MAUDAU is an online platform for everyday shopping or, simply, a market for essential items.
The MAUDAU team strives to turn routine shopping into a fast, high-quality process. You can buy anything on this market: alcohol, food, beauty and health products, and a lot of everything for children and pets. Altogether, MAUDAU is a convenient and easy way to buy all needed non-fun things at a reasonable price without unnecessary headaches.
The same as during our collaboration with PUMB Online, the MAUDAU team reached us to create sounds for their future app. However, during our first discussion, it became clear that the audio brand would be a more profitable investment of time and effort.
An audio brand is a system of music and sounds that conveys the brand’s meaning at each touchpoint.
It is important to explain that MAUDAU was undergoing rebranding and focused its attention on strengthening the emotional component of interaction with the client. Therefore, a consistent and cohesive audio experience perfectly fits their plans to roll out the new brand.
In addition, none of MAUDAU’s competitors had managed to create something similar at the time of the start of our cooperation. Therefore, the audio brand also had the opportunity to become an additional point of differentiation for the young brand.
Moreover, a distinctive sound could also help the new audience to recognize MAUDAU.
So, considering all the above, together with the MAUDAU team, we aimed to create a full-fledged audio brand.
During the briefing, we learned more about the MAUDAU brand.
We immediately liked that it is tied to the care of market guests. In addition to the apparent advantages of this approach, this care could become a good basis for the future sound of the brand.
Then, we took a closer look at MAUDAU’s target audience groups, their habits, and peculiarities of world perception. Also, together with the brand’s team, we identified the primary associations they sought to create in the audience’s minds.
Another key feature of the market’s identity was the focus on authenticity, which ran as a leitmotif through the entire brand — from the name to its visual style. We had to consider it for the audio expression of MAUDAU.
After we determined the associations and feelings that the future audio brand should create, as well as its tasks, we moved to the stage of audio analysis of the niche.
We analyzed the sound of the list of competitors provided to us by the MAUDAU team. We focused on parsing the audio of their campaigns and social networks.
As a result, several things became evident to us:
With all the gathered information, we could finally move on to generating ideas for the audio concept.
Considering the results of the analysis of competitors, it was obvious to us that electronic dance music (EDM) or funk should not be chosen as the main style of the sound of MAUDAU. Also, we immediately decided on elements we would not use to create this audio brand: saxophone, palm mute guitars, whistles, claps, finger snaps, funky riffs, EDM build-ups and rolls, and breathy vocals.
At the same time, it was clear that perceiving the electronic sound would be easier for the target audience.
Therefore, based on the desired associations and tasks, we hypothesized that a mix of electronic and jazz elements with organic sounds (percussion + human voice) should work best.
We created several audio mood boards to illustrate our ideas and to decide on the further direction of development.
An audio mood board is a playlist that contains a selection of musical clips that show different ways of conveying a particular message, meaning, or idea.
Each mood board corresponded to a specific group of desired associations and revealed a separate element of our hypothesis. Some of the tracks we used at this stage included snippets from various genres and artists, including Taylor Swift, Stromae, Michael Jackson, The White Stripes, Shawn Mendes, and even HIM.
After a collaborative session with the brand team where we listened and evaluated mood boards, we eventually formed the final framework for MAUDAU sound. Also, we gave up on the idea of jazz elements and decided to replace them with an acoustic guitar.
Finally, it was time to move on to creating the «heart» of the audio brand — the audio DNA.
Audio DNA is an audio «collage» or a short complete track that embodies the brand’s promise, values, and personality in the sonic form and determines the sound of the brand’s audio touchpoints. It defines the musical vocabulary of instruments, harmonies, tempo, rhythmic patterns, the timbre of sound, voice, etc.
Creating audio DNA is not only the most responsible part of developing an audio brand but also the most interesting one. At this stage, we have the opportunity to experiment with expressing the brand in sound.
For MAUDAU, we developed three different DNA demos. Each of them explored and embodied the hypothesis highlighted in the audio concept.
However, all demos had some similar elements, for example, a unique drum set (percussion) that we created specifically for MAUDAU. For it, we recorded samples of various items that clients could buy on this online market: a bottle of sparkling wine, an empty wine bottle, glasses, different tableware, toilet paper pack, children’s toys, candles, a bottle of detergent, etc.
This drum set immediately fitted perfectly into the general idea of authenticity of the brand, giving the sound liveliness and a sense of simplicity and comprehensibility.
And even though we had no particular questions or doubts about this element of the audio DNA, we still had to decide on all the other components of the sound. 🙂 This meant that the testing moment had arrived.
We needed to test the effectiveness of our demos. So, together with the MAUDAU team, we reached out to loyal and new online market users and company employees who did not participate in developing the audio brand. In total, 178 respondents took part in the testing.
