Waltraud Niemann
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Waltraud Niemann, Head of Marketing and Communications, ING DiBa
Waltraud Niemann has been the head of ING DiBa's Marketing and Communications department for two years, and she's been quite busy. Niemann was a driver in the implementation of ING DiBa's sound branding strategy – an initiative that helped the bank become one of the most well-known audio brands in Europe and beyond. Niemann has been with ING DiBa since 2000. In her interview, she describes the evolution of the ING DiBa audio brand, and how it has changed since it was first implemented.
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“We asked ourselves: What do we stand for as a brand? We’re eye-to-eye with the customer, we’re not complicated, we don’t speak “banking-blah blah”. We are human and we understand people’s needs. We wanted to transport all of that through our sound.”
— WALTRAUD NIEMANN, HEAD OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS, ING DIBA
Reese: How important is music in branding?
Niemann: When you switch off the sound while you’re watching a movie, the emotional power of the piece is lost almost immediately. That gives you a good idea of just how important music is for storytelling. And it’s similar with branding: the more senses you trigger, the more impactful the result. Our sense of hearing is one of our strongest senses, and it would be a huge mistake to neglect it. It goes beyond a mere jingle, even though that’s how it started for us. But we’ve moved beyond that. Now, it’s about the entire brand sound. How does the brand talk to me? What is the tonality like? We took a holistic approach to our brand sound and spent a good while analyzing and developing it. We paid attention to the sound of our voiceovers, our brand theme, and, of course, the jingle that started with the very memorable ‘Strangers in the Night’ melody.
Reese: It’s not the same anymore?
Niemann: No, it has evolved since. Mind you: I’m talking about an ‘evolution’, not a ‘revolution’. I have often witnessed how brands throw away equity by abandoning a strategy they’ve built over years and decades, just because they got bored and thought they had to do something entirely different. And that is usually way too disruptive. Back in the day, when we entered the market as a very young brand, the ‘Strangers in the Night’ melody helped us gain awareness very quickly, because it was a well-known tune. Of course, there was a cost attached to it – but the investment was well worth it. But once we decided it was time to move on, it was important for us to stick to the DiBaDu feeling that we established with ‘Strangers in the Night’.
Reese: So it’s an entirely new piece?
Niemann: There were two phases of sound re-branding: The first was to interpret ‘Strangers in the Night’ in a more modern way. In that step, we also found Melody Gardot, our new brand voice. Later on, we took a second step with an entirely new composition of the jingle and added a brand song. The brand song is focusing on easiness, feeling relaxed. The same feeling that you have while banking with ING-DiBa. What we’ve kept is our most important anchor, the ‘DiBa-DiBa-Du’ wording, and the piece also follows a similar instrumentation as before. So there’s a certain consistency, but there’s also innovation. Brands need to evolve. Of course, it was also good to move on to a piece where we, as a brand, could own the copyrights and didn’t have to pay for royalties or usage rights anymore.
“We are human and we understand people’s needs. We wanted to transport all of that through our sound.”
Reese: I talked to a few people and they all said that the voice representing you is very vulnerable, unpretentious, it’s very real. It’s a very direct way to your heart.
Niemann: That was exactly our goal, and it still is. We went through a branding process and we asked ourselves: What do we as a brand stand for? We’re eye-to-eye with the customer, we’re not complicated, and we don’t speak “banking-blah blah”. We are human and we understand people’s needs. We wanted to transport all of that through our sound. Not just superficial ease, but profound ease, so to speak. We found that Melody Gardot’s voice delivered just that – she has that unique, authentic ease is in her voice, yet it’s rough around the edges. There’s a story behind it. You feel it right away. We felt it was the perfect match.
Reese: Most brands are run tactically. Tactical, short-term branding, and no strategy whatsoever. How come ING-DiBa, unlike many of its competitors, has committed to a strategic brand sound?
Niemann: We’re just inherently different than our competitors. We have a different company culture. The people who work for us are curious, they want to change things, make things better. And that is also shown in the way we approach sound. We’re always open to trying new things.
“I remember I went to a radio congress in Cologne a good few years ago and I saw a presentation on the ‘Sound of Lufthansa’ by Carl-Frank Westermann. I felt really inspired, and upon returning to the office, my team and I delved into our sound strategy even further.”
Reese: When was this?
Niemann: It must have been in 2010. People already knew our ‘DiBaDiBaDu’ tune. They could immediately recite it. But I realized that strategic sound branding is so much more than just ‘a jingle’, and that we would have to go much deeper into it. The great thing about this company is that I immediately got the resources to do just that. It’s so unusual for a bank. You’d think they’d come with questions like: What is that going to gain us? How much will that cost? Instead, we have that freedom to try out new things, without having to justify everything at every step, is amazing. It’s the right attitude if you want to be a true innovator.
Reese: What I’ve often experienced is that everybody thinks they’re a music expert. Subjectivity can be a big problem…. When your C-level superior tells you that they don’t like what you’ve come up with, and then your project dies, just like that.
Niemann: Maybe it’s also just the fear of making mistakes. People can have such extreme reactions to sound. You get a lot of feedback: I love this, I can’t stand that… I think the C-level guys have to understand that it takes a certain emotional depth to really understand music. Buying decisions are made emotionally, not rationally. Research has clearly proven that. So it’s much wiser to have people in charge of your sound branding decisions that have a similar emotional connection to music as your target audience does.
Reese: Most C-level executives mention ROI when I ask them about why they’re not investing in sound branding strategies. They say you can’t prove that it brings a return on investment. In one of your presentations, you show that your sound identity moved your KPIs. Beforehand, they were stagnant. Is that right?
Niemann: Yes.
Reese: Can you talk about that?
Niemann: We all want to be super-efficient all the time. And it’s difficult to fight for things when you can’t prove that they’re effective. Which is definitely applicable to brand sound – it’s difficult to measure what it does for the brand. And I believe it always will be difficult. What we have experienced through our market research though, is that when we measure the impact of our TV spots scene-by-scene, there are two factors that clearly boost brand recognition: Our testimonial, and our brand sound. It makes us stand out among our competition. We consistently, and repeatedly, use the brand sound throughout the spot to reinforce that effect. With the new brand sound, we’ve seen a bit of a drop, of course. It will take some time for our audience to get used to the new audio.
Reese: Do you think the decision to let go of ‘Strangers in the Night’ might have hurt the brand?
Niemann: Not necessarily. Maybe short-term. But that gets me back to efficiency: We’re not borrowing anymore. This is now our composition, our brand song. It was very important for us to own the music this time around.
Note: Note: The interview took place in Roland Boekhout, Frankfurt on October 11th, 2016.
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