Sonic Profile

Sonic branding, or sound logos (Sogos), play a powerful role in marketing. They activate emotions and memories, making consumers more attentive and increasing brand recall. Sound has a unique impact on humans, appealing to our senses and facilitating communication. Audio logos with melody, lyrics, and duration are effective in creating a memorable jingle. Research shows that a six-tone Sogo is the sweet spot, allowing the brain to associate it with the brand and increasing willingness to pay. Sonic branding aims to connect emotion to a brand and increase perceived value. Hi, and welcome to my sonic profile. Today I will be dissecting and profiling two journal articles on Sogos, also called Sound Logos, and try to make them more digestible in this audio format. In the first one, by Audio Content Lab, titled, How Sonic Branding and Audio Logos Activate Emotion and Memory, we will talk about sonic branding and how it affects our brain. In the second article, by the Journal of Product and Brand Management, titled, Sonic Logos Can Sound Influence Willingness to Pay?, we will discuss how sound can influence our willingness to pay these companies through research. Done. I hope this dissection of both these articles is useful, and listeners find them as cool as I did. Sound is one of the most important senses that appeals to human emotion. Through consumerism, the importance of sound in marketing ploys has risen greatly, especially when consuming modern media. It seems that every popular food chain, store, or ad has a specific sound associated with them. Sound Logos, also called Sogos as I mentioned before, are logos that are too iconic to replicate and just too catchy to forget. Some examples of these are, a classic that people of all ages can remember like the boring line from the MGM intro to movies, or perhaps the classic ba-da-ba-ba-ba jingle from a certain double-arched fast food restaurant, or a more modern one, the trademark to doom intro, sound when logging into Netflix. All of these Sogos, when played by themselves, bring forth the image or the feelings that these companies made you feel. In the article for Audio Content Lab, the author, Jake Sanders, discusses how audio logos and sonic branding allow marketers and brands the ability to make people pay attention to their brand and product, as well as aiding in recall by using specific cues to stimulate memory. According to InfoLinks, only 14% of participants could remember the company associated with the last display ad they saw. This means that whenever we are walking or driving on a street and we see a large billboard, or perhaps when we're watching TV or scrolling on our phones, our brains aren't really absorbing all those images that we see. As humans, we are driven by emotions. Something that appeals to our senses and makes us feel something when we're watching can help maintain that recall and association with a brand. In the article, Sanders states, unlike our other senses, sound impacts humans in a very visceral manner. Being one of the few sensory experiences based in the physical world, sound is a physical wave that interacts with our ears, brains, and bodies, which is why it is such an effective means of communication. This does not happen with visual, olfactory, or sensual stimulus, only auditory. There are specific areas within your auditory cortex, specifically the apex and base of the cochlea, that are designed to correlate and respond with sound frequencies from the outside world. This is completely unique only to sound stimuli. There are multiple parts to these audio logos that can help the human brain maintain that association. These include melody, lyrics, and duration. A good SOGO will use all three to create a successful jingle or sound for us to remember by. Four-note audio logos are the most commonly used. Some brands produce the short and long version to have multiple versions of a SOGO. Some sonic branding takeaways from this article include, the core purpose of an audio logo is to consistently connect emotion to a brand to ensure strong recall within your addressable audience. The ultimate goal of sonic branding is to increase the perceived value in products and services a brand sells. For the next part of my sonic profile, I will be dissecting an article by Professors Krishnan, Kalaris, and Orend, written and researched for the Journal of Product and Brand Management. This article focuses more on how SOGOs affect marketing and the influence they have on consumerism. This paper specifically focuses on an experiment conducted that shows there are a specific number of tones in a SOGO that draws more human attention than another. According to the paper, SOGOs are important and costly branding devices, and their creation relies on intuition rather than objectivity. In 2017, Robert Fripp created the Microsoft Windows Visa Startup Sound, and this effort took 18 months. These ads that run on TV also don't come cheap. A 30-second spot on a network can cost you anywhere from $200,000 to $600,000. To overcome these costs, companies must remain objective with their SOGOs. They want to create the sound that produces the highest verge to pay. It seems that as the number of tones in a SOGO increases, processing fluency should decrease to the demands imposed by more auditory information. However, in the human brain, the less tones there are, the less there is a chance of associating the SOGO with something else. It seems that through this research experiment, the sweet spot for SOGOs is six tones because this gives the brain the ability to chunk the information or parse it, making it shorter and letting the brain make associations with other sounds. This gives us a chance to relate the SOGO to the brand, and makes it stick in our brain, giving us the urge to consume or pay when we hear this sound, making it a direct economic practical implication. However, this is just an overview of the research, and there is much more to learn from the writers for the Journal of Product and Brand Management. Thank you for listening! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! 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