How Sperry decided what a boat shoe brand sounds like

Sperry calls itself the “creators of the authentic original boat shoe,” something that’s evident throughout the brand’s visual marketing: Nautical pictures on its Instagram, a boat for a logo, and, you know, all those boat shoes. Now Sperry has the audio to match.

The brand introduced a new sonic logo in early March: an eight-second sound (plus a shorter, two-second version) composed of ocean sounds and an A major seventh chord played on an acoustic guitar, according to Senior Global Brand Marketing Director James Mackenzie. Water is a “multi-sensory” experience, he said, and can call up strong memories—like Mackenzie’s childhood trips to York Beach, Maine.

“People have such a visceral, wonderful reaction to being near or in the water,” Mackenzie told Marketing Brew. “I think we do a bit of a disservice if we’re representing that visually only.”

In an effort to evoke those feelings, Sperry—which joins several other brands that have recently invested in sonic branding efforts—dove into the deep end to design its new sound by teaming up with a composer and an audio intelligence company.

Too many tunes

Sperry worked with composer Peter Murray to help craft the brand’s sonic identity, Mackenzie said. Murray, who had previously worked with Sperry for a campaign that came out last year, helped design about 20 different versions to start, but the options were narrowed down to six after internal polling highlighted the frontrunners.

From there, Mackenzie brought in audio intelligence company Veritonic, which offers brands a research and analytics platform to test audio assets based on the “Veritonic audio score,” which uses machine learning to rank an asset from zero to 100 based on emotional attributes, as well as other qualities like recall, according to founder and CEO Scott Simonelli. Sperry looked at how its potential sonic logos scored when it came to attributes like“authentic,” “energetic,” “familiar,” “happy,” “powerful,” “relaxed,” and “unique,” Mackenzie said.

The analysis enables marketers to “validate” and “contextualize” human opinions and input—an essential step, Simonelli said, considering the fact that sound has the potential to be linked to a brand for a long time.

“An audio logo is very subjective, and it’s really short, but it’s really powerful,” Simonelli said. “You’ve got this thing that’s a couple seconds long, but people could remember this for the rest of their lives.”

And the winner is…

Of the six sonic logos Veritonic scored, the one closest to the final version, which contained sounds of water and a single note, scored highest in uniqueness and also ranked high in terms of energy, Mackenzie said.

“The water sounds on their own gave it an authentic and relaxed feeling,” he said. “What we were able to do is take that authentic and happy and relaxed water sound, and by adding the musical note, we made it unique.”

The Veritonic audio score, though, is just meant to “provide a framework for that decision-making process,” Simonelli explained, so Sperry turned to focus groups to collect direct human feedback, Mackenzie said.

The team took four different versions of the sonic brand to four focus groups. From there, Sperry eliminated logos with sounds of seagulls and children, which were not popular with listeners, Mackenzie said.

“People don’t want to experience children or seagulls at the beach,” he said.

Sperry also axed one logo with the sound of a crashing wave that scored high in terms of the “powerful” attribute per Veritonic’s testing, but which focus groups deemed to be “not relaxing,” Mackenzie said.

After collecting the feedback, Sperry took one more shot at the composition before rolling out the official sonic logo. The two-second version, which also incorporates the A major seventh chord and rushing water, is currently featured at the beginning of two spots running on paid social, including Meta, TikTok, and YouTube.

The longer cut isn’t running in ads yet, since Sperry’s active ads are only six or 15 seconds long, Mackenzie told us. But he said it’ll start to appear as the brand introduces new longer-form content. He’s also considering other potential uses for it, like working the sound into Sperry’s website or in stores.

“We know how important audio and repetition is to someone’s comfort level with a brand and their affinity with a brand,” he said. “Now audio is top of mind for more people within our group, so we can think about that as a larger part of our marketing mix.”