How do associations elicited from sound logos come to mind?

At the ExSl-project in the fall we explored how associations elicited from sound logos comes to mind to the consumer. The experiment was a pilot study to verify the potential of using the method of free association (as a top-of-mind exercise).

We found that there is a significant difference in the numbers of elicited associations across different sound logos and an apparent difference in the associative space that sound logos created in the mind of the respondents. As a method the experiment showed potential as feedback mechanism in the creative processes to implementing sound logos in companies.

Our motivation was to take one step back and ask which meanings the consumer actually attribute sound logos. Do they elicit recall of the associated brand? Are they actually recognised as logos, or identified as other sounds such as ringtones or other functional interface sounds? Are they perceived as music at all?

The experiment

The experiment was a full factorial design where all sound logos were presented to all subjects. 10 logos were selected from a pool of 48 sound logos. The experiment had three steps: 1) Association elicitation 2) Valence rating of associations 3) self-categorization of associations. 

As a top-of-mind exercise the sound logos were played and the subjects noted down associations (word or sentences). Then they were asked different questions to the associations.

The treatment of data was conducted in two steps; first the data was sorted for each sound to the given associations. Associations with similar meaning or wordings were renamed and clustered and associations was clustered. It was decided to leave out the self-categorization for further analysis; in most cases it was difficult to verify whether the test subjects had understood and used the category properly.

Results

A total of 1175 associations were collected. The average number of association per sound showed significant differences across the ten sounds. Similarly the average valence values for the associations elicited by the sounds also showed significant differences. 

The difference in number of association mainly came from difference between the amounts of associations given by the subjects. The difference between the average values can mainly be explained by an actual difference in the rating of the sound logos.

Read the full Danish version at CKO's website for the specific test results and tabel.

A cautious suggestion of a conclusion

As a cautious conclusion on above results I suggest that different sound logos are perceived differently and that complexity of the logo has a meaning to the size of the associative space. This may not sound as rocket science but above results verifies, after all, some basic presumption.  That sound logos are in fact perceived differently may seem common sense but further analyses will show that the associative spaces are not dispersed as one would think.

Discussion and further analyses

When looking at the overall associative space for the sound logos, the main surprise in the test is that references to actual brands/brand names are only mentioned in very few associations. Less than 5% of the associations mentioned the correct brand name related to the sound logo. It should be noted that the test was not designed towards testing the level of recognition. However, the low percentage could be seen as an indication that direct associations to brands, either true or falsely identified, are not as common as we would like to believe.

Next question is hence if sound logos are associatively linked to the brand at all? Further analyses on the associative space, as it appears in subjects’ top-of-mind written associations, is necessary to understand their meaning creation of sound logos. Associations from various media related sound occurrences, communicative, or functional sounds seemed more common which has been suggested by Graakjaer (2008), since sound logos share many characteristics with e.g. interface sounds in computers, ring-tones etc.

We will now go further with the analyses as see if sound logos are perceived as e.g. functional sounds (ringtones, interface sounds in e.g. computers), as small pieces of music o rare actual representations of brands.