By Miguel Reis, Creative Director at Shift Your Branding Agency
We live in a world saturated with images, where campaigns, videos, interfaces, photography and content are constantly competing for our attention. Yet some brands manage to do something particularly difficult: be recognised without even being seen.
Sometimes all it takes is a few notes, a chord, a tone or a small sonic detail for our brain to immediately fill in the rest. Netflix, Intel, Mastercard. We don't need to see the logo to know who's communicating, and perhaps that is precisely where one of the most powerful, and still underexplored, dimensions of brand building lies: the ability to create recognition beyond what we see.
When sound stops being communication and becomes identity
For a long time, music was used by brands essentially as a communication tool, through a jingle, a soundtrack or a particular musical choice associated with a specific campaign.
The campaign ended and, quite often, so did that sonic territory.
But no major brand treats its visual identity that way. It doesn't constantly change its logo, colour palette or visual language because it knows that recognition is built through consistency and coherence. The same principle applies to sound: campaigns can change, music can change and contexts can change, but what should remain is a recognisable identity, a distinctive signature.
Recognition is built through consistency
Intel managed to turn five notes into one of the world's most recognisable brand assets. Netflix turned its opening sound into an immediate contextual cue: a few seconds are enough for us to know that a film or series is about to begin, and the brand went far enough to turn "Tudum" into the actual name of a global event dedicated to its content.
It's a good example of something many brands still underestimate. A brand asset becomes truly powerful when it no longer needs an explanation, when we recognise it simply because we've learned to recognise it. And that learning is largely the result of consistency.
Recognition matters. Relevance is even better.
But sound can do more than help a brand become recognisable, it can make it useful. Barilla found a particularly interesting way to demonstrate this by creating playlists with the exact cooking time required for different types of pasta.
In this case, music stopped being just communication and became part of the product experience, integrating itself into a real moment in people's lives. The brand doesn't interrupt, it accompanies. And there is an important difference between using sound to generate recognition and using it to create relevance.
When sound becomes a design decision
Other examples show how this dimension of identity is evolving. Mastercard developed a global sonic identity capable of working across different cultures and contexts without losing coherence. BMW, faced with electric vehicles where much of the sound associated with combustion engines disappears, worked with Hans Zimmer to create a new sonic language.
What once happened naturally is now being designed and, when that happens, we're no longer talking simply about music or communication. We're talking about branding, deciding how a brand should sound in the same way we decide how it should look, speak or behave.
If we remove everything visual, what's left?
Perhaps this is the most interesting question. For decades, we built brands primarily to be seen, but today they live in apps, podcasts, interfaces, voice assistants, videos, cars, stores, events and countless other touchpoints. Identity can therefore no longer depend exclusively on what we see.
For many brands, if we remove the logo, colours, typography and imagery, very little would probably remain. For others, there is a voice, a sound, a rhythm, a feeling or a memory.
There is still a great deal of space to build within this territory, because the strongest brands won't simply be the ones we recognise when they appear. They will also be the ones that don't need to be seen to be remembered.
Adapted from an article originally published in Marketeer.