The charitable organization “Reactive Post” is an artillery needs manager that keeps artillery units in a “firing” state. Its main tasks are to repair, equip, protect, and promote artillery brigades.
Since 2014, the “Reactive Post” team has been working at the brigade (unit) level with the relevant officers who assess the overall needs, develop systematic requests, and thus address the needs of the entire unit, not just individual soldiers.
Artillery clears the way for infantry to advance, provides cover during retreat, reaches into the depths of enemy positions, and breaks through concrete that drones will never be able to break. It destroys the enemy’s key resources: ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics. It’s large-scale yet precise.
The CO “Reactive Post” marketing team approached us requesting to strengthen their brand. With the help of an audio brand, they wanted to:
As always, we started our work by researching the three pillars of any sonic identity: the client’s brand, the market, and the target audience. Each helped us understand which elements would determine the organization’s future sound.
Obviously, the audio concept had to be based on “Ukrainianness,” but we didn’t want to limit ourselves to first-order associations. They have already taken root in the minds of the target audience as clichéed. That is why we went deeper and experimented with the Ukrainian Dorian scale.
This scale is dark, but we were ready to work with it because, ideologically, it reflects that the war is a dark affair in which the aggressor drew us against our will, and if it were not for it, there would be no “Reactive Post” at all.
Next, we decided on a mix of genres to help us distinguish the client from the “competitors”. The latter most often use hybrid orchestra, electronica, and rock in their communications, so we went for industrial 🙂
By the way, this decision helped us emphasize another important detail—“Reactive Post” confidently and structurally helps to repair and equip artillery. So, the combination of a classic industrial beat and various metal textures (from the sound of a wrench to welding) worked perfectly in this case.
The sound design also played an essential role in this project, with various cinematic effects adding emotion and scale with the right degree of pathos. After all, artillerists are the gods of war; how could we go without it?!
And, of course, the pigeon — the main character of “Reactive Post” — became an apt “highlight” of the sound.
Below, you can listen to how all these elements intertwined in the brand’s audio DNA:
The aforementioned Ukrainian Dorian scale turned out to be the biggest challenge of this project.
In our experience of creating audio brands, we have never encountered any that don’t sound “fun” and “life-affirming” and lean on the darker side. 🙂
When working with this key, we had to focus on creating the right arrangement to balance its darkness and exoticism while not interfering with the key idea.
We created the following audio brand elements for “Reactive Post”:
You can listen to what we did in the playlist below:
On behalf of the team, thank you very much for your work! I see that the audio brand fits in with Reactive Post and that they are in tune. There are our emotions. The right associations are emerging. ☄️ We had a very good collaboration, and audio has become not just a random background but has strengthened our brand’s associations, completed its perception, and added an emotion that is only ours, reactive. You have felt our brand accurately and embodied it in audio.
