What Pelati and Mars missions have in common
… or what sonic branding is really about
December 6, 2019
At some point I had to face the fact that there are big differences in taste between Pelati cans of the same brand. I was frustrated. The iconic labeling promised me the same taste over and over again. How am I supposed to work if I cannot rely on it? However, then the insight came: in every can there are two or three tomatoes and with them their own personal story.
The crux of the matter is just getting the approach correct. This insight has fundamentally changed my relationship with Pelati and with other products.
In fact, I think this approach can be applied to any brand and almost any product. Namely when the people, visions and ambitions behind the products become visible. When the authentic, moving or even dramatic stories behind the labeling, which suggest quality and constancy, suddenly become noticeable. This is where the really emotional brand messages emerge.
As stated in countless specialist articles and studies, the trend is moving away from purely rational and towards emotionally-driven brand management. It takes courage to shake the scene already set, which is emblazoned like a protective wall between projection and reality. Courage to bring in individual emotions and deal with them as playfully as with a ball.
In this area of tension, where humanity and perfection or brand vision and target group expectations are weighed against each other, sonic branding becomes really exciting. And not because when it comes to music, emotions run high and everyone suddenly has an opinion, but rather because sonic branding can produce a clear intention and a sonically-narrated story from precisely this phase, which may in the overall context of a brand lead to a stronger position than with messages on a visual level. The French writer Victor Hugo once put it this way: "Music expresses that which cannot be said and about which it is impossible to remain silent." If sonic branding does that, then it's good and it adds tangible value to the brand.
Our work for the maxon group shows that this can also be achieved in stages and without a resource-intensive creation phase. The Obwalden-based company develops precise and efficient propulsion systems, the quality of which even NASA trusts on its Mars missions.
In a first stage, we used research and a half-day team workshop to locate the desired effect of sound within the brand. It became clear that the company's vision of making the apparently perfect even better and taking their drive systems all over the world, and beyond even to Mars, should be at the centre. As this message is not only very passionate, it can also be impressively charged emotionally with sound. In a second team workshop, we translated the associated feelings of "pioneering drive forward", "precision" and "energy" into sound and, with the help of an in-house survey, explored how far we wanted to go with it. It turned out that other values such as "quality" and the "professional, sympathetic and open manner" could be allowed to take a back seat at the sound level.
On this basis, "The Sound of maxon" was created in a second stage, represented by a branded music library and the newly developed Sound Logo. This provides the global marketing team with a powerful toolkit for the targeted development of emotions for their moving image content. The maxon brand was able to sharpen the conscious use of audio internally and to launch a coherent sound profile externally.
But now back to Pelatis: I personally now swear by the Mutti company from Parma. They are just particularly good – always the same, can for can – somehow despite my understanding ;-)
Author: Florian Goetze, published on LinkedIn
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