Your business is putting out a lot more sound than you realize, and it’s not just about commercials.
What about your phone automation?
What about your podcast?
Do you produce a product that makes (or can make) a distinctive sound?
You need to own all of it.

You do this by assessing your sonic footprint, creating an audio style guide, and designing custom sonic assets. It’s about taking all those sounds and making them work together, and making them consistent. The goal is to produce audio media that is so closely tied to your brand that the public can identify you blindfolded.

Audio Audit

It all starts with a look at the brand from the outside. Every brand has sound and sound space. The first step is to identify all media, environments, and touchpoints where sound can be designed and applied. 

Brand Audit

Now it’s time for a closer look. This is the tough part. This is where we boil the brand down to its essence and identify its values, goals, function, personality, history, future, emotions. How does it make people feel? How does it make the world a better place? In some cases, we might bring out the Adjective Board. This often helps facilitate a deeper look into the brand. Quite often visuals convey information, but sounds convey emotion. To express the brand sonically, we need to dig deep and find its unique emotional signature.

Audio Style Guide

Once we know both the physical and intangible qualities of the brand, they’re ready to be sonified. The Audio Style Guide is a comprehensive document that outlines how the intangible qualities of the brand translate into music, voice, and sound, and how they’re applied to media, touchpoints, and environments. 

Production

With audio brand guidelines in place, we start creating. This usually involves the creation of a brand anthem. This is a signature musical composition that culminates to a main theme in the form of an audio logo or jingle. The anthem can later be broken down into smaller audio elements such as user experience sounds, background tracks, logo variants, etc.. The production stage may also include the selection of a brand voice, and even the treatment of physical spaces and product sounds.

Application

In the final step, branded audio elements are applied to all appropriate media, touchpoints, and environments.