But as Greenhill at BGA points out, the combination of visual and aural communications may not be right for every brand. "I'm not saying that everyone can use it or should use it," he says. he envisages it being particularly useful for Web business and E-commerce sites.
Perhaps there is another sense which is even less understood and under-exploited than sound. Our sense of smell is now set to be taken seriously. One fmcg conglomerate has set up a sensory board to look at the commercial opportunities of all five senses. In the meantime, BGA is already getting to grips with odour. "We are working on managing the smell in our reception area," says Greenhill.
"It's the last Wild West of the communications world" says Diarmid Moncrieff at Capital Advertising. Prick up your ears, beacause, as Moncrieff and others believe, the dawn of audio branding is upon us.
"The potential for auditory branding is very under-exploited," adds Dr Adrian North, lecturer in psycology at Leicester University, and claiming to be the only psychologist in the world who is looking into this.
A few companies have got the hang of it - Intel, British Airways, Pentium, Carphone Warehouse, Direct Line, Strongbow. They have created or selected a piece of music for their advertising which has become inextricably linked with their products or services.
But sonic branding is the next generation on from this. It's about making aural identities as relevant as their visual counterparts. And this means that using sounds is no longer the domain of the advertising agency - design and branding agencies should also be getting in on the act. Indeed, ad agencies can be accused of abusing the power of sound. Music, voice and sound effects that have become associated by consumers with a certain product are often all mercilessly thrown out when the same or another ad agency creates the next commercial. When branding is all about consistency, this flies in the face of all that the marketers preach.
A proper sonic brand could be a combination of music, voice and sound effects and plays a number of communications roles. For there are many opportunities for such a branding device to make itself heard. Radio and TV ads are the obvious place to start, but what about websites, phone "on-hold" systems, phone ring tones, or every time a computer is booted up? Sound-chips are getting tinier and speaker technology is improving all the time, so a sonic logo could even play at the flick of a household switch. Imagine a kettle that pipes up with Phillips logo, or even a tune from PG Tips.
"It allows brands to be communicated even when your attention is elsewhere," says Dan Jackson who, along with Paul Fulberg, has founded The Sonic Brand Company to take a business's core brand values and translate them into musical values. "Our font is the melody, and our icon the harmonics," says Jackson.
They come from the worlds of advertising and music - Fulberg was at Grey Advertising, while Jackson, before working at Capital Radio, was a singer and a semi-professional Elvis impersonator. They have spent the past year developing their product and have already found some interest from the branding industry, notably from Enterprise IG, Basten Greenhill Andrews and Identica.
"Sound or music is the most powerful sense of memory, followed by smell," says Tim Greenhill at BGA. "We believe our responsibility as an agency is to help clients decide on their qualitative vision and express that in a way that helps staff and customers believe in these values. So we should use all forms of communications."
The consultancy has teamed up with The Sonic Brand Company to work on one client project, which Greenhill declines to name." (Sonic branding) is part of our product offer, now we've met the Sonics," he says. "Visual identity is not the whole story, so we're adding to our ability to communicate." He admits that while clients may find the concept interesting, they may not immediately see its worth for them. But there is solid research out there on the power of music to change people's perceptions.
"Sound is critical in the way people respond to things," says Dr North. He has spent the past seven years looking at the way music can affect people, and has researched how it can influence their behaviour in a retail environment. "It influences the products they buy, the amount of time they spend in a shop, or think they spend there," he says. All of which are "fundamentally important to marketing", says Greenhill. Fulberg charts the importance of sonic branding back to prehistoric times, long before visual communications became prevalent. Indigenous tribes, he says, used a version of sonic branding to stake claims to land. As they spoke different languages, these claims were expressed in the form of songs, the melody reflecting the contours of the land. Since then, music has ceased to be something that works for us, and its only role is one of pleasure.
But music and sound can be harnessed to play an important part in communications. While some of the benefits are quantifiable, according to Dr North, others are more instinctive. "A musical identity is very subliminal. It gets under your skin," says Moncrieff, creative development manager at Capital. He works with the radio network's advertising clients on their audio communication. 'We're getting lots of interest from fmcg, beer and car companies," he says. "The market is more and more competitive, so share of mind is becoming more important."
He describes the difficulties of assessing a conventional logo compared with an audio version. "Visual work can be pinned to the wall and contemplated. It's more difficult to be objective about sound, but it's possible," he says.
"Music is so subjective," adds Jackson. "Everyone's got a CD collection." So it's back to those brand values, and working out "which elements of them better lend themselves to visual or aural expression", says Moncrieff.
Sound reaches both lobes of the brain - the rational and emotional - but it is the emotional values of a brand which Moncrieff sees as best expressed through music. "It's harder to communicate warmth, vitality or touchy-feeliness on a poster," he says. "Music is pure emotional communication." But what is sonic branding? For Moncrieff, it's voice, music and sound effects. "These are the three elements of sound...the palette I used to paint a sonic identity," he says.
Not to be confused with a jingle, a sonic brand falls into three categories, according to The Sonic Brand Company. The Sonic logo is the aural equivalent of a trademark, such as the Intel sound you hear at the end of ads. "We can stretch it and pull it and change the color of it without changing the melody," says Fulberg. This is the sound thay could play everytime you boot up your computer or switch on the iron. Then there is the musical identity, such as the BA music that plays throughout the ads. Each sonic logo Jackson and Fulberg design, has the scalability to work as a full piece of music. Last, the "earcon", is the sonic equivalent of an icon. These could be heard when a button on a website or interactive TV is activated, and would aid navigation. The company is currently designing the sonic navigation for an unnamed E-commerce site, which will be completed by Christmas.
And it makes sense to compose your own tune, even for an ad. BA's image has surely been undermined since Ford Galaxy picked the same piece of music. And it raises even stronger doubts over Ford itself, the shameless copier. "If you are going to play music, why not play music that's unique," asks Greenhill. Otherwise, you are opening yourself up for abuse. The real trick is to integrate a brand's aural and visual communication, says Moncrieff, as "they are as different as sky and sea". So a logo that oozes vitality with red and yellow pointy graphics would be complemented by big, bold rhythms. It's about finding musical fits, he says, something about that Capital has been looking at with the University of Leicester.
The Sonic Brand Company has broken this idea of fits and non fits down. Different instruments, they say, produce their own "colors" - citing the trombone as red and the saxaphone as blue. The two founders have taken this need for sensory integration another step, by matching voices with 30 different typefaces. With Times New Roman, they hear a deep and average voice, while Helvetica would sound modern and cool. "Everything we do is trying to demystify sound," says Fulberg.
With demystification could come popularisation, and where would that lead? What would the world be like if every product and service had its own catchy tune? Could consumers suffer from audio overload, no longer able to differentiate one sonic brand from the next? It sometimes seems that visual communications is an overcrowded marketplace. Could our senses cope with another onslaught?
But as Greenhill at BGA points out, the combination of visual and aural communications may not be right for every brand. "I'm not saying that everyone can use it or should use it," he says. he envisages it being particularly useful for Web business and E-commerce sites.
Perhaps there is another sense which is even less understood and under-exploited than sound. Our sense of smell is now set to be taken seriously. One fmcg conglomerate has set up a sensory board to look at the commercial opportunities of all five senses. In the meantime, BGA is already getting to grips with odour. "We are working on managing the smell in our reception area," says Greenhill.
