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 brands and individuals on the power of sound in marketing. Looking to create branded sound or need a sound strategist? Head on over to www.DreamrProductions.com and let's chat. That's www.DreamrProductions.com. Want to learn more about sound and marketing these days? Go to www.SoundInMarketing.com.
There's courses and resources galore. Now back to the show. We pick up where we left off, talking with Lisa DiStefano, Home Depot's current VP of Brand Marketing and Creative. We've been discussing the success and long reaching effect of Home Depot signature song, The Orange Theme.
In part one, Lisa described how they implemented sonic branding exercises with this song at the center to truly make it the sound of doing as a sonic brander I'm so glad you went through sonic branding exercises and put this into the foundation.
I'm so happy to hear that because the thing is, like, maybe this specific attribute won't last for forever, but once you have that foundation, you can build off of it, use a little bit of the old and do some new and just kind of baby step it into something else as you evolve as a company, because you will. You were just saying, like you had discount on orange paint. And so that was just how it worked.
You were trying to save and cut costs at the beginning, but now you're a larger company and you can actually grow and thrive and do things. So that's just so exciting to hear. And I'm excited to to see how this evolves and transitions and transposes into other things. Would you say that the sound would be more of a brand awareness and growth, or is it more in performance marketing?
At first I would have said, you know, as we were growing the brand and trying to maintain our position in an environment, the the branding element of that was the central focus. But it is become synonymous and can be used anywhere. It's an attention grabber in that in that performance moment, it is in some ways clickbait because it is. You hear it and you're like, what is Home Depot telling me now, right? There's a trusted conversation coming in this case.
And and I think it's also attractive to our partners. You know, that idea, even in the retail media space and people wanting to invest in our platform with us and so many large companies like ours have the opportunity and we are having this very strong brand experience, this very strong set of brand attributes and and tools that they can use. I think it becomes, you know, a deeper advantage for us to have these unique propositions, sound being one of them.
And in the video and in the the digital space, in the social space, you know, sound off, sound on. Right. You need all of those attributes to be able to attract and and be part of that storyline and every single piece of it. I think people sometimes under estimate what it can do and the power that it can do.
To your point on sonic branding, when you really start to dig in and and think about the senses and utilizing as many of them as possible in the relationship that you build with your customer in terms of messaging, you know, this is just a sweet spot that I think people sometimes may not think about. Deeply enough continuity, that ability to have a play in that space, I think is super positive for us as an organization and as a creative organization, to be thinking holistically.
It's a different play in a different angle. What's the sound? You know, the sound going to be for this particular moment, leveraging that original spot. So I would geek out with you all day long on it. I think once you get into it, you know, and you start to really think about creative from this type of angle in a soundscape for your environment, as if it were, you know, a, you know, longer form video. Often those cases, right?
You think about it in that way, but in the short form I think is pretty powerful. There's a depth to an experience you have with the customer when it's more all inclusive and all in. you watch something that's one thing when you feel that be if you're if you're sound is strong enough and it's turned up enough and you hear that the whole vibration of it is energetic and powerful. And that is a whole nother level of just seeing someone do something, or hearing a voiceover on top of it.
But that, that is a unique thing. And I think that's why, as you said, right, there's the guitar riff, but there's that, that strong beat. And then we can interject the sound of a drill or something happening, and it feels right. And it's visceral. I can feel this happening. And that's a pretty magical thing for us.
It's certainly something we're not going to, you know, even if the world were to change and we were to walk away from it, I think we're the power of what we learned through this experience. Will will be part of us and the way we think of our overall brand, brand standards and brand voice. When you say brand voice, right, people think about the way you write copy and that, and I think our brand voices is deeper than that, which is, very, very, very cool and exciting for a creative.
I think the word brand voice is being reassessed because I agree, people always thought that it was copy, but it's so much more than that. Had drum lines work it. We've had marching bands work it, we've had our associates work it on their own, social media. It's a catchy, energetic thing that people just love to play with. So yes, we have some amazing work that we've been gifted by a lot of people that have exactly that energy around them.
