Breaking the sound barrier

Sound plays a major role as a brand mnemonic, says Shouvik Roy, who describes himself as an audio branding evangelist. Early this month, Roy, along with former Parikrama artiste Dilip Ramachandran, blues guitarist Anupam Sen Gupta, and Indus Creed's Uday Benegal introduced the concept of how music and sound are critical to communication to a motley gathering of media and advertising professionals in Delhi. The ‘Audio Alternative' workshop was an eye-opener.

Audio branding, as Roy says, is still a very nascent concept in India. Globally, companies have used it very effectively. He describes how the car maker Audi has explored the potential of sound to the fullest – even the way the car sounds is a form of audio branding, he says. He also shares a worldwide audio branding survey in which the interesting finding was that the most significant contributor to audio branding was the ‘Hold' tune and not the corporate anthem. This, Roy, says, just goes to prove that every sound, trivial though it may seem, can be an important branding tool. From jingles to the background music that employees use in their presentation to the anthem, sonic branding is assuming a lot of importance. Just as a logo or tagline can capture a company's essence, a tune can say a lot about it as well.

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