National Australia Bank Sonic Branding · Sonic Experience Design for accessible brands, products & spaces

SONIC BRANDING

National Australia Bank
Sonic identity & guidelines

Unifying the brand journey with sonic branding.

National Australia Bank's (NAB) sonic guidelines set the framework for all future decisions about using sound, music, and voice with a cohesive sonic brand that builds long-term brand equity.

NAB's groundbreaking "breakup" campaign changed what people thought about NAB and how NAB saw itself.

This revitalization prompted a refocus of their positioning and identity. So NAB Brand reached out to me to help them articulate their sonic brand and show them how to best use their brand sound in their communication and experiences.

Services.

Sonic brand strategy

Sonic brand workshops

Voice identity

Sonic identity

Sonic guidelines

Team.

NAB Brand

Clemenger BBDO

XXVI

Application.

Television

Online

Voice assistants

On-hold

In-store

Events

Cinema

What NAB's brand team want to do.

How do we manage sound across such a complex brand?

The brand team makes sure music says and does the right thing for a wide variety of touchpoints, campaigns, and products. These range from brand campaigns and financial advice to corporate responsibility.

INSIGHT

Too many musical attributes and 'mood terms' overwhelm people and complicate decisions.

Making decisions . Explaining decisions

The guidelines need to make sense to experts and people who aren't confident in their musical expertise.

Everyone has a point of view when it comes to music. NAB Brand needed to know why certain music works in different situations to show they based decisions on reasoning, analysis, and purpose, not gut feel.

NAB's sonic identity

Being consistently ‘NAB’ doesn’t mean always sounding the same.

Being such a large business, NAB expresses itself differently depending on where they're speaking, who they're talking to, and what they want to achieve. And they need to deliver this in a way that always feels and sounds like NAB.

Brand analysis. Audits. Building sonic profiles for different use cases.

Matching the right sound to the right situation.

Not every situation needs every brand personality or voice trait dialed up to full volume. NAB doesn't emphasize the same brand personality traits and related musical attributes for a graduate event as they would when entertaining corporate partners.

KNOW WHAT FEELINGS, BELIEFS, AND BEHAVIOUR TO EVOKE AT DIFFERENT TOUCHPOINTS.

1

States of mind

I identified the three states of mind NAB needs to evoke with sound, voice, and music from NAB's customer insights and brand collateral. The core functional and emotional benefits that NAB gives customers.

2

Workshops & audits

Workshops and touchpoint audits discovered clusters of personality and voice traits. NAB dials them up and down to suit three core messages and the types of campaigns and experiences NAB uses to communicate these values.

3

Energy & tone

I used these clusters as the foundation to decide where to use sonic attributes, energy, and tone.

Putting the business and its agencies on the same page.

Workshops with NAB Brand and Clemenger BBDO's creatives built a shared understanding of NAB’s brand sound and use cases.

The guidelines

Describe, choose & test your music.

3 simple choices.

Three practical and straightforward sonic profiles organize NAB's sophisticated brand, touchpoints, and customer needs into task-based uses.

Each profile explains the on-brand musical qualities that will achieve different outcomes and where to use them.

NAB's sonic brand.

You're muted

VOICE LOGO

Friendly, confident, supportive, knowledgeable