What is Vocal Branding?

Vocal Branding is a concept and the term Coined by Tim Noonan in 2009 to describe a strategically sound focus on voice in the branding process.

Your brand is already talking, it has a sound, but what is it really saying to your customers consciously (and even more importantly) on an unconscious level?

Vocal Branding is the strategic and purposeful use of voice to strengthen and enhance brand experiences – so your products, brands and user experiences sound as compelling as they look and feel!

Vocal Branding realises the intrinsic capacity of the human Voice to transmit emotion, and its extraordinary potential to create compelling, durable and trusted brand relationships with customers.

Voice is an incredibly powerful, though under-utilised touchpoint of brand communication, and is key to building strong and on-going trusted brand relationships. Tim Noonan intimately understands contemporary use of voice. This means that the tone of your brand (its VocalFeel™) will be natural-sounding, and – most important of all – will be highly relevant and sound familiar to your customers and prospects, speaking directly to their interests and needs.

Authentic, natural-sounding voices, carefully selected and directed to resonate with the values of the brand, lead to a more vibrant and personalised relationship between the brand and a customer

Vocal Branding is a powerful way to create brands which are more unique, engaging and compelling; where all voices are fully, precisely and uniquely On-Brand.

Vocal Branding strategy can elevate and completely transform the tone and impact of all your products, services and user experiences through their spoken messages in:

• Virtual Assistants & Smart Home Devices – Conversational computing, Gender, Accent, persona and identity;

• Script writing and voicing of automated and human-based telephone services – ‘on hold’ messages and call-centre scripts;

• Talking Devices – GPS, PDAs and SmartPhones, ATMs, Voting machines, point-of-sale devices;

• Audio Announcements and Safety – Transportation & Location information, Instructions, Alarms, Emergency Messages, Aircraft Safety Announcements, Evacuation Procedures etc;

• Advertisements – Television, Radio and online;

• Executive – voice mail messages, live and recorded presentations by high-level corporate representatives;

• Videos – educational and promotional;

• Recordings – Audio books, Tutorials, Audio training programs, Corporate podcasts, Meditation programs and Workshops;

• Interactive – Computer based training applications, augmented reality and mobile applications and other media applications involving voice.

With brands, just as with people, relationships often start with a glance, but they usually develop through speaking and conversation.

To be successful in a super-saturated market, modern branding approaches need to really ‘touch’ us, they need to express the perfect blend of intellect and emotion. Tim’s Vocal Branding methodology achieves this because (when appropriately guided) the human voice is biologically designed to do just that, being positioned immediately between the head (the centre of intellect) and the heart (the centre of feelings).

Vocal Branding goes so much deeper than images and surfaces, this is because the sound vibrations produced by the human voice literally cause the listener’s body to sympathetically ‘entrain’, that is they vibrate in resonance with the vocal vibrations produced by the speaker. This is why the human voice is the natural carrier-wave of emotion – literally ‘telling us’ what is inside and behind the images that make up the visual brand.

In the same way that graphic brand design employs the psychology of shape and colour, Vocal Brand design employs the psychology of voice, perception, attention, and hearing.

Tim Noonan’s contemporary Vocal Branding approaches result in more spoken messages in the marketplace that are inviting, suggest possibility, are engaging and compelling. They literally lay down the sound foundations on which an authentic conversation can build between the consumer and your brand.

Our Vocal Branding philosophy is a paradigm shift in the ways that voice is viewed and employed as part of marketing, branding and advertising activities. We apply a fresh and contemporary reframing of the ways voice has traditionally been considered in these industries – we innovate with voice – traditional approaches tend to imitate how it has always been done before.