What Does Your Brand Sound Like?

Laurence Minsky and Colleen Fahey for the Harvard Business Review Blog:

To gain advantage on this leveled playing field, there’s one powerful branding tool that has been generally overlooked — or perhaps undervalued — by most marketers: sound. With of our increasingly audio-enabled media environment, the strategic use of sound can play an important role in positively differentiating a product or service, enhancing recall, creating preference, building trust, and even increasing sales.

Called audio branding, sonic branding, sound branding, or acoustic branding, cognitive studies show that relevant sounds and musical cues can truly influence people in ways marketers want. According to research presented at the 2012 Audio Branding Congress, congruent sound cues can increase the speed of a visual search for products (a key for success in both online and retail settings), as well as improve the perceived taste of food and wine (PDF).

Some marketers have long employed sound and music as part of their brand experience, including the familiar chime of an Apple Computer launching, the pop of the Snapple lid, and the aggressive howl of a Harley in rev mode.

A few years ago, at the beginning of Lady Gaga's ascent in pop music, I was at the gym with a friend. I found myself mindlessly singing along to one of her songs. My friend pointed this out to me. I didn't own any of her albums, didn't own the song, had never seen the video for the song and yet her sonic presence was so ubiquitous that I had managed to learn all the lyrics of the song totally unconciously. That kind of earworm quality is what makes sonic branding such a powerful tool that few people are utilizing.

Ken Burns' New iPad App Turns U.S. History Into Beautiful Mixtapes

The app, simply called “Ken Burns,” allows the user to surf an overarching timeline year by year, seeing how clips from each film line up chronologically with – and, as Burns says, “speak to” – each other. Zoom in on 1869, for example, and a cloud of clips from The Civil War, The West, and The National Parks orbit in parallax formation around one another; swipe to 1930, and it’s clips from Jazz, Prohibition, Baseball, Huey Long, Thomas Hart Benton and The Dust Bowl. You can also watch its six playlists straight through – they range in length from 20 minutes to an hour long – or select individual clips à la carte.
 

The concept came out of a conversation Burns was having two years ago with MacKinnon, who is the music entrepreneur behind Hear Music and has known Burns since they worked together on music components for 2001′s Jazz.

“Ken and I were talking about how his films were in the search engines of iTunes and Netflix, and they’re always the top-rated thing when they run on PBS, but there wasn’t a digital place where all of his films were presented as one thing, as an integrated body of work,” says MacKinnon. “Then he paused for a second, and looked at me and said, ‘I really love my iPad.’”

Download the app but only if you are prepared to lose your day to it. 

Photographer JR and New York City Ballet Collaborate For Art Series

An Unexpected Way to Experience a Night at the Ballet

Following the inaugural 2013 installation LES BALLETS DE FAILE, New York City Ballet is proud to collaborate with the French artist known as JR for the second annual Art Series.

Exhibiting freely in the streets of the world, JR catches the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. His largest project to date, INSIDE OUT, was born in 2011 when JR won the TED prize and called for the creation of a global art project with the potential to change the world. Transforming messages of personal identity into public works of art, more than 172,000 people have taken part in nearly 8,600 locations around the world.

JR will share his Art Series installation during three special performance evenings — January 23, February 7, 13 — when every seat in the house is available for just $29. On these evenings, every audience member will receive a takeaway created specifically for this event.

Absolutely love this collaboration. More please. NYC Ballet should have a ballet with sets designed by JR. 

A brief introduction to 4D printing

Skylar Tibbits and his team at MIT's Self Assembly Lab are working on programmable materials to create 4-D printing. What exactly is 4-D printing? The Self Assembly Lab works to create physical objects that can self-construct from stored memory inside their materials, adding what is commonly referred to as the 4th dimension — time — to 3-D printing. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Skylar was inspired by similar self-producing, self-constructing organisms in nature.

Talk Less, Do More

Discovered The Little Book of IDEO today and it led to a series of films created by various teams around the world to represent the company's culture and values. The above is one of my favorites and a philosophy I'm embracing this year. 

The Little Book of IDEO: Values from Tim Brown