It’s disconcertingly reassuring when someone writes a book about an emerging market that you have set up a company to exploit.  Great that the idea is gaining traction – in our case helping brands to make effective use of sound and music – and that others are actively developing the market with you.  Ever so slightly annoying that you didn’t get there first, but c’est la vie!  This is not an unusual experience for internet entrepreneurs, I am sure, and luckily, there are many aspects left requiring future research, publication, and business development.

With the publication of Sound Business, Julian Treasure picks up the sound baton passed by Martin Lindstrom, who in his book Brand Sense states that successful brands of the future will be multisensory, appealing holistically to all the senses, not just sight as is more often than not the case today.  Brand Sense has also influenced us at Sound Strategies.  Although one of our less academically-robust sources it is bursting with vision and commercial perspective, which is why we included reference to it in previous SMC posts and our recent debate on exploiting sound in social media.

Julian has done an extensive job in promoting his book through a panoply of traditional and social media, including no less than a wiki, blog, squidoo.com lens, two online channels to buy the book, three online profiles, all of which can be accessed via a central URL:   http://www.soundbusiness.biz/.  It’s a model worth investigating if you are planning launching a book on your area of expertise at some stage …  So far it all looks pretty one-sided, but I hope that he succeeds in creating some much-needed debate, driving client learning, integrating previously disparate skills, and promoting a balanced perspective on what organizations need to succeed in creating effective sonic brands.

A first requirement is for clients to come to this sort of project fully aware of the dangers of making enduring business decisions based upon incomplete evidence of outcomes, relationships, psychology, and processes.  As a respected musician, educationalist, and international speaker on such subjects, my partner Michael Spencer voices his views on this on the Sound Strategies blog.

A second need is to establish a consistently shared vocabulary that means the same thing to an acoustician, a composer, a sound consultant, a retail marketer, a web administrator, marketing VP, or whoever, about the task in hand.  The current trend that we are seeing among some competitors trade-marking generic phrases and promoting their own confusing terminology when appropriate terms from music, visual identity, and wider marketing already exist and easily can be adopted and where necessarily extended to promote clarity.

I believe that the real skill here is in enabling an organisation to identify its optimum sound strategy as an integral part of its brand identity, choosing from the thousands of potentially appropriate musical genres, not just the consultant’s favourites.  Many international corporate identity programmes are long and complicated affairs, it would be a shame if the promise of the aural medium fell at the first hurdle due to ill-formed advice and guidance.  Failure here would stop in their tracks companies willing to experiment with sound, say on websites, as being just “too problematic”, “expensive”, and “unpopular”.  As my colleague David Bowen said in the Financial Times recently: “Sound is here to stay on the web. Give it more attention, and it could be a real benefit. If you don’t it will stay just plain annoying.”