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Winner Story

Merrell Sonic Branding by Sixieme Son

In 2021, the outdoor footwear brand, Merrell set out to revamp its overall brand identity. Creating a sonic identity, the marketing team realized, would be an essential element to Merrell’s branding strategy. The company tapped Sixieme Son, an innovator in the space. The result was a soundscape that captured the essence of Merrell’s brand, and earned The Communicator Award of Excellence for Corporate Identity – Sonic Branding in 2023. We spoke with the agency about their award-winning project, their in-house audio team and what timeless communication means to them.

Tell us about the first workshop session Sixieme Son had with Merrell?
Our first session with any client is getting to understand what’s at the core of a brand. What are its values and brand personality? We look for the things that are unique, which don’t always come across in a creative brief. To get the process going we run a mood board workshop which helps our clients associate their brand values, personality and unique attributes with specific types of sounds.

The mood board itself is made up of short musical clips our musical strategists have put together based on how the brand described itself in the creative brief. The first workshop is all about playing these music boards for the clients and, often, their agency. We watch and listen to get a sense of what tempos, instruments, rhythms, voices and textures they feel best fits their brand.

Tell us about the structure of the team that contributed to the sonic branding?
We have an account team and a creative team who are composer/sound designers. We have the musical strategy group that we mentioned earlier. This team discusses the creative brief and starts to collect existing music that contains ideas that might help communicate the brand attributes described in that brief. If a brand describes itself as optimistic and energetic, the strategists will collect and group music that explores each of those aspects. In the mood board workshop, we play a curated selection for the client/agency group and gauge their reactions.

The creative team is in-house. They’re the ones who actually design the sonic identities. Sixieme Son is unique in that we only work with in-house composers, and they’re trained to create music that will work for brands and to work as a team. Collaboration is a critical part of Sixieme Son’s DNA.

How did the concept and style of the project evolve over time?
This is a really interesting question. After the sonic identity was established, a new CEO joined Merrell. He had a background in fashion and wanted to adjust the positioning of the brand a bit in order to give it a fashion component without losing its heritage as an outdoor brand.

We started by trading music tracks with the Merrell creative team to help clarify the Merrell conception of a fashion sound – a sound that both conveyed joy in the outdoors, but also had a trendier vibe that could work in a fashion show. After some back and forth we were able to establish a shared vision. We then created a library of sounds that contain the core elements of the sonic identity, but could also be turned into more trendy and danceable music. This gave Merrell the freedom to emphasize the fashion aspect of the brand.

If you had an unlimited budget, what would you add?
We would extend the sonic identity into Merrell’s retail outlets so that we could infuse the in-store experience with that same joyful, nature-loving, welcoming, and approachable vibe. We’ve created store sound designs with other brands where we used directional speakers to create specific moods within different sections of a store.

Let’s say a Merrell shopper is in a corner where trail running shoes are on display. The mood could be set by playing the sounds of someone running on leaves beside a rustling brook hearing light music threaded with birdsong. In the fashion section we could set the stage by playing the danceable version of the music. There is a huge opportunity to use sound to create separate spaces and to enhance the in-store experience.

How does this project represent Sixieme Son’s creative ethos
Sixieme Son is all about brand clarity, how do we create a sonic identity that is an authentic representation of the brand? Merrell’s goal is to prompt people to get out into nature and to make the great outdoors accessible to everyone. We wanted to come up with a musical dimension that felt like the outdoors. To us, it just made sense to go directly to nature for inspiration. Our team hiked into a forest and recorded the sounds one hears there, such as footsteps walking on leaves and birdsong. We experimented with the natural sounds you’d produce if you were making music with sticks, logs, and stones around a campfire.

Our ethos is highly collaborative; we come up with these sounds and ideas, compose them into musical concepts and then bring them to the client’s listening committee. We watch how the listeners respond to the musical ideas. We never sell; we’re far more interested in knowing if what they hear conveys how they imagine their brand.

We’re excited to be celebrating 30 years at The Communicator Awards. What aspects of communication are timeless to you?
Music is absolutely timeless for people. It gets lodged into our brains and stays with us our entire lives. All of us can remember the brand music we heard in our youth, and it becomes nostalgic.

But nostalgia is only one aspect of that timelessness. Music can evolve with the times. State Farm has had the same core jingle for 52 years, but the musical expression has been updated to reflect the tastes of the contemporary audience. It’s the same tune Barry Manilow composed in the early 1970’s, but we’ve been able to recompose it with a much fresher, cleaner, newer sound. Music’s inherent timelessness means we can update a sonic identity without losing any of the brand equity it has accrued.

Are you producing impactful work in Corporate Comms like Sixieme Son? Submit your projects before the Final Entry Deadline on Friday, January 26th, 2024.

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