Colgate has stepped into the sonic branding world, collaborating with creative music agency MassiveMusic to match Colgate’s signature smile logo with an upbeat musical grin.
The oral care brand has launched its new sonic brand identity, a suite of sonic assets and compositions, produced by MassiveMusic London in collaboration with MassiveMusic New York. The agency was tasked with creating a holistic sonic experience.
A making-of video of the process starts with Colgate seeking something memorable, modern and reflective of the core brand promise of ‘Optimism in Action,’ while also being flexible enough to be stretched into different genres and work across all product offerings.
MassiveMusic’s idea was to ground the music in science, so it talked with academics, ethnomusicologists and neuroscientists to come up with the human hum as the perfect timbre for Colgate’s sonic logo. They recorded a blend of both female and male humming tones to make the sound real and natural, and created a steady pulse and bright accents for an optimistic tone. The choice of the key of D major was also a scientific one, generally agreed to be optimistic in nature.
“It was important that the new sonic experience not only felt fresh and exciting, but that it also embodied the brand’s promise…This needed to work across more than 200 countries via online content, radio, product and TVCs. And so we created a sonic architecture that could handle this complexity and an overarching aesthetic to the new Colgate music and sound that has universal appeal,” Roscoe Williamson, global creative strategy director at MassiveMusic, said in a statement.
Jared Richardson, global head of design at Colgate, added in a statement: “It really was an incredible experience developing the sound of Colgate with MassiveMusic…The result is a strategically valuable asset that will play out across our global marketing campaigns. We look forward to continuing developing this side of our brand.”