Why sonic branding

Most brands are built to be seen. Fewer are built to be heard.

Sound has moved from the end of an advertisement to the middle of the product. This page sets out what changed, what the research supports, and how the return on a sonic identity gets measured.

What changed

The places a brand is heard have multiplied.

Screenless

A payment confirms on a merchant speaker in a crowded shop. A car announces a state change while the driver watches the road. A voice assistant answers with no interface at all. In each case the brand has one channel available to it, and it is audio.

Attention

Feeds are scrolled with sound off and podcasts are listened to with sound only. The same brand needs assets that survive both, which a single film soundtrack cannot do. A system built for one channel now fails on most of them.

Immersive

Spatial audio, headphones by default, and interfaces that respond in sound rather than text. Audio has become directional and positional, which gives a brand more to design and more to get wrong.

Product states

Success, failure, approval, decline, delay. These moments carry more emotional weight than any advertisement, and they occur thousands of times a day. Most brands leave them to a default system sound.

The evidence

Published findings, with their sources.

3.44×

Audio assets outperform visual assets in producing high-performing advertisements.

Ipsos
77%

Consumers considered Mastercard more trustworthy within twelve months of its sonic identity launching.

Mastercard and GfK
38%

Rise in brand recall for Tostitos after its sonic logo, alongside a 70% rise in overall appeal.

Veritonic
17%

Share of advertisers with audio-specific brand guidelines, against 86% holding visual ones.

WARC, 2018

The first three figures are collected in Spence, Sonic branding: a narrative review at the intersection of art and science, Psychology and Marketing, 2024. Figures published by brands and testing companies describe those engagements and are not a forecast for any other.

Measurement

How the return gets quantified.

A sonic identity is testable in the same way a visual one is. What follows is what can be measured, at which stage, and what each measure is actually good for.

Before launch

  • Forced attribution

    Listeners hear the motif without context and name the brand or category it belongs to. This is the single most useful pre-launch number, because it measures the asset rather than the campaign behind it.

  • Delayed recall

    Recognition tested a day or two after first exposure, which separates a motif that is pleasant from one that is memorable.

  • Fit and distinctiveness

    Whether the sound matches the brand's stated attributes, and whether it is confusable with anything already in the category.

  • Channel survival

    The same tests repeated on a phone speaker, a merchant device and a compressed stream, since an asset that only works in a studio does not work.

After launch

  • Attribution lift

    The pre-launch attribution test repeated at intervals. The trend matters more than any single reading.

  • Advertising performance

    Recall and brand-linkage on campaigns carrying the asset, compared against equivalent campaigns without it.

  • Product signals

    For transaction journeys, completion and error-recovery rates against the periods before the sounds were introduced.

  • Internal adoption

    The share of new work using the system without being asked to. Low adoption predicts a dead asset regardless of how it tested.

Over years

  • Distinctiveness

    Fame and uniqueness tracked together, the two measures that decide whether an asset is worth continuing to invest in.

  • Production cost avoided

    Music licensed, commissioned or cleared per campaign before the system existed, against after. This is the most direct saving and the easiest to overlook.

  • Asset value

    Where a mark is registered and held in perpetuity, it becomes something the business owns rather than rents.

Before spending

Questions worth asking any sonic branding partner.

  • Ask how it holds up once it is compressed

    A motif mixed in a treated room can fall apart on a merchant speaker or through a codec at low bitrate.

  • Ask what happens when it is cut short

    An asset gets trimmed for a bumper, a notification, a two-second pre-roll.

  • Ask how the same idea carries across instruments

    The identity should survive being played on other instruments too.

  • Ask about the sounds that carry bad news

    Failure, decline, delay. They reach someone at their least patient.

  • Ask what the guidelines actually let someone do

    A document describing the sound is not the same as one that lets an internal team make a new asset correctly.

  • Ask how it changes for a different market

    This would also depend on client clarity on the project, and your partner's diligence.

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