So that sound you just heard? It’s got you thinking. You are humming it again and again in your head. When you do that, you are also recalling the brand or your past memories or emotions associated with the sound. The famous Nokia ringtone, the Intel four notes sounds or even the national anthem! Each one represents a brand and helps build that relationship between a product and its target market. Or a nation to its people.
All of these sounds are masterpieces of what is called as ‘Sonic Branding’. These help consumers associate with a brand through sounds, over a period of time, with enough repetition. And needless to say, businesses use ‘sonic branding triggers’ to elicit responses from their target customer segments. These include jingles, catchphrases, the radio station specific music introductions etc.
Why is sonic branding important to radio advertising? What’s in it for me, you ask? Sonic branding is radio’s alternative to all the visual branding that TV has to offer. The color cues, the smiling faces, visual effects etc., though absent in radio, can be made up by the excellent branding done in a radio campaign via sounds.
This incredible power of sound was backed up by a study done by the Katz Media Group, demonstrating the powerful messages sent by advertiser’s sonic brands and their effectiveness. They studied sonic brands of top U.S advertisers such as McDonald’s, Old Spice, Mazda etc. and were able to capture detailed descriptions of each of these brands such as product benefits, pricing, spokesperson details and even exact slogans. It was established that sonic branding, even for brief seconds, could create explicit visual messages in a listener’s head. Details of this study could be found here.
If you wish to harness the benefits of audio advertising, have you thought about the sounds your ad network wants to hear?
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