When it comes to crafting a sonic identity, no one person is bigger than the brand. Not the CMO, not the customer or client, not you, not me. One of the great things about sonic branding is the opportunity to create without your ego in tow. You’re not expressing yourself. You’re expressing the brand. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when crafting an audio identity is applying too much personal taste, or even worse, the perceived tastes of your audience.

This is a great time to be in this business because we have more data and insights than ever before, and it’s confirming some of the things that many of us had suspected for years. In this case, we learned from SoundOut’s 2021 Audio Index that music really is a universal language. They found that there is no significant connection between demographics and efficacy. And this works very much in our favour when crafting sonic identities.

The world of neuroscience has also offered a wealth of empirical research on the relationship between emotion and music in recent years. We’ve learned that there’s a difference between emotions expressed by music and emotions induced by music. Emotions expressed by music refers to the qualities you perceive in a musical piece (this music is sad). Emotions induced by music refers to your own personal emotional reactions (this music is making me sad). It’s the universality of perception that allows film composers to make a living. Regardless of how strongly you react personally to a piece of music in a scene, you always know what sort of tone the composer is trying to convey. If music didn’t have this universality, films wouldn’t make sense.

Audio Branding works in a similar way. It’s not about what you like personally, it’s about what is being expressed. If we were to impose our own egos and tastes on the brand, we would end up with something that expresses us rather than the brand. Plus we’d never get anything done because it would become an endless clash of personal preferences.

Another way audio branding parallels film scoring is in its goals. What we’re after is not so much entertainment, but congruency and immersion. It’s a way of saying, you’re in our world now. After you see a movie, do you go home and listen to the score? Probably not. If people enjoy the music, that’s great, but you’re never going to please everyone in that way. Everyone has their own individual tastes and preferences. But if everyone understood and was immersed, you did your job right. Instead of asking, do we like it, we should be asking, is the music getting the point across? Does it reflect the values and unique attributes of the brand? If the answers are yes, we’re on the right track. It’s about expressing the brand’s personality; not your personality.