers quickly recognize the brand and build a connection with it.

3. Audio Icon

An audio icon is another form of audio branding; it doesn’t show association but is a reminder of the brand and helps the customer frequently identify it.

It is a signature sound used for brand interface and action. It plays the role of intuitive non-verbal feedback.

The most easily understandable example of audio icon branding is the ringtones, notifications, and sounds of transactions after transferring data or money from different apps.

4. The Brand Voice

Brand voice is the distinct sound specified for the brand because it portrays its tone and style. It is developed to match the brand’s values and personality and to bring out an audible face to the brand.

The most recognizable example of the brand voice is McDonald’s “ba da ba ba ba.” It expresses the cool, comfy, childish, fun, and playing nature of McDonald’s.

Objectives of Audio Branding

One must wonder why audio branding is needed when there are many other means of branding and marketing your business. The main objectives of the audio branding are given below:

1. Connecting the Audience

Anyone who owns or runs the business knows how essential it is to develop an emotional connection with the audience. He understands how it will prevail over the long-term advantages for the brand. 

Whenever you target a sense in humans, you find a way to reach them. In a chaotic world, sound is something that most people divert to get some peace, scrutiny, and harmony.

When people associate a sound with your brand, you will most likely grab their attention and become part of their subconscious.

Take the clever example of Liquid Death and its association with punk music and punk bands to attract a vast audience.

Any average person would think about the association between water and punk music and drop the idea. Still, only a genius would find a way to do the unthinkable and generate profit.

2. Communicating Fast

As mentioned, attention spans nowadays are limited to seconds. If you want to entrap your audience and get their attention, you must think of a quick getaway.

And for far, sound has been seen as the most intricate way to get attention. You can use different sounds that are particular to the purpose and personality of your brand.

Coco Melon is a straightforward example of fast communication through audio. The first sound is of a bee playfully buzzing around a watermelon, which shows that the video’s tone is playful.

3. Connecting Emotionally

Different sounds are associated with various emotions. Happy is associated with upbeat music, sadness is related to melancholy music, and carelessness is associated with jazz music.

By genuinely understanding which music is associated with which emotion, you can easily find a tone specific to your brand.

Many brands play calm and relaxing music to make customers comfortable in the shop so they spend more time in the shop and make more purchases.

Likewise, many gyms use a mixture of upbeat and heartbreaking songs so users don’t get bored and go back home; instead, they focus their emotions on exercise and spend more time in the gym.

4. Boosting Brand Identity

Audio branding can quickly enhance your brand identity, giving the audience another thing to associate with your brand.

Now, they will immediately recognize your brand whenever they hear your tone. For example, the iPhone has the same ringtone. Imagine you are in a crowd, someone’s phone rang.

If they were an iPhone user, you would immediately know that because of the tone. In short, it helps make your brand distinct.

5. Resonating with Brand Personality

When we design a logo, we think of many visual aspects of the logo. We concentrate on the shape of the logo, the icon to represent the logo, and we think of whether it should be scalar or vector.

We also consider the font we will use in the logo, its use, the tone it should express, the color psychology of the logo, and last but not least, the slogan or mission statement of the logo.

The same goes for thinking about the various aspects of audio branding. What is your brand’s tone? Are you selling something playful, funny, serious, or controversial?

We must understand that different tones evoke different emotions in the human body. Our logo can help. The shape of a logo can determine emotion.

With the font, we can analyze the tone and niche of the industry, and with the slogan, we can deduce the brand’s seriousness and sophistication.

Ivan Pavlov: Classical Conditioning

It would be unfair if we talked about the importance of sound with action and did not discuss Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning.

Let us summarize his theory so you can understand it better. Ivan Pavlov was a biologist who had a dog. He noticed that the dog used to salivate whenever he brought dog food.

One day, he thought of experimenting. He added a bell to the experiment. He rang the bell and then gave the dog the food. For a couple of days, he did the whole bell thing.

Later, one day, he noticed that the dog that used to drool after looking at the food now salivates to the sound of the bell. To confirm his observation, he tried a different approach.

This time, he rang the bell only without food. To his surprise, the dog started salivating at the sound of the bell, even when he could not see the food.

