Parliament: Sounds Like You.
Written by Bri Thomas, Creative Director.
When I was pregnant, I had cravings. Some of them were predictable, like Big Macs. The one that surprised me the most was that I craved sounds.
I don’t mean music. I mean sounds. I found myself queuing up ASMR videos, and only a very specific kind: someone performing a reiki healing, a slow scalp massage, soft brushes and quiet voices. I had never gone looking for these before. Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to hear.
I told a coworker about it, mostly as a joke. The longer we talked, the less it felt like one.
My body knew what it wanted. Maybe culture does too.
I’ll be the first to admit this is pregnancy intuition, not science. But if you believe in listening to your body, it’s worth asking what mine was telling me. Maybe it was picking up on something culture has been telling all of us without our noticing.
We’ve spent decades training our eyes. We can spot a logo on a semi going 70 miles an hour. I think we’re becoming just as fluent in what we hear, and it’s happening quietly.
Think about it. You open Netflix and you know the tudum before the screen loads. Everyone knows the “dun dun” from Law & Order. There are no words in it, only cadence.
None of those sounds explains a product or makes a promise. They tell you who just walked into the room. That’s recognition, and recognition is the whole job of a brand.
Sonic branding isn’t new. Paying attention to it is.
Brands have used sound for a long time: jingles, startup chimes, hold music. What has changed is how often we hear brands now. Every app, device, video and smart speaker is a chance for a brand to be heard, and most brands leave that moment silent or fill it with something generic.
So will sonic branding become a non-negotiable? I believe it will. It won’t happen overnight, and today it mostly lives with enterprise brands that have the budget for it. But the brands we remember next will be the ones that designed for every sense, not just the one we’ve always designed for.
This isn’t another moving finish line.
I’m not raising this to make building a brand feel more out of reach. I’m raising it because it’s exciting. Sound is a new place to build brand awareness and recognition, and most of it is still wide open.
Here’s how I’ve started thinking about it on our projects.
When we plan an activation, we talk about bus wraps and stage design. We talk about floor decals, subway signage, LED trucks on the highway and the occasional flash mob. We obsess over how every one of those pieces looks. What if we also asked what each one sounds like?
What plays when someone walks onto your stage? What does your booth sound like from three aisles over? What does someone hear when they submit your form, open your app or wait on hold? Each of those is a moment when a brand can be recognized or forgotten.
Those questions are closer to the ones we already ask than you might think. Every brand we build starts with who you are: your values, your personality, how you show up. A sound is one more expression of that. If you know who you are, you can figure out what you sound like.
Listen to the craving.
Is sonic branding the way of the future, or has it always been here, waiting for us to notice? I think it’s both. Our brains have always responded to sound. We’re just starting to realize how much.
My cravings have passed (mostly). The question stuck. If someone closed their eyes, would they still know it was you?
Bri Thomas is the Creative Director at Hoot Design Company.
