The Brand
The Project
Simon Squibb is a dynamic entrepreneur and visionary with a passion for transforming ideas into impactful ventures. With a track record of founding and scaling multiple successful businesses, he has amassed a following of 9 million followers (Sept 2024) across his socials and now fronts a large personal brand with the primary purpose of funding people's dreams.
Simon founded Helpbnk where all revenue from his platforms, ventures and sponsors goes back into funding peoples dreams.
Simon Squibb saw the power in sound for brand awareness and recognition, especially with his social media reach, and we have been developing a sound strategy, initially with the focus being on a Sonic Logo.
After spending some time getting to know Simon and his teams goals we soon realised there was no Sonic Strategy in place for the music they were using. We understood the power of utilising a wider strategy withs sound to drive more engagement to his platforms and in turn drive more investment into people's dreams.
Using trending sounds simply wasn't going to be enough to engage people with the brand emotionally. We needed to use sound more coherently across the brand which meant we needed to create more than just a Sonic Logo. We set out to create an audio toolkit of music for Simon Squibb's editing team to use across his content consistently. Choosing songs without a sound strategy could potentially be damaging to the brand so we needed to establish what sound resonated with their core values and the audience demographic.
We took Simon and his team through our SoundBoard Process and create a full Sonic Strategy.
This allowed us the springboard to project manage ourselves through creating a plethora of songs, transition sounds, Sonic Logos and more that are intentional and will drive more recognition and emotional engagement to the brand.
The Strategy
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The Songs
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Considering the variety of use cases across all socials and media we felt that having one track would be too limiting and trying to include a variety of emotions in one longer track would make for complicated editing.
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Therefore we created 3 tracks that each contained 3 Sections, a medium energy, lower energy and higher energy section (Section A, B & C for the purpose of this SoundBoard). This will allow for clearer and easier edit when putting together content but most importantly creates many combinations of edits that suit any narrative of content.
For example:-
If you used any 2 Sections from any of the 3 tracks to create a 'new track', you would have 9 combinations of potential new track structure combinations (we'll illustrate this further below for more clarity on how this works). We have cut all the sections out into separate files, so all the editing team have to do is put the sections together top and tail that best fit the emotion of the video - designing their ideal backing track for any content!
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If you used any 3 Sections from any of the 3 tracks to create a 'new track', you would have 27 combinations of potential new tracks.
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4 Sections = 81 potential new tracks and so forth
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The Key
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We plan to use the same key for all variations of songs to allow for seamless edits between the different tracks.
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BPM
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120BPM is our BPM. This is neutral to most popular genres of music and allows us to easily create track lengths of 15 seconds, 30 seconds and 60 seconds, the most popular lengths of track we get asked when making social media content.
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Brand Tracks
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Track 1 - Emotional
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This version begins with the emotional piano that already works so well in content. We aren't aiming to change the formula of what 'works' in Simon's content, purely to enhance and bring more recognition to the music as much as the visual. This will enhance people's emotion when they scroll onto Simon's content and instantly feel a certain way which will in turn keep their attention longer on the content.
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The emotional arc of the track develops throughout which mirrors the emotional support provided in the motivational conversations in the content.
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The result of the emotional build is that by the end the viewer has been on a journey both in music and the story itself - doubling down on emotional connection.
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The track loops back to the piano at the end for a moment of reflection - this is the only track that gives that moment of reflection because it's more emotional and we felt it needed this full story conclusive moment.
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Track 2 - Motivational
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This track begins with building anticipation that brings you the feeling something epic is about to happen, something great is on the horizon.
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We hear the piano return for some familiarity and cohesion with the Emotional track.
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As the build begins a choir is introduced to support the human element in every story and the percussion builds to support the excitement felt as people start to feel they can make their dreams a reality.
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The outro allows for last moments of the story to play out but also keeps the energy level up as if there's more to the story - This anticipation and tension can be released in later videos when the story is revisited and would be where Track 3 comes into the picture.
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Track 3 - Celebratory
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This track is all about the fun and celebratory moments when either revisiting stories or wanting some more upbeat content.
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You should be able to recognise the melodies associated with the brand after listening to this track. They should already feel familiar which shows the power of creating that 'hook. These melodies are intentional and can be malleable across instrumentation and creatively across the brand to keep everything feeling 'familiar' to the listener.
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The introduction allows space for the foundations to be laid in the video, setting the scene.
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When the beat comes in the signature bass also kicks in with the drums to provide a full energetic "lets get to this" feeling.
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The middle section drops in energy to allow the narrative to develop and gets people intrigued, anticipating that there is more to be told in the story.
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Have you spotted Simon's voice. We sampled the famous 'What is your dream?' and have manipulated it to become part of the rhythmic hooks within the song. We didn't want the phrase to ever fully be heard in an obvious way, but people that really know Simon's voice will pick up on this consciously or subconsciously integrated into the Sonic Branding.
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This ends in a big foot tapping manner that makes you feel a moment of celebration.
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You will hear there is space for the Sonic Logo dotted throughout the track to be subtly re-establishing the Simon Squibb Sonic Branding without people focussing on it or drawing attention away. This is the case for all the tracks.
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Sonic Logo
The beauty of building Brand Tracks is that we can pull any element out of the track and begin to build a brand Audio Toolkit. This is how we reached the below Sonic Logo idea.
It is in keeping with the track, it uses the melodic intervals and recognisable textures throughout so it can be seamlessly integrated into content and placed amongst content without clashing with the tracks.
Interactive Audio Toolkit
As explained in the Strategy section, we have designed these tracks to be delivered in sections so that the team can 'build' their own tracks for content depending on the emotional arc of the videos. Below is an example of a grid where you can trial and test your own combination of sections to build a track.
1) Press the play button on the video which has no music, only talking.
2) Click play on any audio play button from column 1, then column 2, and column 3. Watch the content and how your choice of music works. You should hear that no matter which play button you click, you can create a very different emotional feeling and story to the content.
Column 1
Emotional
Motivational
Celebratory
Column 2
Column 3
Content Examples
Travel Girl_Sonic_1.0
Bin Guy_Sonic
Thai Restaurant_Sonic
Thai Restaurant 2_Sonic
See it in action:
Additional places to use Sound:
Complete
What's next?
Send this to all team members that are involved in the application of Sound across your brand.
Want us to present something like this to your team?
Sure! We can present this to all involved at any time so you never lose consistency, recall or engagement across your brand.
Don't want to stop here?
Would you like us to create bespoke music for your brand?
We have everything we need to get started on your Sonic Branding.
If you would like Bespoke music for a specific campaign, a Podcast, App, or more..
click 'Get Started' below and we'll send you over a quote and schedule studio time to get started.
Call
George - +44 7557 108826
Luke - +44 7851 487782