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The Next Folgers Is Being Built Right Now. Is Yours One of Them?

  • Writer: ErikWalterThompson
    ErikWalterThompson
  • Jun 15
  • 8 min read

By Erik W. Thompson, Founder & CEO, Walter Audio


What is sonic branding equity? Sonic branding equity is the measurable consumer recognition a brand builds over time through consistent deployment of owned audio assets, including sonic logos, brand music, and audio mnemonics. Like visual brand equity, sonic equity compounds with every consumer exposure. Unlike visual equity, it is processed in the brain's limbic system, the seat of emotion and long-term memory, making it faster to encode and more durable to retain. Brands with high sonic equity can reduce their audio to a fragment and consumers will complete it from memory.

There is an old proverb that says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.



For a mid-market CPG brand without a sonic identity, today is 20 years ago.


Every article written this year about the jingle revival misses the same uncomfortable truth. The pieces celebrating Folgers and Frosted Flakes and Maybelline for turning their sonic assets into cultural moments are not stories about sonic branding. They are stories about the dividend of sonic branding. They document the payoff. They skip the part that made the payoff possible: decades of consistent investment in owned audio assets that slowly, quietly hardwired recognition into millions of consumer brains.


The cultural moment is not the strategy. The cultural moment is what happens after the strategy has been running long enough to compound.



What the Jingle Revival Is Actually Telling You


MassiveMusic put it plainly in a recent piece: brand sonic identities are becoming the music people are choosing to listen to.


Frosted Flakes worked with rapper JID to remix the "Hey Tony" jingle into a full anthem. Maybelline collaborated with Miley Cyrus to revive a tagline born in 1991, earning 73% actual consumer attribution and breaking straight into the top 20 of the SoundOut Index 2025. Just Eat has built an ongoing roster of artist collaborations around a single sonic thread, turning an advertising jingle into a playlist embedded in culture.


None of it would exist without a sonic asset worth remixing.


We were in a session with a client recently, studying how the industry's most recognized sonic assets were built and how they are deployed today. We pulled up State Farm. Barry Manilow wrote "Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is There" in 1971 for a flat fee of $500. State Farm has been building on that melody for more than 50 years. Today they can cut their sonic logo in half and it still lands. Consumers fill in the rest from memory. That is not a creative achievement. It is an engineering one. The equity was deposited so many times, over so many decades, that the asset became self-completing.


We looked at that and then looked at our client. The question that landed in the room: what is in your vault?


That question has a Walter Audio answer. It starts with the Sound On framework: is your brand's audio Consistent, Congruent, Distinctive, and Ownable? Most brands, when they run that diagnostic honestly, find they are zero for four. Not because they made bad decisions, but because they never made any.



The Compounding Mechanism Is Real and Documented

Consistent sonic investment builds measurable brand equity on an accelerating curve. Philips grew consumer attribution for its sonic logo from 14% to 42% in two years, a 28-percentage-point gain and a 48-position rise in the SoundOut Index 2025, making it the fastest-growing sonic brand in the study. No campaign reinvention. No viral moment. Disciplined, repetitive deployment of a single owned asset.

Les Binet, IPA Fellow and one of the most cited voices in marketing effectiveness research, stated in the 2025 MassiveMusic / IPA Sound Science report: "Once you've got a great track, keep using it. People will increasingly associate the track with the brand and think that it fits. Over time, you get long-term benefits, the most important and profitable of which is increased pricing power."


Pricing power. Not recall scores. Not brand awareness lift. Consistent sonic investment, over time, reduces price sensitivity among your consumers. That is a balance sheet outcome.


Binet and Field's IPA Databank analysis, drawing on 30 years of marketing effectiveness data, confirms the timeline: emotional campaigns achieve very large profit growth in 27% of cases at one to two years. At three or more years, that figure climbs to 43%, while rational campaigns remain at 21%. The compounding effect is real. It takes time. And it does not start until you start.



The Attribution Gap Most Brands Don't Know They Have

Most CPG brands significantly overestimate how well their sonic identity is working. The SoundOut Index 2025, the largest consumer study of US sonic brands ever conducted, found that average claimed attribution across 174 brands is 36.4%, while average actual attribution, measured by unprompted consumer tests, falls to just 15.6%. More than half of consumers who believe they could identify a brand from its sonic logo cannot do so when tested.

Of the 174 brands in the study, only 17 achieve actual consumer attribution above 60%. The first-mover window in sonic identity is not closing. But it is narrowing.



A Conversation That Keeps Happening


We were in the middle of building a sonic logo for a brand that has been on American shelves for decades. Part of our process involves studying how the category's most established sonic assets were constructed, so we understand what we are building toward. We pulled up State Farm. We pulled up Folgers. We pulled up Intel. And the client said something that has stayed with me: we should have done this 20 years ago.


