Here’s something most business owners have never considered: your brand already has a sound.
You may never have commissioned a jingle, briefed a composer or spent a minute thinking about audio. It doesn’t matter. Every time a customer calls you, watches one of your videos, hears your advert or uses your app, they hear something. And that something is shaping how they feel about your business.
The only question is whether anyone chose it.
Listen to your business
Think about all the places a customer might hear you. For most businesses, the list is longer than expected:
| Where customers hear you | What they often hear by default | What it can say about you |
|---|---|---|
| Phone greeting | A rushed recording made on someone’s mobile, or a robotic system voice | “We didn’t think this was important” |
| IVR menu (“press 1 for…”) | A generic synthetic voice reading a long list of options | “You’re a number in a queue” |
| On-hold music | The phone system’s default track, looping every 15-30 seconds | “We’re the same as everyone else” |
| Adverts | Whatever music the agency or radio station suggested that week | Nothing consistent from one ad to the next |
| Social media videos | Whatever track is trending, or the first one the editing app offered | A different personality in every post |
| YouTube and website videos | Stock music chosen to fill the silence | A mood, but not a brand |
| Podcasts | Royalty-free intro music shared with thousands of other shows | Nothing that’s yours |
| Events | A playlist someone put together on the morning | Fine, but forgettable |
| App and product sounds | The default notification ping | Indistinguishable from every other app |
None of these are disasters on their own. But add them up and your customers are hearing a dozen different, unrelated sounds, none of which were chosen to represent you. That’s still a sound. It’s just not one you designed.
Even silence says something
Some businesses think they’ve sidestepped the issue by having no sound at all. No hold music, no audio on their videos, no greeting beyond a ringing phone.
But silence communicates too. On a phone line, silence makes people wonder whether they’ve been cut off, and many will hang up rather than find out. On a video, silence can feel unfinished. At an event or in a reception area, silence can feel awkward or empty.
There’s no such thing as a neutral option. Whatever your customers hear, or don’t hear, becomes part of their experience of your brand.
The wrong question, and the right one
When business owners first hear about sonic branding, the natural question is: “Does my business need it?”
It sounds like a sensible question, but it assumes there’s a choice between having a sound and not having one. There isn’t. Your business already sounds like something, everywhere customers hear you.
So the more useful question is:
“What is my business currently communicating through sound?”
Once you ask it that way, the conversation changes. It’s no longer about whether to add something new. It’s about whether the sound you already have is helping your brand or quietly working against it.
The double standard
Here’s what I find remarkable. A company might spend thousands defining exactly how its logo, colours and typography should be used. There are rules for the minimum size of the logo. There’s a specific shade for every colour, written down in three different formats. Nobody would dream of letting a supplier pick a random font for the website.
Yet the auditory experience is often left entirely to chance: whatever music, voiceover or phone-system default happened to be available at the time.
I don’t think that’s because businesses don’t care. It’s because nobody ever pointed out that sound is part of the brand. It’s invisible in a way that a badly placed logo never is. You can’t see it on the brand guidelines, so it never makes it onto the agenda.
The opportunity is that, because so few businesses get this right, the ones that do stand out immediately.
A quick sound audit you can do this week
You don’t need any expertise to find out what your business sounds like. Set aside half an hour and try this:
- Call your own phone line from a mobile, as a customer would. Listen to the greeting, go through the menu and stay on hold for a couple of minutes. How does it make you feel?
- Play your last three videos back to back with the sound up. Do they sound like they come from the same business?
- Listen to your most recent advert if you have one, and compare it to your social content. Is there any common thread?
- Check your licences. Do you know where your music came from and whether you’re licensed to use it where you’re using it? Music on a phone line counts as a public performance and needs its own licensing.
- Write down three words that describe your brand, the ones you’d use for your logo or website. Now ask: does what I just heard match those words?
If the honest answer is “no” or “I’m not sure”, you’ve found the gap between how your brand looks and how it sounds.
From accidental to intentional
The good news is that the fix doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. It starts with one idea of what your brand should sound like, and then making sure every place customers hear you comes from that idea.
That’s exactly what we do at DJi Studio. We create an original piece of music for each client, written exclusively for them, and build everything else from it: the phone greeting, the on-hold music and messages, the radio ad, the social video intro, the event soundscape. Because our music is original and isn’t registered with PRS, there’s no PPL PRS licence to worry about on your phones, and we provide all the licences you need to use your audio anywhere.
The result is a business that sounds like itself, everywhere, on purpose.
If you’d like to understand the bigger picture first, start with our complete guide to sonic branding, or read why sound should be part of your brand identity.
And if you’ve just called your own phone line and winced, get in touch with DJi Studio. I’m always happy to have a chat about how your business sounds today, and how it could sound.
About the author: Dan is the founder of DJi Studio. Before starting DJi, he spent 8 years at PHMG, working on audio branding and on-hold production for businesses of all sizes. DJi Studio creates original, broadcast-ready sonic identities, from sonic signatures and radio ads to on-hold messaging and social audio.