We’ve said goodbye to the silence of pages, flipcharts, point-of-sale materials and most products. Savvy marketers realize those have been replaced by the audio-enabled world of mobile videos, apps, YouTube, and digital signage. And now, the Internet of Things, connecting the cloud to everything from refrigerators to projectors to vehicles to industrial products.

What impression will your product’s sound convey when a device successfully receives incoming information, encounters an error, is running out of power? And how will those sounds relate to your brand’s sales video, app opening sound, your call center on-hold music?

Brands had better be ready. If you’re not creating an audio universe (and managing it) with the same care you do your visual identity, you’re dangerously late.

How many companies operate in an auditorily chaotic environment? Katie Perry’s “Roar” for meetings, Brian Eno for on-hold music, oldies-but-goodies for commercials, and perhaps a synthesized “whoosh” for app-opening sounds. Diagnosis: multiple brand personality disorder.

But a cure exists. Audio Branding. A discipline that has been used in multilingual Europe for more than 20 years.

In the same way a brand has graphics guidelines and a logo to help differentiate from its competitors, it must also develop a sound identity. And it must manage that identity with the same balance of rigor and flexibility that goes into managing a visual brand.

This requires a system of sounds based on a proprietary audio DNA that expresses your brand’s values and personality–and it becomes an identifier across all your touchpoints. It requires a consistent feel, from your advertising, to call-waiting messages, to showrooms, to websites’ training videos, to YouTube to products.

What’s more, music is a globally understood language that can define what you stand for and underscore what differentiates you from competitors.

Social media–on which time spent continues to grow across PC and mobile devices–makes everything transparent. If your corporate videos and your ringtones speak in different vocabularies, everyone will know.

A Brand’s Most Important Asset Is Trust

And the best way to earn trust is to behave in a consistent manner.

In music, that requires a well-designed audio DNA that centers the brand’s sound and infuses the execution of music at the brand’s touchpoints. A focused approach to your own sound can bring congruity to brand experiences and that supports trust-building–more so than does the use of licensed music. Though licensed songs can add impact or aid memory, they can also detract from the brand, especial if they don’t express its values. And impact without meaning adds to confusion and clutter.

How To Design Your Brand’s Earprint

So how do you go about bringing meaning to the audio dimension of your brand?

Before anything, you and your audio design agency (not your ad agency, though they are key partners in the process) will examine your brand’s values and aspirations. Do you wish to express who you are today or what you’re evolving to? In the course of recent activities, has a particular value taken precedence over others? Any tensions? For instance, between reliability and innovation? Delicacy and efficacy?

You may also explore the historical audio cues your company has used and contrast your sound landscape with those of competitors. Together with your audio branding experts, you’ll work to find the unique and differentiating dimensions your audio identity must express. In short, you’ll build the brief for the audio brand strategy.

As an example, the La Roche-Posay audio DNA captures the purity and sensitivity of the products, while the Atlanta Convention & Tourism bureau audio DNA conveys the sound of dynamism, warmth and eclecticism.

A Defined Process

After you and your team determine the brand’s core values, music strategists will explore and curate different musical approaches to communicate those traits. These will be translated to musical “mood boards.” These selections are brought to a workshop that includes the marketing team, the most trusted agency (or agencies) and the audio branding experts where they’re OK’d, rejected, discussed until a general agreement has emerged.

Once the musical ingredients have been defined in the mood board exercise, it’s time to create the music. Sound designers will compose a unique and tailored audio DNA that becomes woven into your brand’s many touchpoints. Is there a sound when a mobile coupon is redeemed? What ringtones might your sales force use? What will get people’s blood coursing as you rise to the podium at the global meeting? What will make people feel welcome at an expo booth?

I’m not talking about mindless repetition here.

Each point of contact presents an opportunity to deepen the brand relationship. Customer experience needs to be considered, and the sound needs to be adjusted according to the touchpoint (commercials, telephone on-hold messages, retail spaces, Internet, events). Think of it as an audio media plan.

