Papers
Not ‘academic’, but not superficial either. Serious points made as simply as possible but no simpler.
Unprompted brand attribution tests
Play someone a sonic logo, and ask them to identify the brand: that’s an ‘unprompted brand attribution test’, and it’s the standard way we measure sonic logo performance.
Trouble is, the whole idea is wrongheaded from top to bottom. We don’t care about attribution: we care about familiarity.
Don’t put your faith in brand fit
Brand fit – or brand ‘congruity’ – has come to dominate the way we think about sonic logo design. But it doesn’t deserve such elevated status. In fact, the obsession with maximising congruity is a distraction, which might actually make it harder to succeed.
Included in this paper:
• a round-up of the scientific evidence
• case studies on Currys, Direct Line, Old Spice, Stella Artois
• a critique of the practice of ‘brand personality matching’
Soft and hard audio branding
Hard audio branding focuses on a specific asset that becomes a brand ‘theme’. Soft audio branding builds consistency in other ways, around a style, a procedure, an idea .
Not so much complete opposites, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ are tendencies – some audio branding strategies can be ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ than others – and all audio branding has a place somewhere along this dimension.
What makes a good sonic logo?
All the general factors that matter, distilled into a terse set of instructions. Don’t look here for argument – you’ll find plenty of that in my other work: this document is about key strategies, expected benefits, and examples to illustrate them.
Longevity: what’s the lifespan of a sonic logo?
A deceptively simple question, which I answer with sonic logo data from my audio branding database. With some important qualifications, the findings are:
• For every year of a sonic logo’s life, there’s maybe a 15-20% probability of it being cancelled.
• The chance of being cancelled doesn’t seem to change year by year: it’s just as likely in year 1 as it is in year 10
• Half of all sonic logos probably won’t last more than 7 or 8 years.
Sixteen sonic snippets
What qualities do we hear in sonic logos? And how well do they communicate specific marketing values? In 2019 I set up a test to find out, and this paper reveals the results. They may surprise you!
Brands in the test: AT&T, Enel, Vueling, HSBC, NBC, Philips, Sony, Lindt, BT, Santander, Mastercard, Shell, State Farm, Coco Pops, NatWest.