Case Study: Global Biotech Brand


PerkinElmer

PerkinElmer prides itself on innovative thinking to change things for the better. The company is a global leader in end-to-end solutions that improve the diagnosis of disease, discovery of new and more personalized drugs, monitoring of food quality and safety, and advancement of environmental and applied analysis excellence. So, it’s no wonder that while designing a highly advanced gas chromatography (‘GC’) machine, they wanted to create a more informative and immersive user experience using audio. What began as a sound navigation project gradually expanded to become a custom sonic identity for PerkinElmer.

Gas chromatography machines are used by technicians to separate and analyze chemical mixtures. Needless to say, they are highly technical and extremely precise, but PerkinElmer also believes that they should be efficient and user-friendly. It’s for this reason that they called on SAM to introduce sound navigation to the user interface of one of their latest GC machines.

Our production team spent time getting to know the PerkinElmer brand, understanding how technicians use the GC interface along with its various menus and selections, and taking into account such things as competing sounds that might exist in a laboratory environment. We also considered the capabilities of the speaker inside the GC machine, going as far as creating our own replica speaker to test against audio samples. The initial goal was to create a startup sound for the GC machine to express PerkinElmer’s expertise and care, while evoking feelings of optimism, confidence, and compassion. Further audio prompts would then be developed to progress users through menu choices and task completions.

As conversations continued, however, PerkinElmer saw the potential of transitioning this startup sound into a full sonic identity for their brand — an audible logo and mnemonic distinctly theirs to be used across products and touchpoints.

With the global brand in mind, our composers applied their magic first coming up with a custom mnemonic composed of digital elements expressing a fresh, smart and airy tone — lending to PerkinElmer’s forward-thinking and human-centric values. Once approved, SAM extrapolated this theme into a toolkit of navigation sounds for the new GC machine.

PerkinElmer’s sonic logo and navigation sounds are contributing to the fresh, user-friendly experience of their new GC machine with plans to expand their sonic identity across the brand in the near future.