How Brands Use Sonic Identity to Stand Out Against Large Competitors

If you’re a smaller brand, you probably struggle to create awareness, especially if your main competitors are well-known incumbent brands (think TurboTax in the consumer tax-prep space or Coca-Cola in beverages).

This is precisely the challenge that TaxAct, an online tax filing service, faced. The company had invested in very clever ads, but when consumers thought about the TV commercials they had seen, they assumed they were for the industry incumbent. Another challenge was the name itself, which some assumed was a bill before the U.S. Congress rather than the name of a tax-prep company.

To overcome these challenges, TaxAct opted to develop a sonic identity to help distinguish it from the well-known brands and draw enough attention to its name so that people remembered it when they turned on their computers to file their taxes.

What Is A Sonic Identity?

So, what is a sonic identity, exactly? It’s the art of using sounds to define a brand and distinguish it in the consumer’s mind. The best sonic identities surprise consumers and subliminally tell them that the brand is distinct and, therefore, worthy of their time and attention.

Sonic identities are similar to the visual vocabularies that brands develop. They are composed of all the sounds needed to emphasize a brand’s benefit or feature across all customer touchpoints, including logos, intros, and outros in commercials and podcasts, hold music on social media, and other beds of music. Like visual vocabularies, sonic identities use these elements to create a cohesive identity so that the brand (and its benefits) is instantly recognizable.

In TaxAct’s case, the brand’s agency had created a wonderful character named April Showers. The agency also created storylines for TV ads that feature a magical moment when a filer’s tax refund falls out of the sky.

Rather than use universally used sounds for money (e.g. cash registers ringing), TaxAct opted for a unique, upbeat tune with whistling and jingling coins that signifies a reward that comes simply and easily. To help consumers remember, TaxAct rolled out a sonic logo featuring a repeating T syllable (T-T-T Tax Act).

Cohesion Equals Strength

Sonic brands can be the secret sauce for smaller brands competing against large brands, especially if the brand is in a category where sonic identities are largely absent. A sonic identity will allow you to link all of your touch points so that consumers get some frequency out of hearing the sonic identity in a radio ad, TV commercial, social media video, a how-to video, or any sound your brand app may make. A cohesive set of sounds delivers a bigger and more memorable brand impression. 

The other benefit of a cohesive sonic identity is that if you’re a small brand, that consistency makes you feel like a big brand to the consumer. When the sonic impressions build upon one another, people feel as if they hear you everywhere, in multiple places and contexts. Ubiquity equates to strength in the consumer’s eye.

Solving Specific Challenges

When developing a sonic identity, it’s important to focus on key benefits or challenges you want to address. A sonic brand that tries to be too many things to too many people will inevitably be generic and, therefore, unmemorable. However, a sonic identity can be transformative when applied to specific challenges.

Take Sparkling Ice, a sparkling water brand whose customers got its name wrong. The issue stemmed from its logo, which stacked the word sparkling on top of the word ice. To fit the word sparkling on top of the word ice, the former needs a tiny font while the latter is quite large. This led consumers to assume that the brand was called Ice.

But the word ice isn’t an apt description of the product; sparkling water in innovative and cool flavors (think kiwi-lemonade or strawberry-watermelon). It also makes it difficult to find the brand via a search engine.

Sparkling Ice created a sonic identity highlighting the word sparkling to address this challenge. The sonic logo is a short, upbeat jingle featuring the word sparkling repeated repeatedly. The jingle is used in all Sparkling Ice marketing materials, including TV commercials, radio ads, and social media.

The sonic identity has been very successful in helping Sparkling Ice stand out from its competitors and communicate its unique brand proposition. A recent study found that 90% of consumers can now correctly identify the Sparkling Ice brand based on its sonic identity alone. 

These are some ways a sonic identity can be a brand’s secret sauce. They’re powerful tools smaller brands can use to stand out from the competition and communicate their unique brand proposition. By creating a sonic identity that is memorable and relevant to your target audience, you can create a strong emotional connection with your customers, increasing sales and brand loyalty.

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