Book Review: Sound Business. A Sound Investment.

In 2007, I was working with Best Buy on what Best Buy called “New Blue,” a new approach to the physical retail space: wider aisles, more carpeting, lower shelving, a center-of-store experience, and “stages.” These stages were placed at the front of each major department as demonstrations of products in a home. The computing stage was a home office; the home theater stage had a big HDTV, surround sound, and a comfy couch; and the kitchen stage had a kitchen. I felt they never worked because the stages were too open to the rest of the store and didn’t have the warmth of any of those locations in the home. It still felt like a big box environment; the ceiling was still that big box-exposed-rafter ceiling that made the store noise reverberate through everything. It just didn’t feel right. Best Buy claimed the customer response was positive, but that’s a seriously subjective statement.

Last summer, Bill Gerba wrote an article about audio and digital signage, and suggested reading “Sound Business” by Julian Treasure.

Working in an industry concerned almost exclusively with the visual medium, sound is largely an afterthought. While at Best Buy, I realized the power of sound in experiential and brand engagement, and now consider it crucial to the strategy of effective communication.

I wish I had this book in 2007.

Mr. Treasure’s book is a must if you work in an industry where sound is in any way a part of the communication medium or environment. The book does a splendid job of covering the spectrum of sound, from creation to transmission to impact in just about every type of environment where sound is used.

The book is broken into three sections. Mr. Treasure first educates us on the technical side of sound: decibels, resonance, frequency, waves, creation, transmission, and the factors in sound’s impact on the listener. He ends the section on listening. “Hearing is a physical process, but listening is a relationship, a choice, and a skill.” The text dives deep into the ability to listen and decode information, citing research that states, “We can handle only around seven chunks of information at once (plus or minus two).” This is important when thinking about a retail environment and all the competing noise.

The second section tours the several different classifications of sound and applicable rules for working with sound, including Mr. Treasure’s “Four Golden Rules of Sound:” Make the sound optional, make it appropriate, make it valuable, and test, test test. He writes about some new tools, such as Reactive sound, where computers with environmental sensors create sound on the fly. For example, when the room lights dim, the computer senses a change in light and automatically alters the sound.

Mr. Treasure introduces the SoundFlow™ model, a detailed process map that outlines the effects of sound on people and environments. He also introduces the SoundMap™, a 12-cell matrix with over 90 questions designed to drill down to the core issues around sound associated with a brand, product, or service. I’m willing to bet that you, Mr. or Ms. Marketing Executive, will be unable to accurately answer two-thirds of those questions. If so, you do not have a solid sound approach to your brand or product.

All of this information is the foundation for the third section where Mr. Treasure takes you on a journey through the application of sound in any given environment. He explains the value and impact of sound on a brand, ranging from brand music (British Airways using “Flower Duet” from Delibés’ opera Lakmé), to sonic logos (Intel’s five note logo or NBC’s three-note chime).

Mr. Treasure explains the factors of sound in just about every type of environment, from retail spaces, to hospitals, reception areas, office environments, private spaces (living rooms) and vehicles.

The book is loaded with case studies and examples of good sound and bad sound, providing detail on how sound can affect sales and engagement. Mr. Treasure cites a retail project where the front windows were transformed into giant loudspeakers, resulting in a 50 percent increase in customer traffic stopping to investigate.

Mr. Treasure provides ample detail on the effect of sound in a retail environment. For example, he describes how up-tempo music results in customers with a higher degree of energy that move through store faster. He suggests that slower music results in longer dwell times. But, if you’re Abercrombe and Fitch you would be hard pressed to change your Top 40 and electronic up-tempo music aimed at the teen and young adult demographic to slower music. Going back to the SoundFlow™ and SoundMap™ processes, Abercrombe and Fitch would be able to make the sound applicable to the environment as part of the brand, not just noise from the heavens.

The book comes with an accompanying CD that exemplifies the very situations he cites. After going through the CD along with the book, I cannot fathom how this book would work without it. I spent several tracks thinking, “So that’s what he means!”

This book has proven to be an invaluable resource for my work with some of my clients, substantiating details I already knew about audio and providing me with knowledge on appreciating audio’s impact and developing solutions better suited for the client and the audience.

I believe this would be a great addition to anyone’s desire to understand the impact of interactive experiences, and highly recommend it.

You can find some more of Treasure’s insights on his Sound Business blog. And you can watch him talk about sound at a TED event last year.

I’ll let Mr. Treasure close: “If this book achieves one thing only, I hope it is to move us out of this denial and into recognition of the enormous, varied and wide-ranging effects that sound is having on us all.”

You can find the book on Amazon.com here.