• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 11, 2024

Snapdragon wanted a “heartbeat” to connect with consumers on an emotional level through audio, so its parent company Qualcomm made it happen with an increasingly popular strategy called sonic identity.

American Express, AT&T, Amazon Music, Doritos, Corona, Intel and many more brands are forging a sonic identity as consumers increasingly spend time with audio.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon recently launched its first sonic identity -- a distinct and recognizable audio asset, as a way to connect with consumers through advertising, sponsorships, podcasts -- at the Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego, California.

Don McGuire -- Qualcomm senior vice president and CMO, who spent 5.5 years at Intel -- views sonic identity as a way to build an association with a brand as well as recall, advocacy, and emotional response.

“Visual identity and how we speak about the brand -- sonic and sound -- can create an amazing trifecta to remind people about the brand,” he said.

Not unlike the Intel journey of Intel Inside, Qualcomm always looks for ways to get consumers to remember the brand. Instead of buying a Qualcomm mobile phone or computer, the technology lives inside the devices.

Snapdragon processors, for example, are used by smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, LG, Sony, Oppo, Vivo, Motorola, HTC, and Nokia. The products also are used in Window devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 SQ3 5G, and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s.

Qualcomm has begun to use the sonic identity in the U.S. In Samsung’s campaign for the Galaxy S24, a new smartphone line, the identity appears in the Ultra television campaign.

Brand strategy, competitors, the environmental space, and what the brand is trying to reach are all taken into consideration when developing a sonic identify.

This begins with a “soul” session where the marketer talks about the brand’s groove, sound and music. Made Music Studio did not look to create a new strategy for the brand, but instead to translate that into a sonic identity.

“Marketers think a lot about words on a page and color, but when thinking about sound it comes from a different part of the brain,” said Lauren McGuire, president at Made Music Studio. “Languages come up and inconstancies among brand teams because they are not used to talking about the brand through music.”

Music seeps into every part of the process. Sometimes its long-form audio and sounds are reduced to very short expressions, such as the audio identity that Snapdragon when with. The identity sounds like a music snap.

"One metric is emotional appeal," she said. "All sounds we hear as humans fall on one line of emotional appeal. The lowest tested sound is a human pain scream, and the highest is a baby's laughter. Everything else falls between." 

When asked how a brand chooses a sound, she said in tests the first time people heard "snap beat" the sound came in between 60-to-70 percentile. After a year of use the audio identities tend to rise 8%.

A/B testing is done to determine if brand recall improves with or without the sonic. People tend to like it more overtime, she said. Emotional appeal growth is tracked and against the brand’s goals and positioning.

The price of audio identities depend on how long the brand intends to use it, the media exposure, what are the deliverables of which 70 are available. 

The core piece of audio IP is created by the hands of producers, writer, composers, not artificial intelligence (AI), she said. AI can be used later in the process, not in the initial sound. The company, which wanted to associate the sound with name recognition, created about 50 sonic identities for Snapdragon and reduced the amount to eight before it settled with one.

“You want something between 1.5 and 3 seconds,” she said, adding that this is mostly to integrate it into a 15-second spot.