Brand Salience: Why a Brand Without a Sound Leaves a Vacuum

For years, the question in marketing meetings was how much bigger a brand could be with a sound. Our John Smeddle thinks that question is about to flip. Soon it will be how much smaller a brand stays without one, and that is really a question about brand salience.

John wrote about it for LBB’s Thought Leaders. Here is the short version, plus what it means for your brand.

From nice-to-have to must-have

Sonic branding has long been treated as an add-on, something a brand gets round to once the logo, the colours and the campaign are done. John’s point is that this is changing fast, and in many sectors it already has. Sound is now at the front of the charge, not bringing up the rear.

Brand sounds are everywhere, working on us consciously, semi-consciously and subconsciously. Not to trick anyone, but to reinforce what people already like and trust about a brand. And they are no longer just in the ads that tempt someone to try a product. They are inside the experience itself: the app, the payment, the notification, the phone line.

The numbers only point one way

Well-informed projections suggest sonic branding will quadruple in the next five to seven years. For John, the more telling number is how budgets are shifting between what brands look like and what they sound like.

Ten years ago, for every 1,000 spent on visual branding, about 1 was spent on sonic. Last year, it was 170. Opinions about sound may differ, but the spending doesn’t.

What brand salience has to do with sound

Brand salience is how easily your brand comes to mind when someone is about to choose, and how quickly they recognise it when they meet it. Most brands build it almost entirely through what people see. But people hear brands too, often when they aren’t looking at all.

John goes as far as predicting that, very soon, the people who look after brands will talk about a brand’s visibility and mean its sound as well, without batting an eyelid. When that happens, a brand with no sound is simply less visible than one that has it.

Read John’s full piece on LBB.

The vacuum, and what it costs you

Here is John’s sharpest line. If the character of your company can’t be defined by a sound, whether you sell to businesses or to consumers, you have created a vacuum between you and your customers. It is a space that could have been filled with trust, familiarity and reassurance.

Starve a brand of that kind of oxygen, he says, and the damage is self-inflicted. Nobody else did it to you.

How to fill the vacuum

Start by listening to your brand as it is today. List every place it already makes a sound, or should: ads, social video, the app, payment and confirmation sounds, the phone line, events and spaces. Wherever there is silence, or a different stock track every time, there is a gap.

Then fill it with one identity rather than a pile of one-offs: a brand track and a sonic logo that can adapt to every one of those moments and still sound like you. That is what a proper sonic branding system is for.

And if you want to know what it costs, we publish our real prices: WithFeeling’s sonic logo and brand track projects run from $13,500 to $82,000+ (50,000 to 300,000+ AED). Here is how that breaks down.

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