Sven Seger
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Sven Seger, Global Creative Director of Brand, Microsoft
For more than 20 years, Sven Seger has been fascinated by the strong role brands play in people’s lives. At Microsoft, he applies the things he’s learned from working with many other brands: the need for interdisciplinary strategies, the importance of connecting to our emotions, and the power of a craftsmanship approach.
“It’s become important to understand the impact of technology on your mood, productivity, and consumption. Sound is an integral part of this.”
— SVEN SEGER, GLOBAL CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF BRAND, MICROSOFT
Uli Reese: Uli Reese: Can you introduce yourself…
Sven Seger: My title is Global Creative Director of Brand for Microsoft, and my role is best described as figuring out the most relevant approach to brand expression and management in our ever-evolving organisation: how you get to the essence of the brand and how you co-create and remain relevant in different scenarios within the organisation.
Reese: Why has audio become so dominant in the last five years?
Seger: The world is shifting to multi-dimensional consumption of all kinds of media, and that has something to do with the rise of technology in every aspect of our lives. Sound is a mechanism that helps us navigate that world. Technology sounds are often alerts, notifications, warnings, and so on. But what happens when you are alerted to something is that your adrenaline increases, and your brain can’t handle the task that you’ve just been alerted to. I think we need to re-think our approach.
Reese: It's interesting that you mentioned how much of life is now sound, because noise pollution is higher than ever…
Seger: Sound is part of the fabric of our daily lives, so we should think about which moments we want to pay attention to. There needs to be meaning attached to the sound; sound should be useful. We need to decide which sounds will enhance our experience and whether those sounds will make us more focused, more relaxed, or get us into an active mental state. The way we often envision the future seems to very much imitate Hollywood sci-fi cliches. Think about movies with all the coldness and negative representations of AI. The real world is nothing like that. As an ethical tech company, we need to envision what the future real-world could be and needs to be, then create the experience for it. It's totally our responsibility.
Reese: Looking at Microsoft and how ingrained you are in pop culture around the world, can you talk about where you are today and where you would like to go?
Seger: At the moment, our identity is well recognised around the world. People know Microsoft, and they know we are a tech company. We have an opportunity to create a more emotional connection, not just a rational one. We haven't gotten to the point where we achieve that consistently. We talk about it internally though, and you can feel it in many products.
In the area of sound, there’s a lot we can learn from the product teams and their thoughtfulness. We’re exploring many things. As a company with thousands of products, we have thousands of product icons. To simplify and unify, we co-created a new iconography system that is globally relevant. We recently made a video to announce the system, so we had to think about the sounds of the icons and the elements used to build the icons. We decided to use elements from the physical world: light, shadow, motion, and depth, as well as real-world sound. It was fascinating. I would never have been able to even consider these concepts in detail if we didn't have a team that was deeply ingrained in these concepts on the product side. This was just one exploratory exercise, but it was a beautiful one. As a result of the exercise, we see an opportunity to elevate in-product sounds by combining them with real-world sounds to create an overarching Microsoft brand soundscape. This soundscape would not be for identification. It’s aim would be to stimulate helpful emotions.
Reese: How do we make a brand future proof for screenless ecosystems knowing that the emotional side is lacking?
Seger: I think it’s about finding the right personal and emotional resonance for the brand and exploring how it translates across different mediums. We know that Microsoft is not the most emotionally resonant brand out there. Very few people feel negatively about Microsoft, many are neutral, and some are very passionate. As we think of the future of technology, we hear from people that they want it to be a two-way street. That’s less about a passion-driven relationship. It’s more of an equal relationship with people being more in control. So, perhaps Microsoft has an advantage. We need to deliver on this two-way relationship, of course. It’s new for us to be in a spot where our neutral emotional resonance may actually be resonating well for us.
Reese: So you have to tread carefully?
Seger: Yes. It's about defining the unique emotional moments in the interactions we have with our customers, and these definitions are situational. For example, in Gaming, there’s a lot of passion and love for Xbox among the players who congregate in various gaming communities. There we play a very active role, and the engagement is highly energetic. On the other hand, live events have undergone a change. Because of COVID, we’re digital. We are now talking about 100,000 to 140,000 people attending live events on their PCs and phones. You can imagine the degree of sonic presence these events used to have. Before COVID, it was thousands of people in a stadium in Las Vegas, and everybody's there, and there’s a rock-star performance. You are overwhelmed and excited, the CEO is on stage, and everybody has goosebumps. In a digital event, the relationship is totally different. It’s important to move to a personal, two-way interaction aspect.
Reese: A lot of CMOs are now waking up to the idea that they can’t just use pop culture as their sonic identity, and also that their sonic logo is out of date. The brand is not the superstar; the customer is. Do you agree?
Seger: What you say is highly relevant. We don't have a sound for our logo, and I love that we don’t have a simple sound used for saying ‘it’s us’.
What I would love to do is create a sonic association that celebrates the balance between the customer and the company. As I mentioned earlier, ideally, we would create a soundscape, not for identification, but to elicit helpful emotions in the people interacting with our products and brand.
Note: The interview took place in Seattle, Washington, United States, on the 10th of May 2021.
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