The time is now for brand’s to harness music’s power. This will help you lead in the age of the Internet of Things…and help you prepare for its more abstract cousin, the Internet of Everything.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Colleen Fahey, Sixième Son

Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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http://www.thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/323343-the-real-reasons-behind-the-fall-in-americas-manufacturing

Should brands get political? Plenty of brands make comments on societal issues, but how and when are those appropriate fodder for brand messaging?

Nearly infinite channels and touchpoints have created unlimited possibilities for brands to interact with their customers. With so much opportunity, it’s hard to imagine the effectiveness of advertising is in decline. Yet it is. Of course, it is not wrong to say consumers have lower attention spans or they are deluged with messages they ignore, but that is only a partial answer. The fault also lies with brands.

Consider the lineage of modern advertising. To one side are the brand builders whose iconic campaigns are etched in memory. Brilliant strategies paired with brilliant creative that audiences embraced, related to, and loved. These brands were the leaders. But on the other side are the direct response pioneers. These lines of business depended on more targeted and measurable interactions with consumers and different strategies evolved to create and drive actions.

Digital advertising has much more direct response in its DNA than brand building. And it is beginning to hurt brands. New advancements in advertising and marketing technologies are offering more opportunities to target consumers and respond faster. This increase in speed can often lead brands to produce an explosion of tactics which easily stray from the brand’s strategy, under the rationalization that the brand is practicing ‘agile’, ‘quick to fail’ or ‘test and learn’ plans.

At this week’s ISBA conference, Richard Huntington, chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, said, “The people who build ad tech think direct response is the only thing you’d ever want to do as an advertiser or brand owner.” Further, direct response makes it easy to satisfy a fanatical obsession with the immediate ability to demonstrate tactical-level ROI it has put pressure on marketers to pursue short-term impact over the ‘big idea’.

At last year’s Cannes, the IPA released a report called Selling Creativity Short. The IPA compared levels of effectiveness of creatively awarded campaigns with those of non-awarded ones. Before 2010, they saw creatively awarded campaigns drove 12 times more market share growth per year than non-awarded ones. But between 2006 and 2014, the number of campaigns in the IPA Databank with a short-term goal grew from 7% to 33%. And the number of creatively awarded short-term campaigns surged to 45%, with judges apparently rewarding short-termism. This is despite short-term creatively awarded campaigns being less effective as their crucial fame effects take time to build and exploit.

In fact, two years ago, BBH co-founder Sir John Hagerty said, “Advertising seems to be pursuing a strategy of making a product worse to be more effective, which I find very confusing. I’m not sure what business book people in advertising have read that says we should make the worst product and therefore we’ll be successful. I think the industry has lost faith in TV. I think it has lost faith in the big, bold idea. I think it has lost its courage and I’m deeply upset by that.”

Ultimately, if advertising is less effective because it is less creative, then advertisers will no longer be able to attract top creative talent, and the creative will continue to weaken. (There’s a great podcast from Bob Hoffman around this idea.). Here are some tips for brands:

1. Fall in love with ‘a big idea’ again – Get back to basics and make sure everyone is on board with what the brand idea is. Be sure not to confuse your big idea with a tactic.

2. Be experimental – Once you know your big idea, give yourself permission to play with many ways that idea can come to life. Think big, and ask yourself “why not?”

3. Analog is cool too – Beating the algorithms just to land in a social media echo chamber may get you lots of clicks, but what have they done for the brand. Better yet, think how on and offline can play together to create a seamless experience.

4. Less business, more art – As Geoff Colon believes, MFAs might be better marketers than MBAs. It’s not enough to understand the research and the strategy. Disruptive marketers need to know how to bring strategy to life, and do it in a way that inspires and excites.

Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The speaker lineup for the TED2017 conference features more than 70 thinkers and doers from around the world — including a dozen or so whose unfiltered TED Talks will be broadcast live to movie theater audiences across the U.S. and Canada.

Presented with our partner BY Experience, our TED Cinema Experience event series offers three opportunities for audiences to join together and experience the TED2017 Conference, and its first two evenings feature live TED Talks. Below: find out who’s part of the live cinema broadcast here (as with any live event, the speaker lineup is subject to change, of course!).