Lots of orange buckets upside down make a lot of really great beats. Do you have a favorite, either an iteration that a fan did or one that you actually used in an official campaign? The original is always my favorite. What I think is interesting is the fact that people can recognize that beat, even in work like 545, which was very much an ode to our customers and the people that are doers and that experience. What kind of person would come here?
at 5:45 a.m. well, there's Carly, a carpenter just like her dad. There's Juan. He's building a house and a better life. Kenton and Sadie are here because the couple that grouts together stays together. Mary is a drama teacher, and she'll do anything for her students, even build sets before class. LaMar needs a torch and clamps for welding. School Ed’s putting in a pool for a friend. We all need an Ed. That's who’s in our parking lot at 5:45 AM real customers made for doing.
At the Home Depot, everything we do. for them. and even in that light morning tone of getting ready to get doing you hear those pluck pluck pluck like you know and you get it and it's coming you know and it's it's soft but it's there and it's that just getting ready to get going.
And so that whole idea that you can, you can play it like that and have that experience and then come back with that, you know, equity track, be heavy, you know, handed and you're still thinking about doing in those different ways. I love holiday, I'm big holiday fan overall.
And so that idea of taking it to that celebration place that comes with, you know, preparing for, holidays and, and lights twinkling in the background and that, you know, that kind of tonality is another one of my favorites. (The Orange Song playing) (The Orange Song Playing) The magic that can happen when you start with an incredibly strong Sonic branded sonic sound and branding, and then you apply it, and then it's authentically there, even if it is more subtle.
And I love it when people recognize it. Even in those cases, would there be any piece of advice that you would give to another brand on what you've learned, or your suggestions on moves towards sonic branding? Because everyone's kind of talking about it at this point, not everybody is doing it yet. What pieces of advice, words of wisdom would you give to a company
that's starting to assess that? In a cluttered landscape I think you have to work incredibly hard to make sure that you’re recognized that you're breaking through. And everybody talks about, well, I have to breakthrough creative and, you know, how do you do that? And and that's our mission. You know, to be exciting and, and do that. And I think you can't leave anything out of your quiver when you're doing that.
And I think it's an opportunity that many people overlook as being able to own it and recognize it or they do, which is wonderful, a triggered moment in a, you know, a sonic logo or, or something. But they don't necessarily give their creative teams and their branding teams a full suite of things to work with. And I think the ability to have that full suite and make the investment in what we sound like, ask a group of people what you sound like, and the conversation gets incredibly rich.
It's, you know, what do we look like? You know what people do when it's like, what do you look like well we look like this. And are people have their sleeves rolled up and their hands are in the dirt, you know, and you can just picture what it smells like and, you know, but then you say, what do we sound like? And you think about drills and hammers and you think about people laughing or wiping their brow. There's a sound to all of those things, right?
And it's what is amazing about the, you know, the, the artistry that goes into producing, you know, movies we love and all of that. Why leave that to like those, you know, those sorts of places, right? You want to captivate the customer all the time in every way you can.
And then you get to this amazing place where it just infiltrates not only what you do when put on the screen or what you do when you put on a, you know, in the radio, you know, environment or audio environment specifically, but then it starts to infiltrate how you think about, your brand within the context of events and experiential work and other things. Don't sell it short. What it can do to motivate teams to really think holistically and really question will it be relevant to our customer?
What does our customer sound like and think like? How do they want to participate? That kind of energy is, worth every bit of effort you put into it will pay back in multiples for sure. That was a great answer. I loved that answer. Well, I'm glad we have the shared passion. And I've enjoyed every minute of it. And hopefully you can tell that I am a I am a Sonic branding fan. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for your time. I've just loved digging into this with you. Thank you.
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Let's make this world of sound more intriguing, more unique, and more and more on brand.