Sonic Branding is the strategic use of sound to create an authentic auditory identity for the brand. Conventional applications of sound in branding are tactical and lean on classical conditioning theory by repetitive pairing of sound and brand to create desired associations. In contrast, sonic branding leans on processing fluency theory leveraging sound as information in and of itself. Often such auditory information is nonverbal and nonlinguistic. Sonic logos are good examples illustrating this phenomenon.
A sonic logo, “sogo,” the auditory analog of a visual logo, is a typical sonic branding device. Sogos are short melodies not lasting more than six seconds. Some interesting examples are the 5-tone Intel sogo, windows vista’s 4-tone start-up chime and NBC’s 3-tone sogo. Sogos vary in their design characteristics. They may comprise different number of tones. They may have an ascending pattern (Windows Vista), descending pattern (windows XP) or a zigzagging contour (Intel). A sogo may be easier to remember because it comprises chunks (Miller 1956) of similar tones. Thus, number of tones they comprise, their contour and their chunkability may characterize Sogos.
Per logo literature (Henderson and Cote 1998), good sogos should engender favorable consumer responses on recognition, affect, and familiarity dimensions. For instance, sogos with fewer tones should be easier to remember; thus obtain high true recognition on a subsequent encounter. On the other hand, because they are easier to process, they may engender illusions of familiarity (Whittlesea 1993) leading to high false recognition. Sogos with a zigzagging contour may be more difficult to recall but may be perceived novel and so liked more. In other words, consumers experience differing levels of ease in processing sogos based on the design characteristics.
This subjective experience of ease of processing (Reber, Wurtz and Zimmerman 2004; Whittlesea 1993; Janiszewski and Meyvis 2001; Winkielman et al 2003) incoming auditory information is misattributed to the judgment at hand: Familiarity (Whittlesea 1993), Positive affect (Reber, Winkielman and Schwarz 1998; Winkielman and Cacioppo 2001), judgments of truth (Reber and Schwarz 1999) and brand Evaluation (Lee and Labroo 2004). This research explores the systematic influence of three design characteristics of sogos: number of tones, contour, and chunkability across five studies on response dimensions. Overall, these studies evidence processing fluency mediation of these influences.
Results show that several response dimensions vary systematically with the sogo design characteristics, thus providing for guidelines. Leader brands would want a high true recognition and a low false recognition; brands in a low involvement product segment (e.g., bread) could profit from high false recognition and illusions of familiarity. Huge investments are made to create and air auditory branding stimuli; rights for use of popular songs in commercial jingles may top $500,000 such as for “stand by me,” deployed by Citibank, (Krasilovsky and Shemel 2007). In conclusion, given that sogos are branding devices, guidelines from this research should reduce the precarious dependence of marketers on musicians (Bruner 1990), and provide for greater precision over sonic branding.