Speaking out

Sorry for the long silence here. It's been a frantic start to the year with lots of new business happening at The Sound Agency. The market for audio branding (and for sensory marketing in general) is really starting to move this year. We have some fabulous new projects cooking, which should add powerfully to the case studies we already have of the benefits of designed sound for retail (BP and Glasgow Airport), hospitality (InterContinental Hotel London Park Lane) and banking (Helm Bank, Colombia) among others...

One indication of this increasing momentum in the market is that I'm preparing for a summer of public speaking. It starts in May when I'm speaking at the prestigious Arabian Travel Market in Dubai on sensory hotels (May 5) and then I'm very excited to be one of three speakers at the Wealth From Marketing event in Dublin (May 14) and London (May 15), where I'll be sharing some tools and techniques to increase sales and brand value with BrandSound™. At this event I'll also be launching my three-day Sound Business seminar, which will take place in London this Autumn. Then at the end of May I speak at Thinking Digital in Newcastle, a vibrant TED-like event that should be fascinating.

In June I'm speaking at the European Marketing Academy conference in Copenhagen (June 3) where the whole theme of the conference is sensory marketing, and then at the annual marketing conference of the International Council of Shopping Centres in Lisbon (June 15), where I'll be talking about the effects of sound on retail sales.

Finally, and on a delightfully different tack, I'm speaking with my friend and colleague Simon Harrop of BRAND sense Agency at the annual seminar of the Veterinary Marketing Association, at the Chartered Institute of Marketing in Cookham, Surrey (November 18).

The marketers of the world are definitely opening their ears to our message that sound affects everyone all the time. These are all valuable milestones in my mission to make the world sound better, by communicating the message that better sounding brands achieve better results. It's an exciting year in prospect. I hope to see you somewhere on the road!

Martin Lindstrom opened the field up for us all with his important and very readable book BRANDsense. Every month that goes by, my news and blog feeds are giving me more and more hits as the message spreads: brands exist in more dimensions than vision alone! We have five perfectly good senses, so why do many organisations still spend millions on how they look and nothing at all on how they sound?

Here are some recent fish my trawls have caught...

Business Week featured the rise of sound as a major consideration for business with an article on Ford upgrading its in-car warning tones here, backed up with a pleasant, if rather perfunctory, slide show on product sound here.

The subject or brand sound is cropping up in more and more blogs. Recent examples include Chief Home Officer, Ready To Spark and Personal Branding Summit. This mirrors the trend in business: more and more boards are talking about multi-sensory branding in general, and brand sound specifically.

The latest major sonic logo to launch is Mercedes: you can hear it at the end of this German ad. To me it sounds like something from The Exorcist, and I am very confused about its relationship with the traditional Mercedes brand values... other blogs like BurstLabs and Autoblog seem to agree. Maybe it's a grower...