Is Your Sonic Identity Working?

A brand commissions a sonic identity, approves the final assets and begins using them everywhere. The work sounds distinctive. The team is proud of it. Six months later, nobody can say what impact the sound is having on the brand. That question should have shaped the decision at the start.

A sonic identity is a business investment. A sonic asset may be beautifully made, but the goal is to help people notice the brand, form the right associations, remember it and choose it. If you test only whether people like the sound or can recognize it, you may learn a great deal about the asset while learning very little about its effect on the brand.

A 2026 study published in the Journal of Brand Management helps explain why measuring brand associations belongs in that conversation. The researchers wanted to know whether quick, largely automatic associations with brands were related to performance in the market. They studied nine toothpaste brands in the UK, surveying 514 category buyers and comparing their responses with market share data from the same period.

Participants saw a brand logo paired with an attribute such as “strong protection” or “great taste.” They had to indicate quickly whether the attribute fit the brand. Their response times helped the researchers gauge how readily each brand and attribute were associated. This was an IAT-style task based on rapid brand–attribute judgments; no audio was played.

The researchers then compared those association scores with each brand’s share of the market, adjusted to the set of brands each participant had evaluated. Stronger implicit associations were significantly related to higher market share. The relationship was stronger among people who said they considered fewer brands when buying toothpaste. Buying toothpaste more frequently, however, did not strengthen the relationship in the way the researchers had predicted.

A person choosing toothpaste may never stop to explain why one brand feels right for them. Across the category, the brands people associated with an attribute fastest were the brands holding more of the market. Asking people to describe a brand still has value, but their considered answers may not reveal every association that comes into play at the point of choice.

The study examined one product category and linked association scores with market share. It did not track whether a given participant bought a particular brand because of an association, and it did not compare implicit scores with explicit ratings in a head-to-head test. Price, distribution, promotion and past use also affect market share. The researchers themselves treat the result as an association, not proof that changing an IAT score will change sales.

Nor does a study of toothpaste logos validate any particular sonic identity. What it offers is a question worth borrowing. Can we measure a response to the brand that has a meaningful relationship with behavior? That is a much better starting point for audio research than asking respondents whether the music is catchy.

Start with a baseline. Measure how people respond to the brand on its own, then measure how they respond when the same brand is accompanied by the proposed sound. Keep the other elements of the experience consistent so that the comparison tells you as much as possible about the audio’s contribution. Depending on the brief, the outcomes might include the brand’s emotional appeal, its alignment with a desired attribute or how readily the brand is encoded in memory. These are separate questions and may require separate tests.

The distinction matters in practice. A piece of music could be well liked without making the brand more appealing. A sonic logo could be easy to recognize without strengthening the association its creators intended. A sound might improve memory for the brand while doing little for emotional appeal. If the team looks only for one reassuring score, it can miss the result that should guide the next creative decision.

Implicit testing reaches brand associations people struggle to put into words. It should be designed for the sound, the brand and the decision at hand, then interpreted alongside other evidence. What a listening session can establish is whether the sound moves the brand in the direction it was commissioned to move. It will not predict a sale.

The biggest risk in sonic branding is assuming that hearing an asset often means it is doing its job. Once a sound becomes part of your brand, that assumption can travel a long way. Test the brand response before you ask the sound to travel with it.