What Does Your Brand Sound Like?

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This blog was originally written by Ja’Qor Goodwin, the Strategist and Voice Team Lead at Nebo Agency, a Setup agency partner.

Nebo is a human-centered agency built for the digital world. Because of their prior experience in voice technology, we asked for their opinion on voice marketing in the future.

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First Things First

Smart speakers are the fastest-growing consumer technology ever. They are faster than smartphones, TV, and computers. 

Take a step back, though, and see that what consumers are really adopting is voice assistants. These voice assistants allow us to interact with technology on our terms—verbal communication—instead of clicking, typing, or swiping. 

Humans process sound faster than any other sense. And when we can communicate with our devices via voice (and the devices understand our words and intentions), we can get the information we need faster. 

Some of the most common uses for voice assistants are related to simple tasks like the weather, playing music, and simple search. But people are searching via voice more often and with different intentions. 

In Voicebot.ai's 2019 survey, 60% of U.S. adults said they used voice search. 47% of those adults expected to increase their usage of voice search. For context, there are 250 billion annual voice searches.

Remember voice assistant =/= smart speaker.

Smartphones account for most of the voice searches that happen today, but only one in four Americans use a smart speaker (though this number will continue to increase). 

The Voice Assistants

The Big Three voice assistants are household names: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple's Siri. They are each built upon a couple of key software components including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and parsing, natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), speech-to-text, and text-to-speech. 

Each voice assistant has different strengths and ecosystems.

Amazon's strength in product search gives Alexa an edge. While Amazon leads in smart speaker sales, it is still losing ground to Google. Loup Ventures performs an annual IQ test for voice assistants across Local, Commerce, Navigation, Information, and Commands categories. Google performed best in every category except commands, which Siri won. 

Siri is a walled garden compared to Amazon and Google, which both have more developer access. The tide may be changing, however. 

In 2019, Apple opened up Siri support for Spotify, a direct competitor to Apple Music, and joined an alliance with Amazon, Google and Zigbee to develop and open standard for smart home devices. 

Marketers, like consumers, see Alexa as the leading voice assistant. According to Voicebot.ai, marketers have launched almost twice as many Alexa Skills as Google Actions. That said, platform-agnostic content allows you to meet your audience where they are. 

But don't forget about Samsung Bixby and Microsoft's Cortana. These two are smaller players now, but Samsung is making a developer push with Bixby Capsules and Microsoft seems to be taking a more B2B approach. All this to say, there is about to be a big push with voice assistants. 

Smart Speakers and Brand Sound

From jingles to startup sounds, brands have been thinking about sound for a while now. Apple's magic chord. The Microsoft Windows XP startup and shutdown lullabies. The McDonald's jingle. The NBC chime. Intel's sonic logo. The list of recognizable tunes is endless. 

Except now, brands can go beyond the music and have a voice. Smart speakers are unique in that they are always-on devices. We can close our laptops, put our phones on silent, and turn off the TV, but smart speakers are always listening.

This means that a brand's voice presence needs to work around the clock. 

Of course, the access voice assistants have to us brings privacy and trust concerns. In fact, in a 2019 Microsoft survey, 41% of people expressed concerns about trust and privacy. 

There were, and still are, endless headlines about humans reviewing voice assistant queries. But this is essential to improving the ASR, NLP, and NLU that make the devices work in the first place. Amazon, Google, and Apple have each responded to these concerns by giving users the option to delete their audio recording history and, in some cases, disable audio recording entirely.

What to Consider with Your Brand’s Sound

First and foremost, extending a brand's experience to sound or audio requires defining exactly what that means. 

Does "sound" mean a branded podcast? Voice assistant applications? A sonic brand identity? All of the above, or something completely different? Once that is defined, the next step should be determining how that aligns with your audience's needs, wants, and expectations. 

Extending a brand to new channels is a major effort that requires making the business case and proving return on investment (ROI). So, once your team has defined what “sound” means to the brand, determine key performance indicators (KPIs) for how you will measure and optimize your efforts. 

If you're thinking about extending your brand to sound, use your brand's principles to guide every decision. 

A brand’s sound should be a logical extension of the following:

• A brand’s platform, 

• values, and 

• positioning. 

If sonic brand means a voice application or branded podcast, things like speed, tone, inflection, and accent all play a role in the emotions that are conveyed to your audience. With voice applications, is your brand voiced by the default voice assistants? Is your brand's voice a celebrity, a paid actor, or is it something unique to the brand?

Over the past year, Google Assistant has rolled out celebrity voices like John Legend, Samuel L. Jackson and Issa Rae. Other tools like Resemble.ai can reproduce AI-generated voices from audio samples. 

Brands Doing It Well

Nike dropped its Adapt BB self-lacing shoes on Google Assistant during halftime of a Celtics-Lakers NBA game. It was a perfect example of audience-experience fit, and the shoes sold out within six minutes. 

Mastercard has been retooling and extending its brand, from audio press releases to a unique taste with two branded macaroon flavors. Mastercard has been a visionary, but even their search for the perfect sonic logo took two years to find.

Starbucks is using voice to take the frustration out of morning wait times. Starbucks Rewards members can order straight from Google Assistant. Don’t worry, Alexa users, there’s a Skill for you to order your usual drink too. Check it out on Youtube. 

Westworld The Maze is an Alexa Skill based on the HBO show. The Skill is an interactive story game with more than 60 storylines and took Grand Prix honors at last year’s Cannes. Again, this demonstrates audience-experience fit, as the most loyal fans of the show get to extend their experience across devices.

Voice and…

At Nebo, we don’t think it’s necessary to be “voice first,” so much as “voice and.” Looking forward, we expect voice to become more ingrained and more seamlessly integrated into all kinds of experiences. 

Take gaming for example. Traditionally, console and computer gaming has been a 2D experience in which you translate your intentions into buttons on a controller or keyboard, with little direction or feedback from the game itself. But what if you could talk to the game while you were playing it? Sony recently patented an in-game voice assistant that may ship with its upcoming PlayStation 5. This could change the booming world of esports. 

Smart speakers are the fastest-growing consumer technology ever. And brands are starting to find ways to incorporate voice assistants into their ecosystems. The best way to do that is to start with defining the boundaries for your brand and your audience.

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Special thanks to Nebo Agency for providing their expertise on voice marketing. If you enjoyed this blog, be sure to subscribe to their newsletter to catch up on the latest trends in the digital marketing space.