Sound-brand fit measurements

I am defending my Master's Thesis in a couple of weeks at MSc. Marketing Communication Management, Copenhagen Business School. This is what I have been looking at: 

The paper studies the fit between sound logo, visual logo and brand in a sound branding context. The cross-modal study is carried out on six Danish brands and their existing sound logos and visual logos.

The objective of the study is two-fold: 1) To study how the constructs of likeability, recognition, affect, brand knowledge and brand attitude influence consumer’s perceived general fit in the modalities of audio, visual and audio-visual, and 2) to explore how the sound logo meaning and brand meaning fit correspondingly on a set of brand personality attributes. It is expected that a high perceived general fit will result in fewer differences between brand personality attributes.

Likeability and recognition is found to influence respondents’ perceived general fit in the audio-visual modality, where the combination of sound logo and visual logo is exposed. For the attribute fit; two brands show high perceived general fit and corresponding few differences between brand personality attributes; another two brands show low perceived general fit and corresponding large differences between brand personality attributes; and two brands has respectfully low attribute fit and a high perceived general fit and medium attribute fit and low perceived general fit. 

The study also finds evidence that sound logos can fit with brands in more than one way. Depending on how perceived general fit and attribute fit are high or low, a sound logo can either support the brand meaning, add additional meaning to the brand, or devaluate the existing brand meaning. 

By comparing perceived general fit and attribute fit, the study finds that the unconscious attribute fit between sound logo meaning and brand meaning does not always correspond with a conscious rated perceived general fit. Hence, the two analyses provide complementary information to understanding a fit between sound logo and brand. When studying perceived fit in the future including an attribute fit measurement will provide fruitful insights to the results. 

Additionally, the study found that recognition mean values were surprisingly low when a sound logo is presented without brand context. It raises the question if consumers actually understand the sounds as being a representative for the brand; being a logo? This and the study’s implications for companies are discussed in the end of the paper. 

There is particular two things that I would like to discuss based on the papers findings; the differences between familiar and unfamiliar brands and how context influence perception of sound-brand fit. 

The paper will be posted here after my defence in ultimo March.