Guest Column: From Jingles To Sonic DNA,The Evolution Of Brand Music

' Washing powder, Nirma. Washing powder, Nirma…’

Go on, read those words and tell me the jingle isn’t already playing in your head.

I’ll wait.

That involuntary recall is the whole point. For decades, the jingle was one of advertising’s most powerful weapons, a brand message wrapped in melody, engineered to burrow into the consumer’s mind and stay there. It worked beautifully. And then the world changed.

The Age of the Jingle

To understand where sonic branding is today, you have to understand where it began. The first formalised medium of advertising was print, logical, visual, static. Then came radio, and with it, a revelation: sound could carry a brand message in ways the written word simply couldn’t.

The jingle was born out of that truth. Couched in melody, a brand’s promise became something a listener would hum on the way home from work, something they’d sing in the shower without quite knowing why.

Television amplified everything. Now the jingle had visuals to partner with, and the combination was exponential. Nirma wasn’t just about the jingle. You instantly remember the little girl in a sparkling white dress, twirling in slow motion. The marriage of music and image gave the jingle era its full power, and for a generation of consumers, brands were literally sung into memory.

The Disruption

But here’s the inconvenient truth about the jingle era: it thrived on captivity. We were captive audiences. At the cinema before the film. In the car on FM radio. In the living room watching our favourite serial. The media environment was relatively uncluttered, and the jingle had room, real room, to make its impression.

That world is gone. The digital explosion has given us a media landscape of almost incomprehensible complexity, hundreds of touchpoints, platforms, formats, and contexts all fighting simultaneously for the same finite resource: human attention.

We are living in an attention-deficit economy, and the 60-second jingle is a format built for a world that no longer exists. You cannot hold a consumer’s attention for 60 seconds when their entire feed refreshes in 5 seconds or less.

The Evolution

What has emerged in response is something more sophisticated, more structural, and infinitely more powerful: sonic branding. Not a jingle. Not a single piece of music. A system.

Sonic branding begins not with a melody but with your brand , its DNA, its values, its personality, the feelings it wishes to evoke in the people it serves. That brand DNA is then translated into a sonic identity system: a modular, flexible, scalable architecture of sound that can live across every environment a brand inhabits. At its heart is the MOGO® , the Musical Logo, typically three seconds of sound that functions the way a visual logo does, as an instant signal of brand recognition.

Sitting alongside it is the Mini-MOGO®, a sub-1.5-second brand signal built expressly for the digital world, notifications, alerts, app interactions. And anchoring the whole system is the MOGOscape: a 60 to 90-second sonic palette from which everything else is drawn.

What makes this system genuinely transformative is the concept of the Earpoint™, every audio touchpoint across a customer’s journey. Map that journey, and you realise a brand has the extraordinary opportunity to follow its consumer through sound: on television, on mobile, on streaming platforms, at the point of sale, at brand events, in owned retail spaces where longer immersive sonic experiences can be created. The MOGO® and its ecosystem travel with the customer rather than waiting for the customer to come to them.

The Science of Sound

This is where neuroscience enters the conversation  and it changes everything. A jingle was always overt, designed to catch your ear and plant a brand message. A sonic identity system operates on both levels simultaneously. At the conscious level, it creates recall and recognition.

At the subconscious level, it does something far more profound: it opens up a brand world. It triggers associated memories. It works on memory structures in the brain in ways that build trust , deeply and durably, over time.

We are living in a trust-deficit world. Consumers are sceptical, distracted, and overwhelmed. And yet the right sonic identity, properly built and consistently deployed, can trigger an immediate, instinctive sense of trust. That is not a small thing. That is perhaps the most valuable thing a brand can build.

We are entering an era where a visual identity alone is no longer sufficient. Building only a logo is building half a brand. A logo creates recognition; a MOGO® creates emotion. Together, they create something complete ,a brand that can be seen and felt, identified and experienced, remembered not just intellectually but viscerally.

The jingle gave us something wonderful. But its time has passed. In a world saturated with visual noise, sound is the final frontier and the brands wise enough to claim their sonic identity now will own the most powerful real estate in the consumer’s mind.

That is why I say, with conviction: the MOGO® is the new logo.????????????????