Brands spend serious time on how they look — logos, colours, typefaces, animations — but sound is often left until the last minute.
So the launch film has one musical world, the social videos have another, the app sounds are generic, and the next campaign starts from zero again.
Sonic branding gives those moments a shared musical logic.
In Ipsos’s 2020 Power of You meta-analysis of over 2,000 video ads, sonic brand cues were the highest-performing brand asset type for branded attention, outperforming logos, slogans, characters, celebrities, fonts, colours and visual style
Source: IPSOS – The Power of You
In the same IPSOS meta analysis, visual brand assets were widely used, while audio assets appeared far less often. Sonic brand cues appeared in only a small minority of ads.
Source: IPSOS – The Power of You
Kantar reports that strong brand cues can increase brand saliency by 52%. Its Brand Imprint research also measured more than 1,300 brand cues across 200+ brands, using 10,500 interviews in 8 markets. The point for sonic branding: a distinctive sound can become another cue that helps people recognise and retrieve a brand from memory.
Source: Kantar
Audacy and Veritonic reported that sonic branding increased ad recall by 17% in radio ads and 14% in podcast ads, compared with ads without sonic branding.
Source: Audacy / Veritonic study