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With Audio Branding, Timing is Everything

Timing Is Everything

We’ve all felt that awkwardness when a friend tells a joke and rushes the punchline, or places it in the wrong order. You do your best to feign a laugh, but the joke falls flat — the moment is gone. Music, like comedy, is all about timing. When it comes to audio branding, the right music at the right moment means the difference between making a deep connection and just making noise.

Audio branding, also called sonic branding, is the audible identity of a brand — the collection of music and sounds used across marketing channels that helps a brand stand out while conveying its core values. Audio branding, like its visual counterpart, is built on feeling and storytelling, and requires impeccable timing to evoke a desired emotional response.

Take for example, an automotive ad with a truck boldly climbing a mountain to reach the sunset-lit summit. As a marketer, you want people to feel the rugged allure of the outdoors and heed the call of the wild (ideally in your brand’s truck). Musically, you might opt for a daring, action-adventure score that resolves into a triumphant flourish as the truck reaches the top. And of course, you’ll need your brand’s audio logo — the mnemonic synched to your logo animation — to cap it all off.

Finding a piece of music that fits perfectly with the style of the brand, the spot’s pacing, and the desired resolve is not as easy as it sounds, not to mention placing it appropriately to picture so that it makes an emotional impact. Get the music wrong, and you risk misrepresenting the brand. Get the timing wrong and the message falls short, in the same way it would if you cued the ‘sting’ for a scary movie after the jump scare. Success comes down to how well you incorporate the senses into your storytelling.

Multiple Senses Intensify Emotion

We feel with all of our senses. According to a recent study, “audio-visual congruent presentation can lead to a more intense emotional response” (source: National Library of Medicine). In other words, our feelings become stronger when multiple senses are engaged, and especially at precise moments. For brands it’s a high-risk, high-reward scenario in that the more senses you incorporate, the more intense the emotional response, which can make for unparalleled storytelling assuming the senses are accurately represented and synched appropriately. Couple this with music’s innate ties to emotion and memory, and you have a recipe to deeply engage audiences, if you get your timing right.

Brands have long been experimenting with sensory marketing. Take for example, Apple’s unique retail store fragrance, DoubleTree’s chocolate chip cookies, and the high-end feel of the stainless steel AMEX Platinum Card. Timing, including when and where these sensory moments happen and how they stack and interplay, is a big part of effectiveness and goes a long way to communicating an emotional brand story.

Disney is masterful when it comes to timing and delivery of sensory moments, bringing to life the visuals and music from its films throughout its theme parks and retail stores, and elaborating with smells, tastes, and tactile experiences. Every interaction is thoughtfully designed to support their storytelling. Of course, not all brands can (or should) be Disney. Sensory marketing is unique to each brand, however, at a minimum, combining sonic elements appropriately with visual branding can decisively strengthen messaging.

Timing Your Audio Branding to Perfection

Designing a unique audio branding strategy starts with your core values and how you want to be perceived. This can then be translated into a sonic identity that represents the brand musically (e.g. mnemonic, rhythmic, chordal, instrumentation, genre, etc.). From here, consider your audience touchpoints and how you want people to feel at each interaction, taking into account the best music to shape emotions while staying within your audio guidelines. This is where timing comes into play — incorporating music suited to the tempo and length of your content, and placed to give audiences an emotional lift at just the right moment.

Audio Branding Using AI

It’s worth mentioning AI in the conversation. After all, couldn’t you just ask a leading platform to create a sonic identity and drop it into your content? Well, not quite. While AI is proving itself capable of creating appealing music, a recent study by Stephen Arnold Music and SoundOut showed it to be less adept at creating music for specific emotions. Leading AI platforms averaged a 20% accuracy rate when designing music to emotional creative briefs — 80% accuracy is the minimum for effective emotional response according to SoundOut. While production quality is improving, lack of emotional accuracy and sense of timing heavily limits AI’s effectiveness in the audio branding space, for now.

Mastering the art of timing is critical for any brand wanting to make an emotional impact, especially when using audio. Leading content producers from film and TV studios to social media influencers, and even top comedians, recognize that effective storytelling is more than just what you say, it’s when you say it. Don’t let your brand messaging fall flat.


Russell Boiarsky is Director/Brand Strategy at Stephen Arnold Music, The World Leader in Sonic Branding®, which has created audio branding for leading companies worldwide including CNN, Sony Interactive, Airbnb, The Weather Channel, ESPN and more.

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