For the correctness of the test results, in addition to the demos, we added a control track to it — one of those that were part of our audio mood boards and was approved by the brand team as a good reference.
The purpose of the testing was to determine if the audience correctly perceives desired associations. Also, we paid particular attention to undesirable associations for the brand and the general attractiveness of the sound.
We analyzed the responses of different groups of respondents separately before looking at the aggregated results. Surprisingly, the differences between the reactions of the three groups were insignificant.
Overall, all three demos performed well, ranging from 58.2–91.5% for desirable associations and 3.3–37.3% for undesirable, 57.2–68.4% for attractiveness. The control track performed the worst: 50–75.3% for desirable and 6.8–46.1% for unwanted, 55% for attractiveness.
It proves that stock or licensed music solutions cannot convey the brand’s essence as accurately as specifically developed audio.
Of course, we chose the «winner» among the demos based on the numbers but also the answers that the respondents gave to the open question about each track. In these answers, you can often encounter unexpected thoughts from the audience that are difficult to predict at the time of DNA creation.
As a result, we chose the DNA demo with the value of desired associations in the range of 72.4–87.1% (i.e., without extremes) and the least number of negative associations in the answers to the open question.
By the way, the «authenticity» indicator in the selected version was the highest among all demos.
After testing, we only had a little to refine this musical «collage» and approve its final sound. You can listen to the result below.
The most challenging part was done, and we moved with enthusiasm to the creation of actual adaptations of MAUDAU’s audio DNA. We had to develop an audio logo, a brand track with variations for different use cases, and app sounds.
Skipping ahead, we will say that we could never develop the app sounds because, on February 24, 2022, began a full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine. It affected our work on the brand, and later we replaced the development of app sounds with the creation of audio for a commercial.
An audio logo is probably the second most crucial element of any audio brand (after audio DNA). After all, this short sound is created to constantly attract the audience’s attention and broadcast the brand’s promise, values , and individuality. At the same time, it is developed in such a way that it is effortless to remember.
An audio logo is a direct analog of a visual logo in musical form.
In addition, the audio logo is the quintessence of all that is best in the audio DNA. Based on the latter, we created several versions of the MAUDAU logo: basic, simplified, and Ukrainian-style.
Each of them has its own rules and use cases to best complement the brand’s communication messages.
You can listen to audio versions of the MAUDAU logo below:
We believe every brand that actively communicates on social networks through videos or regularly creates commercials should have its own brand track. Moreover, this track should be adaptable to different messages and use cases.
It is precisely the kind of track we created for MAUDAU.
From the very beginning, we knew that we would create the composition in a rhapsodic form, that is, one that contains different parts. After all, we aimed to highlight different MAUDAU product categories: pet and children’s products, alcoholic products, and other «general» product groups.
That is why we created a three-part brand track. Each part corresponds to its category and has its own character and mood. At the same time, the third part, created for the «general» group of goods, is also the embodiment of all the main ideas of the MAUDAU brand and can be used for almost any communication.
We adapted each part of the brand track to different needs, creating versions of different durations and such adaptations that can be played in a loop. It will enable the MAUDAU team to use the brand track in almost any communication flexibly.
You can listen to how it all sounds below:
When the time came to create a commercial for MAUDAU, we were prepared more than ever. We already had an established sound, approved audio logo, and understood the task of music… But we still didn’t have a brand voice!
Therefore, the biggest challenge of creating this audio adaptation was the casting for the brand voice.
We usually love castings because they are always fun and full of surprises. Everything is like a talent show: you have professionals with many years of experience, nuggets, and even those who just passed by and decided to try themselves.
But in the end, we were lucky enough to find a voice that fits perfectly into the general concept of MAUDAU’s sound (it’s unique, cheerful, young, and convivial). Then it was just a matter of technology.
You can listen to what we got below:
MAUDAU became the first e-commerce brand for which we created an audio brand, so this experience was unforgettable for us. We are happy about how deeply we worked with the brand team on its sound and how many nuances were taken into account during its development.
Of course, MAUDAU is a young brand with many challenges ahead of it, but it already has a solid audio foundation that will quickly adapt to all its future needs.
Most importantly, everything we have created together with the MAUDAU team is aimed at the market clients improving their online shopping experience. And this will only strengthen the brand’s connection with the audience over time.
You can listen to all current elements of the MAUDAU audio brand in the playlist below:
For effective communication of MAUDAU, as an online product that cannot be touched in real life, it is imperative to engage the other senses of our guests. That’s why we wanted MAUDAU to sound! Not just in any way, but consistently and correctly, broadcasting our values and character of the brand.
