This sonic brand was created for ING Canada and is currently being used internally as a ring-tone on staff cell phones as the first phase of a viral marketing campaign. It will ultimately be made available to ING customers in Canada as a downloadable ring-tone and could see its way further into ING’s marketing mix in the future.
The strategy here was, in the words of Scott Lugar ING Canada’s CMO at the time, to literally create the “sound of orange”, ING’s distinct brand colour. Their colour scheme is one of the dominate characteristics of their branding, the other being a rather stern Dutch actor delivering their messaging and tag line “Save Your Money”.
Initially we decided on a three note logo concept designed to represent the letters I, N and G. To do this we created an arbitrary relationship between the letters ING by assigning the letters musical notes in a proportional relationship emulating their position in the alphabet. The three notes made for a pleasant combination and we put them aside for further development.
We then created a sound using a meta-synth program which translated a scan of the corporate color and brand logo from a 2 dimensional image into a sound wave. The sound we generated resembled the sound of several notes revolving around each other. Oddly enough they were the same three notes we created with the alphabet experiment.
While we do not often look for “signs from the universe” in our design methodology, this certainly appeared to be one. We tweaked the pitch of the sound and presented it to the client along with the story of how we created it and they loved it. The final step was adding sound design derived from sampling the sound of spinning coins and marrying the completed design to the narrator’s “Save Your Money” tag line.
