Here's something people tend to forget when they talk about how a brand sounds. Your customers hear your sound now and then. An ad, an app notification, a call to the service line. Your own staff hear it all day long.
Think about it for a second. The hold music when somebody tests the phone line, the brand film that gets played at every single kick-off, the company podcast intro, the little sting before each webinar, the playlist running in the office or in the shop all day. I'd guess some of your people hear your sound logo a hundred times before a customer has heard it once.
And they decide what it becomes. A running joke, or something they're actually a bit proud of.
What usually happens
Most of these internal sounds were never chosen by anyone. The hold tone is whatever the phone provider set up. The webinar intro came from a stock site. And the playlist is whatever someone happened to put on Spotify that morning (often whoever got in first). None of it has anything to do with your brand, or with each other.
Nobody minds, for a while. But it means the people who represent you every day never hear what you're supposed to sound like. And then they're the ones running the stand at a trade fair, making the TikToks, recording the onboarding video.
Why it matters more than it looks
When the sound is good and consistent, staff use it. They put the sound logo at the end of their own videos. They play the anthem at events without being asked. That's free distribution, and honestly it's the kind you can't buy.
When the sound is bad, or annoying, or just random, they quietly stop using it. Or worse, it becomes the thing everyone does an impression of at the Christmas party. It can go either way, and it's usually decided in the first few weeks after launch.
A few things that help
Launch it inside first. Play it at an all-hands before it goes on air, and explain why it sounds the way it does. People are a lot kinder to a sound they understand.
Make it easy to use. Put the files where people can find them, with a one page explanation: which version for which situation, what not to do.
Test it for repetition. If your staff are going to hear something fifty times a day, like a hold tone or a notification, play it fifty times in a row before you sign off. Seriously. You'll know pretty quickly whether it's going to drive people mad.
And fix the boring stuff. The hold music, the webinar intro, the sound in the office. It's cheap, nobody outside notices, and everyone inside does.
So if you're thinking about how your brand sounds, maybe start inside. Ask a few colleagues what they hear from the brand on a normal workday, and write it all down. I bet the list is longer than you'd think, and I bet half of it nobody ever chose.