What Does Music Mean To The Marketer?
Michele Arnese, Founder & CEO at amp and world-leading expert in the field of sonic branding.
Digitalization has pervaded every aspect of our lives and has brought with it technology that animates how we live. But technology also overcrowds our lives with endless screens and increasing sounds and voices. By 2024, it is expected that digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion units, higher than the world’s population.
For brands, using sound effectively to stand out from the crowd has now become vital. And helping brands to build outstanding sonic identities has become a crucial task for agencies.
To understand how brand marketers see this evolving aural world, we asked our Global CMO to create a virtual roundtable with more than 100 of the most influential CMOs on the planet. He engaged them in conversations, asking how they personally and professionally view the role of music and sound in brand marketing and the issues and opportunities that would influence this. Based on these conversations, here are some takeaways we learned that brands could find helpful:
Listening To The Future Of Brands
Sonic logos are what most people think of when they imagine sonic branding. They have been around for decades. One trend that’s emerged strongly is that the simplistic use of jingles in advertising on TV and radio as an attention grabber and memory recognition builder is evolving fast into something much more sophisticated.
Think about the speed at which TikTok has emerged as a channel and come to be a daily feature in people’s lives. It is just one channel among a huge array of emerging technology creating new sonic touchpoints around entertainment, work, home life, search, e-commerce, in-store, travel, study, healthcare-the list is endless.
Brands now understand that their sonic assets have to do so much more than influence people through broadcast media. In a world where the sound of a vehicle can be branded, a sonic logo as a single asset strategy is not enough to fulfill the ever-changing requirements of a brand’s sonic expression at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
Brands must show up sonically in a more experience-driven landscape amid the exponential growth of podcast content, game-changing apps like Clubhouse, audio-only engagement platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, and immersive worlds like the metaverse.
Musical Authenticity Is Critical
Marketers understand that attempting to buy cultural credibility through licensing the work of the latest hot artist is not a realistic approach anymore-if it ever was. Licensing a piece of sonic pop culture is still regarded as valid only when it supports the narrative of a campaign and the fit for the brand is good. Licensing strategies must be more thoughtful, and long-term planning must be considered. This may mean a mix of licensed and owned musical assets.
Audio Builds Fast And Lasting Emotional Bonds
Marketers are increasingly aware of the emotional impact sound can make on people. Audio creates a key response in the brain that builds memory structures across media, channels, and executions-a proven track to enhance recognition and trust with consumers.
If we consider the work that designers and marketers are putting into visual brands right now, with “de-branding” being a trend to adapt visual brands to mobile-first and through the digital transformation, audio offers the logical expansion to “de-branded” brand logos in a space-the audio space-which is emotionally and culturally even stronger than the visual one.
To unleash this potential, a common view on audio shared by all CMOs interviewed is that sound and music need to be meaningfully and authentically tied to the identity and story of the brand. For example, the Star Wars and James Bond movie franchises consistently use recognizable elements of the master soundtrack not only at different points in the films to indicate different types of emotion but also over many years, in different cultures and in the marketing that supports the brand.
Recognition In Screenless Ecosystems
Audio search and audio in service or transactional UX is now a vital extension of marketing, and sound plays an essential part. For example, 72% of people with a voice-activated speaker say that voice search has become a day-to-day activity, and it is estimated that at least 50% of consumers will use voice search this year.
Brands are getting far more thoughtful and strategic about investment in music and owned sound that is integral to their brand marketing. Music and sound are no longer an afterthought-it is seen as an essential driver of performance for brands in a digital world.
