Sonic strategy: The last unfair advantage in branding
Wilson Brown, founding partner and executive creative director at Antfood, explores the importance of sonic branding and why it requires expert guidance to build a framework that serves both the brand and the business.
Before a logo registers, before anyone can read a tagline, your audience has already felt something. Payment chimes, podcast interstitials, streaming platform launch screens and advertising mnemonics grab attention before you’ve even looked up from your phone.
Sound arrives faster than visuals, cutting through a multi-device, always-on world. Still, most brands rarely consider what their sound is actually saying about them.
Major rebranding efforts yield a comprehensive brand book: design systems, typography rules, colour hierarchies, motion guidelines and guidance for every touchpoint from signage to app icons. But then the launch video ships with a stock track chosen ten minutes before delivery, hold music no one approved and app UX sounds that default to a phone’s native OS rather than expressing the brand’s own voice.
Visual identity has been a systematised discipline for fifty years. Sonic identity, as a practice with the same strategic and creative rigour, is just arriving where visual identity was in 1975.
Back then, a brand's touchpoints were limited to print, TV and radio. Today, that list spans thousands of touchpoints across digital media, personal devices, products, segmented audiences and real-world experiences. At each interaction, a brand either sounds like itself, or it doesn’t.
Here's an exercise worth running before your next planning meeting: pull your last five audio touchpoints – a TV spot, an app notification, a podcast ad, a retail playlist, an onboarding video. Play them back-to-back and ask, “Do they sound like the same brand?” and “Do they sound like us?
Most don't. Not because nobody cares, but because there isn't a larger system holding them together. Disparate teams responsible for each touchpoint work hard with the resources they have, but they often lack the guidance or alignment needed to create a unified experience.
What a branded audio system actually looks like
Great sonic brands are built as core components of great brand systems, defining how the brand promise, heritage and personality are expressed through sound. Just like a visual identity, a sonic identity extends well beyond a sonic logo.
For CBS, Antfood spent nine months working alongside CBS and Gretel teams to unify news, sports and entertainment under one audio language. The work translated the network's classic announcer line, "This is CBS," into a modular sonic expression that flexes without losing the spirit of the brand: an eerie theremin for Ghosts, epic drums for Survivor, brass-band fervour for the NFL. According to SoundOut's annual sonic branding index, CBS recently overtook NBC as broadcast television's most recognised sonic brand.
This kind of success requires expert guidance to build a framework that serves both the brand and the business, backed by rigorous consistency across teams. The brands that succeed here are the ones you can instantly remember, hum and attribute. Netflix's "Tudum" has set the standard for streaming – flexing seamlessly from laptop speakers to cinema surround sound, while extending across marketing assets and product UX. McDonald's five-note mnemonic holds up across genres and instruments, surviving even Succession’s Brian Cox mumbling his way through it. These sonic brands aren’t happy accidents; they were strategically built and rigorously executed over time.
The age of audio
Unfair advantages don't last. In 2005, having a good website was one. In 2010, it was being on social. In 2015, it was a brand podcast. Sonic strategy is in that window now, and the brands that move first get a years-long head start on recognition and recall.
AI is compressing that window further. Audio content is being generated at a scale no brand team can match on taste alone. The brands with a deliberate system will stay coherent under that pressure.
