Sound + Logo = Sound Logo?

Did you miss out on the Audio Branding Congress or my presentation on Free Association Profiling? Here is a quick update on the presentation - also keep an eye out for the ((ABA)) Yearbook 2011/12 where the conference paper will be published.

Free Association Profiling is an exploratory study conducted under the ExSL project as a pilot test. 

The objective was to explore possible new ways to profile sound logos. It is still under development and debate. There are already different tools for profiling sound logos for example emotional profiling using Geneva Emotional Music Scales. 

A study on sound logos and brands' pay-offs using this scale was presented last year and can be read in the Audio Branding Yearbook 2010. This time we wanted to take a step back and challenge some common assumptions that these tools are based on. 

Based on Network Association Theory (Collins & Loftus, 1975) the experiment considers which associations consumers actually attribute to sound logos. One way to use associations as evaluation method is to look at number of associations, valence and origin (Krishnan 1996). Related to brands, the theory can explain how sound and brands can be linked together in the mind of the consumer/listener. 

The  setup had a full-factorial design where all sound logos were presented to all participants. The part with self-categorization was discarged from presented analysis as we are currently doing some further analysis on self-categorization.
The selection criteria of sound logos from the pool of 50 logos were 1) (estimated) level of previous media exposure 2) tempo, 3) expressive characteristics, 4) included the use of real sounds/effects or not.

Findings show no indications on correlations between a sound having a significant associative space and the amount of associations elicited from the sound. 

Associations towards media related sound occurrences, communicative, or functional sounds seemed more common, which has been suggested by Nikolai Graakjaer (2008), since sound logos share many characteristics with e.g. interface sounds in computers, ring-tones etc. 

We found that heavy marketing efforts are necessary for establishing a brand-sound link. We saw no strong brand-links in these 10 popular sound logos - not even the most common/used sound logo in Danish advertising space. 

The method can be used to give sound designers an idea of the associative meaning of the sound(s) they are composing and "visualize" the sound logo.

Free Association Profiling shows how consumers associate the sound logo without direct reference to the brand and visualize if the sound has a associative space that contribute to intended (and meaningful) perception of the brand image.  


If you are interested in the presentation slides? check out SlideShare