Let’s add the psychological terms to the experiment now! Ivan Pavlov added an unconditioned stimulus to the unconditioned response (a bell to the food). Bell + (Food = Saliva) and,

He got the conditioned response from the conditioning: (Bell + food = Saliva) and ( bell = Saliva).

Putting Experiment to Audio Branding

Imagine you went to a famous cafe named “Brewing Delight,” as you entered, you heard the distinct and rhythmic sound of a mockingbird singing.

You sat there, enjoyed the delicious hot coffee, and returned home. You started coming to Brewing Delight more often, and then, one day, you were sitting on your porch.

If you heard a mockingbird, what would be your first thought? It will be the delicious coffee of Brewing Delight, and you will get that intense craving for coffee, which will rush you to the brewing delight.

You have been subconsciously conditioned, and the brand uses this technique more often than you can imagine to lure the audience subconsciously to increase their sales.

Audio Branding Strategy

We’ll now discuss the audio branding strategy so you can incorporate it into your business and avail the abundant benefits of audio branding.

Step 1: Extreme Brand Research

Brand research is a crucial element of audio branding strategy. You can organize workshops with the team to interpret the brand’s vision, customers, personality, and target audience.

You can examine the brand’s core identity and determine its desired association. Then, conduct market research to thoroughly understand brand perception.

Step 2: Define Sonic D.N.A.

Translate your concepts into musical notes and concepts, compose the initial brand ideas with the brand’s value, and reduce them to two or three musical directions. 

Assign a sonic D.N.A. with music that expresses your brand essence.

Step 3: Build Diverse Audio Assets that Last

Design primary assets like the sonic logo and brand anthem, then create adaptations like ringtones and interface sounds.

Then, they can be used for advertising, websites, and retail.Tailor assets for different media and content and maintain consistency with the sonic D.N.A.

Step 4: Constant Optimizing

Monitor the audio resonance and refine it over time. Adjust it to make it more relevant to evolving customers.

Introduce seasonal audio campaigns to connect with an audience, keep up with the spirit of celebrations, and focus on building engagement through persistent audio innovation.

Advantages Of Audio Branding

There are many advantages of audio branding. As we all know, sound affects mood, behaviors, and productivity. By using audio branding, you can manipulate your perception to your favorability. You can further:

• Develop brand Identity
• Make customers active
• Inspire emotional responses
• Increase loyalty
• Increase impulsive purchasing
• Define perception
• Make a memorable impression
• Enhance a broader sensory market strategy
• Diversify your reach
• Attract a new audience and widen the space for more influencers
• Provide limitless opportunities to imply innovation
• Prevent mistakes
• Build a brand position
• Create an emotional bond with the audience
• Attract various age groups

Uses of Audio Branding

We have discussed everything about audio branding. Let’s examine how audio branding can elevate your brand.

• It provides an audience definition (age, gender, income, and marital status) with the tone we will use in audio branding, making it easy to identify the audience.

• It provides data-driven research. So much research goes into audio branding that, with its outcome, one can easily recognize the targeted aspects.

• Audio branding ultimately depends on consumer psychology because each aspect of audio branding is attributed after immense research and is dedicated to a unified purpose.

• Creating consistent experiences and using the same tone to represent the brand can create consistency and loyalty over the years. 

• Audio planning is helpful in future-proofing and growth planning because music is not limited to age or time, with a timeless tone; your brand can run over the years and create magnificent bonds over the years. 

List of Audio Touchpoints for Consumers

By examining the audience based on their behaviors, you can identify when, where, why, what music the audience prefers to listen to, and how they will consume the content.

• Your website

• Your social media accounts

• Your youtube ads

• Your podcast

• Your videos on Instagram and Tiktoks

• Your corporate events

• Your presentation

• Your speeches

• Your ringtone

• Your app for company

• Your customer service

• Your message tone

Conclusion

With audio branding, you can understand consumer psychology and create a consistent experience across all channels.

It elevates brand identity, persona, charm, position, status, visibility, and awareness and gathers many customers and potential investors.

Audio branding is a quick and effective way to promote your brand and build recognition. You can hire an agency to provide audio branding services to achieve better results.

Explore More:

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• Types of Branding and How It Works for Your Brand?

• What Is Brand Management? (Complete Guide)