Welcome to the Sound In Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Jeanna Isham, owner and founder of Dreamr Productions and Sound in Marketing learning. I create, consult and educate individuals and brands on the power of sound in marketing. Sonic branding and sound strategy is such a widely misunderstood concept. I wanted to spend this season exploring how vast and nuanced it can be, but also how easily it can be built into branding.
A lot of these episodes are focusing on sonic branding research that I've done through the years, and rebooting past articles I've written into podcast form. For the original inspirations, check the show notes of each episode. If the content in these episodes inspire ideas for your company. Don't hesitate to give me a call. We help brands to make sound on purpose. Now on to the show.
In this episode, we'll be focusing on a very important aspect of the purchase process, point of sale, and what it does or does not sound like. The data from this episode came from a formal study put together by Sentient Decision Science. What if I told you that over 75% of consumers have a negative emotional reaction to the experience of paying for their purchases? According to Sentient Decision Sciences research study pay sounds, it's true.
Of the billions of purchases that happen every day all around the world. Three out of four buyers walk away from the register, feeling some form of emotional distress. That was Joe Sauer, former SVP and managing director of Sentient Decision Science. Sentient is a data science company based in New Hampshire. They came across this statistic during their larger study over the emotions of shopping.
What they discovered was that although the shopping experience as a whole was positive once the actual purchase came into play, something else happened. The experience of actually paying for things includes subconscious questions like am I paying too much for this? Can I afford it? Is this payment secure? Our initial responses to purchases vary, but ultimately we share an aversion to handing over our money.
Although there are many steps in a customer's journey with a brand, our memory is heavily tied to just two of them. We remember the most exciting step of the journey and the very last step. This is called the Peak End Rule. Our memory of an experience is largely dependent on two things. What we're feeling at the extreme or peak moment of the experience, and what we were feeling when the experience ended.
Our memories typically aren't an average or even influenced necessarily by the amount of time we were engaged in the experience. And it explains why we can actually be pretty irrational in our recollection of events. It also suggests that our memories consist of a series of highlights, rather than a full and unimpeachable record of facts and events. The end point of the shopping process is pretty clearly payment.
Bearing in mind that this part of the process is an emotionally distressing one for the vast majority of consumers. It becomes pretty clear that we haven't applied the lessons of the Peak End Rule to the shopping process. As Joe goes on to explain. We invest heavily in the design of our brick and mortar stores, which focus on the ideal peak experience. However, it falls short in addressing the end experience.
Likewise, in the digital and voice user experience scenario, focus is on the design of the UI and UX of applications, but then they typically rely on a payment plugin or a third party API to handle the actual customer payment process. We continue to largely ignore the payment experience itself. The payment experience is retail's weakest link. You are the weakest link.
Goodbye By breaking the connection of the payment journey, app outsourcing part of it to a third party companies are in danger of appearing insincere with their consumer. It breaks up the uniformity that creates brand persona and brand identity, which affects the natural cognitive bias. There are two terms I learned through my research of this study that are highly important to be aware of cognitive and recency bias.
Cognitive bias is the bias that your mind holds onto that your conscious self is not aware of. Recency bias, in particular, is the process of forming new memories that makes it harder for us to recall older ones. What we last experienced will always remain more vivid than the rest. Whether we like it or not, this is a bias our subconscious automatically plays on us. And this is why the payment process is so very crucial.
When we choose to focus on the customer experience as a whole and not on specific touchpoints like the purchase point. Brain representation is in danger of becoming insincere. Currently, this is happening in physical locations as well as both e-commerce and v-commerce. We must be sincere and authentic in all points of our branding and marketing. When we choose generic and out of the box to represent our brand, that is what the consumer will remember or not remember.
Brand trust and sincerity is formed through a cohesive experience. This is accomplished through UN disrupted sensorial journeys. A brand assures customers that their payment has gone through and is secure through visual prompts. In most all purchase points that have a visual UI or user interface. However, when dealing with things like a touch screen that doesn't have any physical sensorial prompts, how is the customer to be sure that they did in fact push the three button?
Even with sensorial prompts, what if the panel is sticky? Or you're just not fully sure that your process was completed? Sound prompts are that extra and final touch that assure the customer that everything was fully processed and the transaction has been completed in its intended way. Sound is the end rule that all brands need to become more mindful of. With custom sounds for your point of sale step. you’ve automatically gone a step further into identifying a stronger brand persona.
