BrandSutra Annual Lecture: Rajeev Raja plays the flute for some lessons on sonic branding

Advertising has evolved in a thousand different directions, and one of the most interesting of them is sonic branding, or creating a sound identity for brands. Rajeev Raja, Founder & Soundsmith, BrandMusiq, and an acclaimed musician in his own right, regaled the audience with a brief flute performance designed to impress upon the crowd the basic principle of sonic branding at the BrandSutra Annual Lecture.

“When we started BrandMusiq around 10 years ago, people asked us what is sonic branding? Is it just the ad jingles? No, it's a little deeper than that,” said Rajeev Raja. Instead of trying to define it, he took the audience through a sonic experience by playing a tune on his flute, asking them to close their eyes and “go where the music takes you”. He encouraged people to see some imagery, feel some emotions, or experience triggering of memories. At the end of it, he asked people to open their eyes and share their experience. Bravery, positivity, people moving forward, optimism, sunrise, valleys of Kashmir, greenery, nature, meadows, backwaters of Kerala – the audience turned up these varied experiences they had felt to demonstrate the power of sound. “Without any visuals, you all travelled in your mind,” commented Rajeev Raja. “It’s amazing wherever in the world that I played this piece of music, a composition of mine called Peace, everybody across cultures gets the same kind of feeling. A feeling of peace, nature, optimism, etc. There's a reason everybody's feeling this. It's not by accident. It's by design. Because this particular scale or raga that I use, is a very famous Indian raga called Hamsadhwani, which virtually means ‘Song of the Swan’. It gets its particular character because it uses only five notes in the scale. It's impossible to see night when you hear this scale. Now, if I just change one note in the scale, you will suddenly get a different feeling of melancholy, of going towards dusk probably. Well, this is the essence of sonic branding, that we understand what a brand stands for, what its values are all about, and then using the science of sound to depict that. Some brands are brave, optimistic, other brands are caring. Some brands are exciting. Now we're able to use those values and map it to a particular sound, to create something we call a mogo or musical logo. We also create mogo-scape, which is like a master sound for the brand.”

He then went on to play the Liril ad signature music, pointing out the elements of freshness and freedom in it, in a great lead-up to the BrandSutra Annual Lecture by Kailash Surendranath, producer of the famous Liril ad.