Most brands commissioning sonic branding today are solving the wrong problem.

They brief an agency to create a sonic logo - three seconds of distinctive audio that plays at the end of their ads. The agency delivers something memorable. The brand deploys it. Six months later, recognition hasn't moved. A year later, they've quietly stopped using it.

Somewhere in the Australian desert there’s a sonic logo graveyard where discarded logos for brands like Telstra, Westpac, and Mercedes have gone to die. 

The problem wasn't the logo. The problem was treating sound as an asset instead of infrastructure.

A sonic logo is a single asset. And like any single asset, it only works if you use it consistently, at volume, over time. But here's what no one tells you: you're not set up to use it consistently.

It worked for that hero brand campaign, but your product launch needs different music. Social content operates independently. Retail has its own approach. The app team is building experiences. Six months in, you have one distinctive sonic logo appearing in 10% of your touchpoints, and fragmentation across the other 90%.

That's not building salience. That's expensive inconsistency.

The problem isn't that brands don't know sonic branding works. At the recent Heard conference, Mark Ritson once again pointed out the irony of the IPSOS study into distinctive brand assets. Sonic branding is shown to be the most effective, yet the least used. (See slide). 

The problem is they commission a logo, not a system.

What You Actually Need

You need infrastructure. Not just a sonic logo, but a strategy defining sound's role, rules governing decisions, modular assets that adapt, and governance maintaining coherence.

A sonic ecosystem isn't about making everything sound identical. Think of how a visual brand adapts - different layouts, formats, and contexts - while still feeling unmistakably the same brand. Sonic ecosystems work the same way: a shared sonic code creates coherence without demanding sameness.

This is Sonic Code™: the framework defining what role sound plays, what feeling we're encoding, what the sonic palette is, and how sound adapts while serving the brand. It defines boundaries so different choices still sound like your brand.

We all know music is a powerful way to imbue emotion at every step along the customer journey. But without an ecosystem, you commission repeatedly. Different deals, different agencies, no compounding effect. With one, sound investments compound. Teams move faster. Recognition builds through coherence.

Sound doesn't build salience when it's a single asset. It builds salience when it's infrastructure.

In the world of sonic branding, experience counts. Get it right and you’ll have powerful distinctive brand assets, flexible enough for the long term but always recognisably yours.