They were not wrong. This is not a brand still finding its footing. It has deep

distribution, generational consumer recognition, and decades of marketing investment behind it.


What they lacked was any sonic asset they owned, any audio through-line connecting campaign to campaign, any sound a consumer could hear and immediately attribute back to them. The visual identity was airtight. The audio was a different agency brief every year.


That gap compounds quietly. Every year of inconsistent audio is a year of consumer exposure building memory around assets the brand does not control and cannot keep.



The Architecture Matters as Much as the Start Date


Starting is necessary. Starting with the right architecture is what separates the brands that end up in the top 17 from the ones that stay in the bottom 130.


Wayfair achieved 71% actual consumer attribution without the benefit of decades of

exposure. The difference was not time. It was architecture: a sonic identity designed around the brand name from the outset, built for attribution, and validated against consumer data before it went into the world.


The SoundOut data is definitive. Sonic logos that include the brand name achieve 46% actual attribution. Those without achieve 5%. A 9x gap from one strategic decision made before a single note is composed.


Walter Audio's SONICfoundation process exists precisely because that decision cannot be made on instinct. Before composition begins, we use SoundOut's OnBrand AI model, trained on more than half a million consumer tests, to map the musical territory that aligns with a brand's sonic DNA. The LIMBICprofiler brings internal stakeholders into the selection process so the asset has both data backing and organizational alignment. Consumer testing validates the final assets before they go live. The result is a sonic identity built to compound from day one, not to be rediscovered 20 years later when the regret arrives.



The Second Best Time Is Today


The category leaders in sonic attribution did not get there by waiting until the moment felt right. They got there by showing up with the same sound, consistently, long enough for the compounding to become visible.


For mid-market CPG brands and the portfolio companies building toward exit, the question is not whether sonic identity matters. The data has answered that. The question is whether the clock is running.


If it is not, today is 20 years ago.


Ready to start the clock? Walter Audio's SONICfoundation process maps your brand's sonic DNA, validates it against consumer data, and builds the owned assets you will still be activating a decade from now. Talk to the CEO.



Frequently Asked Questions


What is sonic branding and why does it matter for CPG brands?

Sonic branding is the strategic development of owned audio assets, including sonic logos, brand anthems, and audio mnemonics, that build consumer recognition and brand equity over time. For CPG brands, sonic brand cues are the highest-performing distinctive asset in existence, delivering a +191% lift in brand awareness when placed in the first two seconds of short-form video advertising, according to a 2025 System1 and TikTok study. Despite this, sonic brand cues appear in only 6% of brand communications, the largest performance gap in modern marketing.


How long does it take to build meaningful sonic brand equity?

Research from the SoundOut Index 2025 shows that consistent sonic investment can deliver measurable equity gains in as little as two years. Philips grew actual consumer attribution from 14% to 42% over two years of consistent deployment. The compounding effect accelerates over longer time horizons: Binet and Field's IPA Databank analysis shows emotional brand campaigns achieve very large profit growth in 43% of cases at three or more years, versus 27% at one to two years. Brands like State Farm, which has built on the same sonic identity since 1971, represent the ceiling of what decades of consistency can build.


What is the difference between claimed and actual sonic brand attribution?

Claimed attribution is a consumer's self-reported confidence that they can identify a brand from its sonic logo. Actual attribution is measured by asking consumers to name the brand unprompted after hearing the audio alone. According to the SoundOut Index 2025, the average claimed attribution across 174 US brands is 36.4%, while average actual attribution is just 15.6%. Most brands significantly overestimate how well their sonic identity is working.


Should a CPG brand's sonic logo include the brand name?

This is a great way to speed up the "fame" of the sonic logo, and it should be used until the brand reaches roughly 50% actual consumer attribution. SoundOut's 2025 research shows sonic logos that include the brand name achieve 46% actual attribution on average, compared to 5% for those without, a 9x effectiveness gap. Of the top 25 most recognizable US sonic logos, 22 include the brand name. SoundOut recommends transitioning to a melody-only version only after the attribution threshold is secured, following the precedent of Intel, McDonald's, and AT&T.


What is Walter Audio's SONICfoundation process?

SONICfoundation is Walter Audio's foundational sonic branding engagement. It maps a brand's sonic DNA using SoundOut's OnBrand AI model, trained on more than half a million consumer tests, to identify the musical territory that fits the brand before composition begins. The LIMBICprofiler platform brings internal stakeholders into the selection process through structured voting on consumer-validated tracks. Final assets are consumer-tested before deployment. The result is a sonic identity grounded in data rather than aesthetic preference, built from the outset to compound equity over time.



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