Design Challenge #1 Statement
AFLAC! Nationwide is on your side. Byyy Mennen.
The sounds of these advertisements often resonate with listeners. Unlike a visual logo, sonic branding--sound underlying the marketing for a specific brand--is likely to stay with consumers even when they are not paying close attention to a commercial, creating an “earworm” throughout their day. Sound experiences provoke emotion as well as productivity, comfort, anxiety, or memory (Sterne, 2003). Consumers find even greater familiarity, longevity, and memory of products and services through sound and sonic branding compared to image (Edds, 2018).
Most interestingly, the fact that 40% of TV viewers are looking at another screen while watching TV (Edds, 2018) reveals a greater need for sonic compositions (both verbal and nonverbal) that grab consumer attention, as viewers are not regularly interacting with the visual nature of commercials as compared to the interactive nature of sonic branding. With Intel, for example, “a simple five-note mnemonic tune composed over two decades ago [has] helped Intel become one of the world’s most recognisable brands. As soon as you hear that bong, it immediately conveys Intel,” according to Intel communications manager Sarah Allen (qtd. in Tesseras, 2018). This also supports studies from agency PMHG that found “the majority of consumers (60%) said they believe music used in marketing is more memorable than visuals. Nearly half (45%) believe the music used by a brand helps them better understand its personality, while 47% suggest it helps them feel more connected to a brand” (Tesseras, 2018; emphasis mine).
Sonic branding does not just lend itself to jingles and nonverbal sonic compositions in advertisements: consumer products themselves also evoke sonic qualities, such as the “pop” of the Snapple bottle, the roar of a Harley motorcycle, or the sound of a bag of chip. In 2018, through a misunderstood statement in an interview between the CEO of Pepsi Co. and the New York Times, debate erupted about the supposedly proposed “Doritos—for ladies!” that were said to make a quieter crunch for implied female aural preferences (LaForge, 2018). In The Soundscape, Canadian composer, writer and soundscape scholar R. Murray Schafer explains that, to adequately modify and manipulate soundscape compositions, we must consider “the study of sounds in relationship to life and society” (205).
For my first design challenge, I decided to find facts that apply to sonic branding and the connections between sounds and consumerism, because this relationship also plays a role in composition and rhetoric--where scholarship on sound has recently included topics such as podcasting (Stedman, 2015) to the intermixing of voice and sound (Anderson, 2014), and sonic materialisms (Hawk, 2018). Steph Ceraso calls for a multimodal listening pedagogy leading to “new, more experimental approaches to the teaching of listening and sonic composing in a range of contexts” (Ceraso, 2014), and a consideration of sonic branding fits within this call. To develop my graphic, I selected a muted gray background color with an image that represents an emotional throwback to audio norms (a cassette tape meant to convey nostalgia and emotion) with icons that also align with the statistics. The statistics were accessed via articles noted in the Works Cited page.
Sonic branding does not just lend itself to jingles and nonverbal sonic compositions in advertisements: consumer products themselves also evoke sonic qualities, such as the “pop” of the Snapple bottle, the roar of a Harley motorcycle, or the sound of a bag of chip. In 2018, through a misunderstood statement in an interview between the CEO of Pepsi Co. and the New York Times, debate erupted about the supposedly proposed “Doritos—for ladies!” that were said to make a quieter crunch for implied female aural preferences (LaForge, 2018). In The Soundscape, Canadian composer, writer and soundscape scholar R. Murray Schafer explains that, to adequately modify and manipulate soundscape compositions, we must consider “the study of sounds in relationship to life and society” (205).
For my first design challenge, I decided to find facts that apply to sonic branding and the connections between sounds and consumerism, because this relationship also plays a role in composition and rhetoric--where scholarship on sound has recently included topics such as podcasting (Stedman, 2015) to the intermixing of voice and sound (Anderson, 2014), and sonic materialisms (Hawk, 2018). Steph Ceraso calls for a multimodal listening pedagogy leading to “new, more experimental approaches to the teaching of listening and sonic composing in a range of contexts” (Ceraso, 2014), and a consideration of sonic branding fits within this call. To develop my graphic, I selected a muted gray background color with an image that represents an emotional throwback to audio norms (a cassette tape meant to convey nostalgia and emotion) with icons that also align with the statistics. The statistics were accessed via articles noted in the Works Cited page.
Design Challenge #1
Works Cited
Ceraso, Steph. "(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences." College English, Volume 77, Number 2, 2014.
Edds, Kevin. "Sonic Branding." Twenty Thousand Hertz, Podcast Episode 48. 2018.
LaForge, Patrick. "Lady Doritos? Pepsi Wants a Do-Over." New York Times, Feb. 6, 2018.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977
Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003.
Tesseras, Lucy. "Marketers should not neglect audio." Marketing Week, Mar. 6, 2018.
LaForge, Patrick. "Lady Doritos? Pepsi Wants a Do-Over." New York Times, Feb. 6, 2018.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977
Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003.
Tesseras, Lucy. "Marketers should not neglect audio." Marketing Week, Mar. 6, 2018.
