How do you audit your own brand’s sound?
Collect everything you published in the last year that has audio, play it back to back, and check three things: does the sound match the message, was it made for you or picked from a library, and is there an audio logo at all. It takes about three hours and you need no software.
Why do it yourself first
You do not need a studio to find out whether your brand sounds like one organisation. Most of what an audit uncovers is audible to anyone who listens with the right questions in mind, and doing it yourself means you walk into any studio conversation already knowing what you are buying.
It also produces the one thing that convinces a sceptical room faster than any research figure: your own assets, played in a row, disagreeing with each other.
Step 1: Collect everything
Every asset from the last twelve months that makes a sound. Video ads and social cutdowns, brand films, the app if you have one, podcast intros, event openers, the hold music on your phone line, anything shown at a trade stand or in a shop.
Do not filter for quality. The forgettable ones are the point.
Step 2: Look at the visual effort first
Before you press play, look at what you post and how much attention goes into the visible side. Colour, type, framing, the fact that somebody clearly approved the grade.
Then ask what happened on the audio side of the same asset. In most brands the gap between those two answers is the entire finding. Nobody signs off a logo that is slightly the wrong blue. Plenty of organisations sign off a video with whatever library track came up first.
Step 3: Play everything back to back
In one sitting, in order, without skipping. Three questions per asset:
- Does the sound match the message? Not whether it is good. Whether it belongs to this brand saying this thing.
- Was this made for you, or picked? Library music is not a sin, but a brand that only ever picks has no sound of its own to pick from.
- Is there an audio logo? Anything at the end that signs the work as yours.
That third question is the one most often answered with no. In our experience the audio logo is the single most forgotten touchpoint in a brand system, which is also why it is usually the fastest thing to fix.
Step 4: Two technical checks anyone can hear
These are the checks we run professionally, and neither of them needs training.
Key. If you have an audio logo, does the music underneath it sit in the same key, or in a key that relates to it? When the bed and the logo disagree harmonically, the sign off sounds like a collision rather than a conclusion. You do not have to name the key to hear that something clashes at the last second.
Where the music stops. Listen to the end of every video. Does the music land on the bar, or does it get cut mid phrase because the edit ran out? A track chopped in the middle of a bar is the most common and most avoidable audio mistake in brand video, and once you notice it you will hear it everywhere. It reads as unfinished even to people who cannot explain why.
If you only take two things from this article, take these. They cost nothing to check and they are audible on a laptop speaker.
Step 5: Write down what you find, in solutions
The audit is easy. Presenting it is where people go wrong.
Do not walk into a marketing team and list what they are missing. Whoever picked those tracks is in the room, made a reasonable decision under deadline, and will defend it. Talk about what a solution could look like instead: if we had one audio logo, every one of these twelve videos would end the same way. Same finding, no defensiveness, and the conversation moves to what happens next rather than what went wrong.
How long does it take?
About three hours for a typical brand. Collecting takes longer than listening. If it takes you a full day, you probably have more audio touchpoints than you realised, which is itself worth knowing.
What a good result looks like
The encouraging sign is not that everything already matches. It is that there is a clear brief underneath the work.
When a brand knows what it is trying to sound like, even if the execution is inconsistent, the fix is straightforward: build the system and apply it. When there is no brief, no shared idea of the intended register, that is the real gap, and it needs answering before any music gets written.
When to bring someone in
A self audit tells you whether you have a problem and roughly how big it is. It will not tell you what your brand should sound like instead. That question needs the strategy conversation, and it is the first step of every project we take on.
If you want a second set of ears on what you found, send us the list. The sonic branding guide covers what comes after, and the pricing guide covers what it costs.