Herding Fleas
Boosting Your Brand is Recognition Throughout Your Content Strategy.
A company’s Chief Content Officer’s job is both akin to herding cats and herding the fleas
surrounding the cats.
The felines are like your increasingly varied content options and the fleas are the ever-growing
number of outlets through which content flows.
I tip my hat.
It’s a challenging job for even the most accomplished flea-herder.
One of the difficulties of managing content is making sure, despite disparate messages and
methods, it consistently all reflects well on the brand. Even when the content is not directly
talking about the brand or even the category.
And because keeping it subtle while keeping it distinctive can be a challenge, I’d like to offer
some help.
Enter Audio Branding.
One of the subtlest and most memorable ways you can build coherence is through mindfully
crafted music. Music and sound gives your brand a unique and tailored voice in such a way that
it communicates your core values. A brand is illuminated through a system of sounds that begin
with your audio logo (can you hum “NBC”?) and extend to intros and outros for vlogs and blogs,
scores for your YouTube videos, app opening signals, carpets of sound for your events and
crescendos to end a speaker’s presentation.
Audio Branding is not the shiny new object. It’s fundamental and ancient—and overlooked by
marketers in the US. Audio branding’s approach uses unique and proprietary sound and
music to convey a brand’s essence and values - connecting with consumers on a deep
and profound level.. It’s not about music licensing and jingles. It’s using music as a language,
a universally understood language, to express the meaning of your brand.
The Power of Audio Branding
Audio branding offers meaning and continuity to your messaging so what a consumer
hears in relation to the brand always sounds like the brand. This gives you the
opportunity to make every touch point a relationship-builder and create brand
association with specific values.
But first you need to examine your brand and create your Audio DNA. Once you (with the help
of your audio branding agency) have distilled your values and your aspirations into your audio
DNA, you will be able to unify your communication while still providing flexibility for myriad
variations.
The successful audio identity is one that is consistent throughout your messaging yet
flexible enough to adapt to multiple touch points, as needed, down the road. Whether
you’re a B2B or B2C brand, just as you have a visual style guide, an audio style guide will help
maintain continuity. You need audio guidelines as much as you need visual ones. Just as you
wouldn’t use different colors of logos on different content, you wouldn’t use different textures,
rhythms, harmonies in your audio logo.
You wouldn’t have your job if you didn’t have a skill for orchestration. The implementation of
an audio system, gives you a mighty resource to keep all the disparate elements coming back to
the brand vision, while you keep the customer front and center in your sights.
And speaking of your customers, did I mention the job is like herding cats and the cats’ fleas in a
windstorm?
What creates the windstorm? Your audience. They’re being buffeted themselves by the winds of
change and that has interesting implications for the CCO.
1. Shorter, shallower attention spans:
Attention spans have declined from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in the last dozen years and people
are in a state of "continuous partial attention" (Linda Stone). You need every tool in your kit to
reach through. .
2. Overwhelming visual environments
Marketers make full use of the sense of sight, to the point where much of it gets tuned out. Music
provides new and intensely memorable ways to connect.
3. A taste for rich and memorable experiences
The most intensely memorable experiences stimulate sight, sound, smell, kinesthesia and touch.
Brands who have to fight to get people to get up walk out the door, like retailers, dining
establishments, hospitality and travel providers need to use every tool to engage, entertain and
persuade consumers to leave their homes. Your sound when you encounter them in the world
should reflect the sound that created the anticipation.
A quick handshake with the brand
What does audio branding do to make you feel consistent and coherent? Again, think about NBC
and the sound that plays before, after and sometimes during a show—the shows may be very
different but the tunes always bringing you back to the host and authority behind the content.
It’s a seal of approval as well as a handshake of recognition.
Here’s how to get started:
Begin from within. The process of defining your brand’s DNA requires a willingness to probe its
structure and tease out those distinguishing qualities and identifiers making it unique. In
partnership with your audio branding strategist, you will answer a number of key questions. What
does the brand stand for? How does your brand differentiate itself in ways that are interesting to
your customers? How are your competitors differentiating themselves? What sounds characterize
them?
Identify your touch points so each serves to enhance customer relationships. How many different
ways can you devise for customers to interact with your brand so you’re building — and
enhancing — relationships with them? Logo animation is the most common use for audio
branding today, but it’s not the only one.
Make it cohesive. Once you’ve identified your brand’s touch points and have created its unique
audio DNA and logo, it’s time to get your team on board. Audio branding allows for a more
disciplined and efficient approach to sound.
No longer are your teams and partners licensing needle-drop music for a video news release,
Vivaldi for your on-hold music, “Chariots of Fire” for your company meeting and 80’s pop songs
for your videos.
With an established brand identity, groups accustomed to making or guiding music choices now
have a powerful go-to resource. Armed with this audio identity system, your teams will stand
positioned to underscore the role of the brand in their customers’ lives, no matter how or where
those customers are coming in contact with the brand.
The work that sold me on Audio Branding
The Audio Branding Congress in November 2011, an international gathering with relatively few
Americans in attendance, presented a number of case histories demonstrating the use of sound in
branding. One such case history came from Sixième Son, a sound identity and musical design
agency located in Paris, France.
During their presentation, the company shared the audio branding system they had designed for
the French railroad system, SNCF. (add audio identity here) What struck me was both the way
they captured the brand’s of mobility, innovation and comfort as well as the sensitivity with
which the agency applied the audio identity to each touch point.
All sounds addressed specific need states and yet each worked together as a family.
In the train station, the gentle signal that precedes announcements, demonstrates empathy for the
traveler at the beginning stages of her journey, worried about losing her luggage, or choosing the
wrong track. (add signal here) In contrast, the highly varied on-hold music keeps the caller
interested and makes the wait feel shorter. (add SNCF tel here) Audio for an introductory film
captured the sense of carefree mobility, of comfort and the pleasure of travel. (add movie here)
Within a matter of moments — as fast as the speed of sound could deliver the message to my
brain — I not only felt at a profound level what the French railroad system brand was about
(audio logo or endframe here) I was sold on audio branding, this universal language that needs
no translation.
Here I had been spreading marketing ideas for decades and this was totally new to me. Though I
later learned that Sixième Son had created over 275 audio brands, I felt as if I had discovered the
new frontier. Not the shiny new object but a deeper way of connecting through a sense that was
as old as the human race
Byline: About Colleen Fahey. A senior marketing executive with over three decades of
experience, Colleen Fahey is the U.S. Managing Director of Sixième Son, a unique audio
branding agency founded in Paris, France in 1995. Working from a deep understanding of every
brand’s ability to strengthen their position within the marketplace by creating and owning its own
audio identity, Colleen helps clients tap into the value that audio branding provides through the
use of music and sound. Colleen makes her home in Chicago, IL.