US top ten led by Arby’s, Goldfish and Farmers
SoundOut dubs 2022 the year of the Sonic Boom as more brands use sound as a powerful and distinctive strategic brand asset
London, April 12, 2022 - SoundOut has revealed the leading sonic logos for 2022 – which it has named the year of the Sonic Boom due to the growing strategic focus on audio assets. These sonic logos rank as the most effective thanks to a combination of appeal, perceived brand value, personality match and brand recognition.
The most effective sonic logo of 2022 is Arby’s, followed by Goldfish and Farmers – with all three capitalising on the subconscious power of music to engage with their consumers.
The ranking of sonic logos reflects SoundOut’s awareness that sonic branding is increasingly recognised as a powerful and distinctive strategic brand asset, rather than a marketing afterthought.
Arby’s boasts an overall score of 80%, based on a combined score of 81% for appeal; 77% for perceived brand value; 77% for personality match; and 85% for brand recognition. By matching their sonic marketing to their overarching brand personality, Arby’s sonic logo contributes to building brand recognition and equity with every consumer interaction.
Arby’s is followed by Goldfish and Farmers, both with a score of 78%. The top ten of US sonic logos is:
State Farm and Netflix are the only two in the top 10 that do not include the brand name in the logo. Netflix is also of note because it comes ninth overall despite having only a 52% intrinsic personality match to the Netflix brand – clearly this sonic brand has become increasingly effective over time as a result of its exposure on start-up every time a user interacts with the brand.
SoundOut’s ranking of the most effective sonic logos is underpinned by cold, hard, quantitative data on 114 US sonic logos. This is based on over 500,000 data points captured from 30,000 US consumers.
David Courtier-Dutton, Founder and CEO of SoundOut, said: “Well done to Arby’s, Goldfish and Farmers – these are the brands that are really getting strategic with their sonic assets and putting the subconscious power of music to work for their brand. As a result of the shift towards a strategic musical approach for brands, I expect to see a growing value divide between brands that have a sonic strategy and those that do not. Those that ensure their investment in music creates distinctive brand asset status will ultimately supercharge their brand recognition through a consistent sonic approach that resonates with their desired brand personality. Those that do not risk confusing consumers and leaking brand recognition to competitors.”
New entrants
Outside the top ten, SoundOut can reveal that ten new entrants have already hit the full ranking of 114 US sonic brands. The leading newcomer is Colgate, with a sonic logo that has hit the ranking at number 39, thanks to an impressive personality match of 89%. The ranking from 11-114 of the US sonic logos can be seen here – with the newcomers highlighted in orange:
Methodology
The overall rankings were created by equally weighting 4 key factors that contribute to the success of a sonic logo:
1. Appeal – how much do consumers like the sonic logo? Appeal is critical in sonic branding as it underpins recall which ultimately accelerates brand attribution. Strong appeal also enables a logo or brand anthem to better communicate key brand attributes.
2. Perceived brand value was assessed using an implicit (subconscious) testing methodology combining audio and imagery and enabling a measurement of the uplift in perceived brand value caused by the audio against a silent baseline.
3. Brand personality match was calculated using SoundOut’s BrandMatch technology. First by benchmarking the personality of each visual brand with consumers and then separately measuring the personality of the logos with a different set of consumers. The match between the two was then calculated to establish how closely the sonic logo is aligned with the brand personality.
4. Brand recognition is simple a measure of the percentage of consumers who could name the brand from just hearing the sonic logo. Clearly logos that name the brand are at a distinct advantage here – but this is nonetheless a key metric to establish market penetration.
ENDS
SoundOut is the world leader in strategic sonic branding and audio marketing testing. It has achieved this lead position by combining three powerful capabilities.
· Working with world leading music psychologists and over 500,000 consumers, it has mapped the explicit emotional DNA of sound and used this as the foundation for a suite of tools, such as BrandMatch, that can be used at various stages of sonic branding development to increase the certainty of a return on investment.
· The development of a wholly owned consumer panel of over 3.5 million people, which enables brands to test their sonic assets at scale.
· The testing and analysis of almost 200 in market sonic logos (The SoundOut Index) that reveals the key criteria that are essential to audio branding and audio marketing success.
SoundOut works with many of the most iconic brands in the world (such as Amazon, DHL, Ford, GSK, TikTok, Toyota and Unilever) as well as all the major record labels and many leading radio groups. SoundOut specialises in helping organisations trigger the right emotional response from their customers by matching brand personality and attributes to music. As a result, SoundOut provides the data and insight needed by clients to increase the certainty of achieving a strong ROI from their audio branding and marketing investments.
SoundOut also works closely with academia to ensure that the latest advances in music psychology find application in the commercial sphere. It is about to complete an ambitious $500,000 research project, in partnership with Goldsmiths, (funded by the UK government’s Innovate Agency) to map the subconscious (implicit) emotional DNA of music. This understanding of the implicit impact of music, and its relationship to the explicit impact within a marketing environment, will have fundamental implications for brands intent on building value and driving sales through music.
Clients can use SoundOut’s unrivalled sonic testing capability to: identify the effectiveness potential of new audio assets before they are launched; ensure that the right attributes are used to deliver against the business priorities for the audio assets and position audio assets on SoundOut’s Sonic Effectiveness Matrix to see how they are likely to perform against competitors.
SoundOut plans to transform the music catalogue management market when it launches, later this year, a truly revolutionary cyborg technology that will index huge music catalogues and enable brands to search these based on the personality or archetype of their brand.
As a result, SoundOut is well placed to capitalize on the three macro trends that are set to transform the B2B sonic landscape over the coming years:
· Rapid growth in Sonic Branding
· An increasing focus on strategic sonic marketing
· The consolidation in the publishing/music catalogue space requiring new technologies to improve the monetisation of these assets.
Website: www.soundout.com
For more information about SoundOut, please contact:
Neha Khatwani, Carta Communications, +44 (0)7717 576 297 or neha.khatwani@cartacomms.com
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