Most businesses spend months agonising over their logo. The font, the colour palette, whether the shade of blue feels premium enough, and then they stick a completely generic stock music track on their website video and call it a day. It’s a strange blind spot, and it’s far more common than most brand managers would want to admit.
Sound does something to people that visuals simply can’t replicate in the same way. Someone sat down and worked out exactly what those sounds needed to communicate, and then made sure they were heard millions of times until they became inseparable from the brand itself.
So what actually counts as audio branding?
It’s broader than most people realise. This is where a lot of smaller businesses quietly get it wrong. They’ll have spent real money on a brand identity, they’ve got a style guide, they know exactly which typeface to use in which context, and then the audio side is just… whatever was cheap on a stock site. And customers pick up on that dissonance even if they can’t name it.
Proper audio branding is about making those deliberate choices rather than just defaulting to whatever’s available. What instruments, what tempo, what feeling? Not in a vague mood-board way, but in a way that can actually be translated into real creative work.
Why it matters more online now
We’re consuming more video content than ever, across more platforms than ever, and a lot of it is being watched on phones with the sound on. TikTok shifted something there. Reels shifted it further. People are listening again, which means brands that have actually thought about how they sound have a genuine edge over those that haven’t.
There’s also the voice search angle, which is still a bit undercooked in most brand conversations. Not just in terms of tone of voice in the copywriting sense, but literally, acoustically. That’s a question worth sitting with for longer than most companies currently do.
And then there’s the simpler, more immediate argument: if your competitor’s content sounds polished and considered, and yours sounds like it was scored by someone’s nephew who has GarageBand, people notice. Maybe not consciously, maybe they can’t tell you exactly why one felt more credible than the other, but the impression is there all the same.
Getting started without overcomplicating it
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Honestly, even just making a consistent choice about what kind of music underpins your video content, and sticking to it, puts you ahead of a lot of brands. Start with the touchpoints your customers encounter most often, probably your social content and your website, and make sure those feel coherent with the rest of what you’re putting out.
If you’re going to invest in a proper sonic identity, it’s worth working with people who specialise in this rather than treating it as a bolt-on to a general marketing retainer. Audio is its own craft. Getting the brief right, the mood, the associations you want to trigger, the places it’ll actually be used, all of that needs someone who thinks in sound rather than someone who thinks in spreadsheets and happens to have a music subscription.
The brands that are quietly nailing this aren’t necessarily the biggest ones. They’re just the ones that took it seriously early enough to get it right.
