Sonic Branding Secrets

Sonic Branding Secrets: Sonic branding is the craft of designing short sounds, jingles and audio logos that make a company instantly recognizable, using music psychology and repetition to plant a brand in memory faster than any visual can.

NBC Chimes: The three note chime became the first purely audio service mark registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 1950.

Intel Bong: Composer Walter Werzowa created the five note Intel Inside sound in 1994, and at its peak it was said to play somewhere in the world every few minutes.

Brian Eno: Microsoft asked the ambient music pioneer for a startup sound for Windows 95 lasting under four seconds; he composed dozens of tiny pieces and, by his own account, made them on a Mac.

Jim Reekes: The engineer behind the classic Mac startup chord also named an alert sound Sosumi, a cheeky wink at Apple's legal fight with the Beatles' label Apple Corps.

THX Deep Note: Created by James A. Moorer in 1982 using about 30 voices drifting into one huge chord, the sound is generated with randomness so no two original renders are identical.

Netflix Tudum: The famous two beat opener was built from layered recordings, including a wedding ring tapping on a cabinet, plus an anvil hit and reversed guitar.

I'm Lovin' It: McDonald's launched the slogan in 2003 as a pop song recorded by Justin Timberlake before it was ever an ad, so the jingle reached people as music first.

20th Century Fox Fanfare: Composer Alfred Newman wrote the drumroll and brass fanfare in 1933, and it became one of the most recognized pieces of music in cinema.

Nokia Tune: The world's most heard ringtone was lifted from Gran Vals, a guitar piece written by Francisco Tárrega in 1902.

Mastercard: In 2019 it launched a melody designed to work in any genre or culture, plus a short acceptance chime that plays when a payment goes through.

Harley-Davidson: The company spent years trying to trademark the potato potato rumble of its V twin engine before dropping the application in 2000.

Charles Spence: His team won a 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for showing that potato chips taste fresher and crispier when the crunch sound people hear is amplified.

Adrian North: In his 1999 supermarket study, playing French accordion music made French wine outsell German wine, while German music flipped the result, and most shoppers never noticed.

James Kellaris: The marketing professor's earworm research found that simple, repetitive and slightly unusual melodies are the ones most likely to get stuck in your head.

Sega Scream: The SEGA chant at the start of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 reportedly used about an eighth of the game cartridge's storage.

Coca-Cola: The brand's sonic logo leans on the real sound of a bottle cap popping, a pour and fizzing bubbles, turning the product itself into the jingle.

Wheaties: Its 1926 radio song asking if you'd tried Wheaties is widely considered the first broadcast jingle, and it helped rescue the struggling cereal.

Muzak: The company's Stimulus Progression system scheduled background music in timed blocks of rising energy, designed to fight worker fatigue across the day.

Barry Manilow: Before his pop career he wrote and sang ad jingles, including State Farm's Like a Good Neighbor, which is still in use more than 50 years later.

Hans Zimmer: The film composer designed driving sounds for BMW's electric cars, giving quiet EVs an audio identity as regulators began requiring warning sounds at low speeds.

Ivan Pavlov: His bell conditioning experiments underpin sonic branding, since a sound paired with a reward over and over starts triggering the anticipation on its own.

Robert Zajonc: His 1968 research on the mere exposure effect showed people grow to like things simply by encountering them repeatedly, the core logic behind repeating a jingle.

Mister Softee: Its ice cream truck jingle, written in 1960, became so iconic and so persistent that New York City wrote rules limiting when trucks could play it.

Elwood Edwards: He recorded AOL's You've Got Mail greeting in 1989 for a reported $200, and his voice became one of the defining sounds of the early internet.