The listing below reflects U.S. and Canadian times; international audiences in 18 countries will experience TED captured live and time-shifted. Check locations and show times, and purchase tickets here >>

Opening Night Event: Monday, April 24, 2017
US: 8pm ET/ 7pm CT/ 6pm MT/ time-shifted to 8pm PT
Experience the electric opening night of TED, with half a dozen TED Talks and performances from:
Designer Anab Jain
Cyberspace analyst Laura Galante
Artist Titus Kaphar
Grandmaster and analyst Garry Kasparov
Author Tim Ferriss
The band OK Go
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

TED Prize Event: Tuesday, April 25, 2017
US: 8pm ET/ 7pm CT/ 6pm MT/ time-shifted to 8pm PT
On the second night of TED2017, the TED Prize screening offers a lineup of awe-inspiring speakers with big ideas for our future, including:
Champion Serena Williams
Physician and writer Atul Gawande
Data genius Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Movement artists Jon Boogz + Lil Buck
TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi, who will reveal for the first time plans to use his $1 million TED Prize to fund a creative, bold wish to spark global change.

Branding is a serious business, but does that mean brands themselves must always be so serious. Is there room for more personality?

In market after market, CMOs are under pressure to deliver more outputs and bigger numbers. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that brands themselves have become so serious. Who wouldn’t be earnest given what is now expected?

And yet, sometimes, it is the brands that can see past the commercial intensity and project themselves with humor and humanity that consumers are connecting with best. As Alex Altman observed, “it’s fascinating to see brands turn self-deprecation into an earnest form of self-promotion … The strategy has helped some brands atone for mistakes, others address the frustrations of consumers, and others show empathy over the triteness of their industry’s advertising … It shows that they are prone to the same mistakes and vulnerabilities as humans, which in a weird sort of way, makes them more likable to a lot of people.”

It’s ironical isn’t it that in some ways the distance between brands and people has never been closer (in terms of degrees of separation) and yet many brands still feel cut-off from consumers? They try to hard to be cool or credible or hip, or they talk about themselves in ways that people have no time for. So many brands have bought into the authority myth – the belief that in order for customers to prioritize them, they must not just gain their attention, they must also corner their respect. Social media and content marketing haven’t helped. They’ve encouraged brands to believe that they must always have something important to say, and that doing so is a formula for success. But no amount of talking or posting counts for anything if no-one is interested.

The fact is you can’t be the best brand for every consumer all the time. Instead of trying to hide that, brands have an opportunity to make light of those moments when they fall short or where they are simply not as *something* as their competitors. (Like the Progressive Insurance example pictured above.) But to do that confidently, brands need to be super-clear about their comparative market positioning. For many, such an approach feels too out-there, too risky, too easily-misunderstood. They revert instead to what they know: singing their own praises; increasing their projected sense of authority.

Oscar Wilde once observed that “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” The same is true of marketing. It may be a serious business, but much more importantly it’s a human business, and the deftness of that touch is easily lost to cleverness, arrogance or showmanship. If we want the brands we work for to be more effective, then we need to make them more visibly acceptable. And in some cases, that’s about deliberately and counter-intuitively choosing to be less intrusive, less brash, less of a ‘champion’ and more of a friendly face in the crowd of messages. It’s about choosing to defy the market formulae.

Speaking of formulae, take a look at this wonderfully wicked appraisal of brand videos from a company that makes its living off selling footage. It’s also a reminder of just how much brands have vanilla-ized values and personality. The obvious, dressed up to look profound. And all of it utterly forgettable to consumers who peer right through all this terribly serious strategy, and its predictable expression, because it holds nothing of interest to them in their days.

As people, we’re drawn to those who are humble and clear, fun, whimsical and who are genuinely interested and interesting. Somehow, faced with the opportunity to write that large, most brands back off being that raw. They plumb for authority. And when they do so, they lose people.

So here’s a simple challenge the next time you’re looking for a cut-through brand idea. Try making someone smile, with a very human expression of how your brand really is. In real life.

Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event. May 1-3, West Hollywood, California.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14036395/1/the-solid-jobs-report-could-mean-one-thing-a-lost-generation-may-finally-spend-on-luxuries.html

This panel will discuss ways marketers can work with music labels to further enhance their brand-building campaigns and various legal minefields and negotiating points involved in a broader music deal.

By Alex Parkinson The Conference Board and SNCR has two great opportunities to learn more about digital health and communications in the next couple of months. First, SNCR Advisory Board member Fard Johmar and SNCR founder Jen McClure will be hosting the webcast “Using AI, Big Data and Related Digital Health Innovations” on March 29 […]

Check out this Uncontainable book review!

– the book: Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives, the story of The Container Store told by its co-founder and Chairman Kip Tindell

– the brains:  Kip Tindell never intended to go into business, but from an early age he loved retail, he was involved with philosophy, and he was always organizing things (fly fishing tackle, his coin collection, boxes in the stock room of the shop he worked at, etc.). These three passions came together when his friend and mentor Garrett Boone suggested they open a store together and they decided it would sell “the resources for people to organize all the stuff in their lives.”  The file folder he had filled with “great ideas and inspiring quotes” ever since he was a teenager evolved into the seven the Foundation Principles that guide everything the organization does.

– the best bits:  Uncontainable weaves together key moments in the history of The Container Store with expositions on its Foundation Principles.  This approach effectively illustrates how the Principles have played a key role in how the company operates.  Here are just a few examples:

• Principle:  Air of Excitement!

Kip says that he thinks of retail as theater and, as such, it’s crucial that the company’s “stage” is set up perfectly.  “That’s why we take such great care with our interior design and the presentation of products—to make sure the look and feel of our stores reflect The Container Store’s mission… Our goal is ‘perfect product presentation,’ which means that the customer can clearly understand everything about the product immediately, even if our sales staff is busy helping other customers.“

To engage employees in Air of Excitement, the company holds all sorts of events and celebrations, including “We Love Our Employees Day, held every Valentine’s Day.”  Kip justifies the attention paid and resources spent on these activities, saying, “What conventional business minds don’t understand is that all the positive feeling this activity generates is really the fuel that drives our company.“

• Principle:  Communication IS Leadership

“Communication and leadership really are the same thing,” according to Kip.  “After all, how can people trust their leaders if they’re not being fully informed about what’s at stake?“

So, at The Container Store, the leadership doesn’t operate on a “need to know” basis. Rather, he says, “We ask ourselves, ‘Who will benefit from having this information?‘”  And the company gives its employees scheduled time to read, watch, or listen to whatever information is currently available.  Devoting labor hours to communication is practically unheard of in retail, especially in this era of skyrocketing labor costs — but The Container Store does it because “it’s really consistent with our belief in valuing one another, making sure we all feel appreciated, included, and empowered, and have the training necessary to be successful in our jobs.“

• Principle:  Fill the Other Guy’s Basket to the Brim.  Making Money Then Becomes an Easy Proposition.

The Container Store works on “creatively crafting mutually beneficial relationships with our vendors to help them produce and provide the kind of useful, fun, well-designed, high-quality products that delight our customers.”   The company, Kip explains, helps its vendors develop new products, places orders during slow periods, pays them on time, and is deeply loyal to them.  Vendors, in turn, give The Container Store great pricing, exclusive product, and their loyalty too.

The principle proved its value in one particular instance:  The company was able to purchase Elfa, the modular shelving company, despite not being the highest bidder.  The long history of a fantastic relationship between the two entities sealed the deal.  Kip writes, “At some point, it became clear to elfa’s owners that selling to anyone beside The Container Store would not only mean losing their best customer, but also that the hearts and souls of most of elfa’s management team and employees were with us.“

– the bottom line:  Uncontainable is equally inspiring and instructive.  It delivers insights and important instruction that should be learned by any business leader who wants to run a business that creates value for all its stakeholders.  Highly recommend!

related:

Shoe Dog by Nike founder Phil Knight

People First Leadership by Eduardo Braun

Onward by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

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