• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 1, 2023

PepsiCo is developing a series of audio logos that the company believes represents its brands. The goal is to improve ad recall -- when consumers hear the sounds they can recognize and identify with the brand without seeing a visual or hearing the name of the product.

PepsiCo is working with Veritonic, an audio intelligence company, and Made Music Studio, a global sonic branding agency, to help it achieve its goal.

“We had a good idea of how we wanted to present Doritos visually, for example, but what does Doritos sound like?” asked James Clarke, PepsiCo senior director of digital and social. “We developed a crunch sonic logo.”

Clarke described “sonic identity mapping,” an aspect of an audio logo, as a brand’s sound. Doritos, for example, sounds like a “whip-crunch,” he said. It’s added to a radio, television, or podcast ad.

"If your brand says a sentence, what does that sound like," Clarke said, adding that figuring out the brand's voice is something coming in the future. 

For now, he said, it’s not just about creating a distinctive and ownable audio logo for the brand such as Doritos, but marketers also mapped sounds to the consumer journey with the product.

“Think about what it sounds like opening a bag of Doritos, or when you rummage through the bag to pull out a chip, or the sound of licking your fingers once you get the Doritos dust on your fingers,” Clarke said. 

These sensorial cues were mapped and translated into sounds that remain consistent in audio advertising.

Clarke highlighted Tostitos as the most recent campaign that uses this type of media, an auditory logo in a TV ad and other media assets part of the campaign.

Tostitos has partnerships with streaming audio platforms such as Spotify and Pandora to distribute playlists created by influencers.

Device multitasking by consumers makes for a noisy environment, he said, so audio consistency makes it important to have a sonic identity.

He said Veritonic verifies through data that the sounds elicit the correct emotions. The sound was found to generate 23% higher recall of the brand, 70% of 18- to-24-year-olds found it disruptive in a positive way, and 12% gave higher appeal on the overall brand score.

PepsiCo is working its way through the portfolio of products. It started with Doritos, followed by Tostitos, Fritos and Ruffles. The company also crated this exercise for Popcorners, one of company’s newer brands.

Veritonic CEO Scott Simonelli, sitting in a room filled with musical instruments -- from guitars hanging on the walls to a piano in the corner -- said one key performance indicator (KPI) is how people feel when they hear the sound.

“We’re putting a quantitative number on human responses to sound,” Simonelli said.

A sonic guideline measures perception in market, how people feel about the brand, and purchase intent.