Business Voicemail is all part of the audio branding experience. It’s sometimes the first contact you’ll make with a customer, so it’s crucial you make the right impression every time.
Here at PH Audio, we’re passionate about getting it right for our customers, so we’ve put together a few tips on how to make the most of your Business Voicemail package. 
PH Audio features in this week’s Print Week Magazine. Christian Peacock, sales and marketing director at Blackburns of Bolton, tells Print Week’s Deputy Features Editor Philip Chadwick about how OHM is an important marketing tool for the print industry.
Finding the right song for that great weather just got a little easier. We’ve recently stumbled across Musicovery.com, a clever site that allows you to find and listen to music based on its era, genre and tempo — and most importantly, your mood.
Following our recent conference, PH Media’s sales team put on their racing coveralls for the 2010 PH Media Group Go-Kart Grand Prix.
This year’s event took place at Daytona Manchester, where after loads of thrills and a fair few spills, the heats revealed a strong grid for the final race.
Tight lines and tidy cornering gave Ops Director Jason Daye first place, with Sales Execs Terry Rodgers and Tom Ritchie taking second and third.
But trophies aren’t the full story – the day’s fastest laps were put down by Simon La Band, Mark Williamson and Kieron Driscoll.
The psychology of torture identifies repetition as a method of afflicting suffering. Let’s not go into the details because we’re heading on to a downer, but suffice it to say, repetition is not endearing. We’ll call it audioboarding. Most people are familiar with this particular method of audioboarding, a favourite on car journeys worldwide:
“Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet?”
Annoying isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Sorry. The repetition of the above question reflects the passenger’s desire to be distracted from the monotony of the journey, rather than the need to know exactly what time they’ll reach their destination.
Too often, choosing royalty-free music to play on hold means choosing the track that’s least annoying.
Our business is based on the idea it shouldn’t have to be like that.
But if you make a conscious decision to improve the way your brand sounds, you’re starting to think about strategy. After all, you’re now shaping the way clients hear you – creating associations that connect sounds to images.
So, whether you’re making the most of an audio branding service like ours, or simply paying for a licensed track you think works well with – and best represents – your brand, it makes sense to think about what kind of audio fits with people’s image of your company.
Get this wrong, and you could end up sending mixed messages.
Fletcher Moss Rangers F.C. Under 13s, sponsored by PH Media Group, won the prestigious Manchester County Sunday Cup on Sunday 28th of March. They beat rivals Northside JFC, in what was a thrilling encounter.
Fletcher Moss, who train in Mersey Bank, thrashed their opponents 7-1 to win the cup, scoring some wonderful goals and playing some great junior league football. PH Media Group officials watched their team bring home the silverware – another sound investment from PH Media!
Visit the Fletcher Moss website for further details on their famous cup victory…
At PH Audio we’re in the business of making music and voiceovers that fit a company’s image and brand. Sounding right for callers is critical and has lasting effects. I found an interesting piece of writing on ‘creative synaesthesia’ which brings me nicely onto this post: creatively, how does a company develop an on-hold marketing production or create an audio brand that fits with their branding?
Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. For example, you might see colours when you hear a particular sound.
But ‘artificial synaesthesia’, as it’s coined in the article I’ve linked to above, can help businesses to understand how consumers perceive brands. By artificially recreating and understanding how people take meaning from a particular word or sound, it’s then easier to create the most effective combinations of voiceovers, content, style and music. Ultimately, you want to be able to positively reinforce brand values in the mind of the consumer.
Companies spend a lot on symbols. On symbols that people associate with their name.
It’s kind of reductive, but in the simplest terms, advertising is about making an effective symbol that carries a full brand message. That’s why the Nike ‘Swoosh’ logo equals athletics. Equals running. Equals gold medals. Equals you running faster.
Advertising is about making a large concept into a picture. Reducing sentences and paragraphs into lines and squiggles.
It’s been about that for hundreds of years. About graphic identities carrying brands.
Now, of course, we’re producing much more than logos. We’ve got the internet, for one – we’ve got the viral videos and the microsites; the discussions across social media and becoming a company’s fan on Facebook. Now, businesses are creating fully branded ‘user experiences’.
But in the last century, we also got ways to produce better sounds, and faster. We have studios and microphones. And as this medium has grown and gone digital, so too have the agencies (we’re one!) who specialise almost exclusively in audio branding – not graphic-based branding. And on commercial radio, telly, the internet, businesses are using these agencies to compete for the most memorable sound.