• by Martin Pazzani , February 19, 2008

As a species, humans tend to be visual beings, and as a group within that species, advertising and marketing people are even more focused on the visual sense than normal humans. What else could be expected when the profession is populated with art directors, copywriters and graphic designers? And especially when all the big awards, accolades, and promotions are given for excelling in the visual arts.

But a growing number of marketers are beginning to see the benefits of using audio, the sense of hearing, at a much higher level than ever before. They use music and sound as an integrated, planned, strategic communication tool rather than a lowly production afterthought. These marketers are creating the new discipline of audio brand identity and realizing a new area of competitive advantage.

Consider this: consumers are exposed to your brand across a wide range of touchpoints that accumulate over time into the brand experience. These touchpoints include advertising in every medium and every execution, various Web sites, retail stores and displays, showrooms, toll-free phone numbers and on-hold messages, ringtones, and obviously, the products themselves.

Each one of these touchpoints has music and sound that convey information, meaning, and emotion about your brand to consumers, yet each usually has music and sound selected, created and purchased by a different person with a different idea in mind--and often those people have no musical training or ability.

Not only is this an expensive and inefficient use of time and money, but the effect on your overall brand experience is detrimental. By not carefully planning and orchestrating all of your brand's music and sound, you are diluting brand clarity, sending mixed messages and adding to the chaos and clutter in the marketplace.

As a former CMO, I have seen brand recognition and awareness, ad recall, Web visits and consumer information calls all increase by double digits by using the same carefully selected brand-based music in all TV and radio ads for a year. This level of consistency was not boring or creatively limiting, but rather, it followed the basic principals of branding that have long been used in the visual world: consistency and differentiation.

Rather than changing the music frequently or using music that sounded like everyone else's, we made the decision to create a cohesive and unique musical identity. The upside in all these metrics and the impact on the overall consumer brand experience--and the long-term budget savings by not constantly changing music scores--was significant and measurable.

To be sure, some big advertisers have long used music far better than others--Nike, McDonald's, and Infiniti come to mind--but the new profession of audio brand identity and its use of music and sound as a full-fledged branding tool on par with graphic design, art direction and copywriting, has so much more to offer than creating powerful scores for television advertising (and we should know, having won more awards for ad music than any other company in history).

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do consumers know what your brand sounds like as well as they know what your logo looks like? If your brand did have a "voice" and a soundtrack, what would it be?

2. Have you ever done an audit of your audio assets? How much do we spend on music and sound, and how many different audio messages are we sending out?

3. Are musical decisions being made subjectively based on personal preferences of varying people for each execution, or are they made strategically and consistently for the benefit of the brand? And exactly who is making these decisions anyway?

4. Are there strategic guidelines in your creative briefs that give music and sound direction to all who manage your brand? Even better, do you have a carefully created and selected library of "brand music" that they can use to guide their choices?

5. Why do we insist on graphic consistency--logo shape and color--across every medium, yet change the music and sound of every communications touchpoint without a second thought?

6. Why do we invest millions to design and protect our brand's visual logo and graphics, yet have not even thought about the previous issues?

These are some very expensive questions that need to be addressed.

Most brands use only one sense and are far too reliant on the sense of sight. This limits the brand's chances to connect and communicate on a deeper and much less superficial level. Without music and sound, your brand identity is incomplete, it's superficial, it's flat, and it doesn't make as powerful an emotional connection as it could make if you tapped into the powers of music and sound.

If you do it right, music and sound become your own unforgettable "audio assets," which can have great value--and if you do indeed create these assets, your brand will be much better off. And if your brand is much better off, you'll probably be much better off, too.

Martin Pazzani, CEO of Elias Arts, is a seasoned global executive expert in brand building, integrated marketing, and strategic development spanning the ad agency, corporate and music worlds. He has held senior roles at Foote Cone & Belding, the Interpublic Group, DDB Needham, Bally Total Fitness and Heublein (now Diageo). You can e-mail him at mpazzani@eliasarts.com.