Sonic Branding Is Insurance for Customer Trust

Most brands think of sound as something they add. Our John Smeddle has a story about what happens when it is taken away, and it changed the word he uses for sonic branding. Customer trust, it turns out, can hang on a single sound.

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

The ATM that went quiet

At a dinner party last week, John heard a friend of his wife’s tell a story about her morning. She had taken cash out of an ATM, and the bank’s sonic signature, the sound the machine always plays, didn’t play.

For a moment she looked at her cash as if she might have been short-changed. Then she checked her balance. Then she looked around, a little embarrassed. Nothing had actually gone wrong, but for a second or two the missing sound made her distrust the transaction. She had no idea what John does for a living, so there was no agenda in the story.

From asset, to investment, to insurance

In a very short time, the industry has gone from calling sonic branding an asset to calling it an investment. John’s point is that neither word tells the whole story any more, especially now that sonic branding is showing up in every commercial sector. The best description of its real value is insurance.

Think about it the other way round. If that woman had walked into her bank and found every logo and colour stripped from the walls, she would have felt the same doubt. Sound works the same way. Once customers know it, they notice when it is gone.

Why customer trust is what gets insured

Trust rarely announces itself. It shows up, or fails to, in small and unexpected moments: a payment, a login, a notification, a call on hold. Those are exactly the moments where a brand’s sound lives.

So John’s conclusion is that sonic branding is an insurance policy that protects the value of a brand, and that marketers should protect themselves against lost trust before it happens. As he puts it, he can’t quite believe he has just become an insurance salesman.

Read John’s full piece on LBB.

What this means for your brand

Insurance only pays out if the policy is in place before you need it. In practice, that starts with a list. Write down every moment where your brand already makes a sound, especially the transactional ones: payments, confirmations, app notifications, phone lines and IVR.

Next, make sure each of those moments sounds like you, every time, because consistency is what customers learn to trust. Finally, treat any change to those sounds the way you would treat a change to your logo: deliberately, and never by accident. 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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