This is where sonic branding and sound strategy come into play. As a sonic brander, I assumed that the point of sale POS sound should mirror the brand's Sonic logo. However, according to Sentient’s Pay Sounds findings not necessarily Sentient did a number of different tests. The first was between visually and non visually branded payment experiences. The second test was incorporating a sonic element to the payment experience.
What they found was that generally sound added a positive emotional response, knowing that sound and music can infuse experiences with meaning and emotion. Our second hypothesis was that layering, well designed purpose built sounds into the payment experience would introduce enough positivity to at least offset its inherent negativity. Sound has undeniable emotional clout. Sound is really largely untapped or under leveraged element of a brand's identity.
In an era where most CEOs and CMOs are struggling to establish, much less sustain, meaningful and relevant connections to their customers, no company can afford to ignore the impact that well-designed and thoughtfully integrated sound can have on how their brands are perceived. Starting with something as simple as the payment experience, what surprised me, was that the sounds that added the highest positive response were not the sounds associated with existed.
Branded sound made Music a sonic branding agency responsible for works such as the AT&T Sonic logo, were tasked with writing a functional payment sound for the brands. In a study that did not already have an existing Sonic logo. These functional sounds scored higher than those sounds specifically associated with branded sound. Why did this occur and why didn't the sonic logos work best? I've been trying to make sense of this since I heard the results, and it's still unclear to me the answer.
All I have are theories. One theory. Although payment sounds shouldn't just be a generic afterthought, they need to be their own entity, separate from branding. They should evoke comfort and ease that the payment went through and that the customer should feel good about their spend, but not fully evoke the brand's identity in the process. Does that mean that all POS sounds should sound the same? Should we just create a pleasant mnemonic tone and call it a day?
Or should there be a separate brand identity for each store and each brand that only identifies for payment? The Sonic branding landscape is littered with brands that have slapped the poorly designed or badly matched Sonic logo on top of their visual identity and actually damaged their brand equity in the process. A well-designed sonic logo emerges from a carefully planned sonic identity system produced, tested and refined by industry leading sound specialists.
Another thought is that perhaps the sonic branding sounds used may not have been a broad enough representation. Sonic branding is a form of growth marketing, not performance marketing. This means that sonic credibility takes time and is an investment in long term ROI.
Perhaps the sonic branding elements used from these brands that were represented hadn't been mainstream long enough, and maybe the payment sounds that manmade came up with were more sonically familiar or accessible to the test group. So where do we go from here? I don't see these new findings as irrelevant by any means. However, as they were found, someone accidentally, I would consider these test results unsound and sonic branding inconclusive.
Further studies should be taken, and the purchase sound arena in general should be more fully explored. Testing should include both new and decades old Sonic branding to better AB test the results. For example, Mastercard's Sonic branding has only been in circulation since 2019. Its Sonic branding equity, can't be compared fairly to a company like McDonald's, whose Sonic logo has been in circulation for 20 years.
Another factor in the AB testing would be to have more than one Sonic branding agency represented to create the sounds for the... Soundless brands. Agencies all have their own flair and background. That should be factors of consideration. One thing is for sure, a lot more study and research needs to go into this new discovery. We have learned that care needs to be taken in the end purchase stage that is not currently being explored.
However, it may be more of a functional sound exploration rather than a sonic branding one. I for one, am very excited to see what this means. The end rule for purchasing needs to be something on all of our minds. That last step is your final contact with your client customer, consumer. It should matter. The purchase process needs to be given just as much care and attention as the first, “Hello”, and “Welcome to my business.” Perhaps even more so, I'll leave you with final words from Joe.
Or actually Galileo. Galileo said all truths are easy to understand once they are discovered. The point is to discover them. Thank you to Sentient Decision Science for their Pay Sounds study and the inspiration for this episode. Thank you also to Made Music for the Sonic logo and functional sounds that they contributed to the study. The sound effects were collected from Pixabay and the music selects.
Other than the theme song, were from some amazing musicians on ArtList.io ArtList.io Did you hear anything that sparked some interest in sound design or sonic branding for your business? I offer both consultations and sonic branding sound design through my company, Dreamr Productions. Shoot me an email and let's chat. All links will be provided in the show notes, let’s make this world of sound more intriguing, more unique, and more and more on brand.