HEALTHCARE MARKETING: Auditive Touchpoints, Sound Design and UX

Auditive Touchpoints, Sound Design and UX

Why audio is important not only in TV

Healthcare Marketing: At first one thinks of classic sound logos as used in commercials. What touchpoints are important for auditive brand management?

Cornelius Ringe: We’re confronted on a daily basis with new auditive touchpoints which often make very specific demands of sound design. The variety of media used in brand communication is exploding. But they all have one thing in common – they have audio. So it may be easier to say where audio branding is not needed. Is it just the traditional print media?

Healthcare Marketing: Are there other medical fields where audio is gaining in significance?

Cornelius Ringe: In medical technology, brand sound is becoming hugely significant for the design of the user experience, at the interface between humans and machines. Whereas humans used mainly to come into contact with medical technology in hospitals, today in these times of digitalisation and demographic change this occurs to an ever greater extent at home or indeed anywhere. Health is one of the most important topics in our lives. It’s clear that this is reflected in the range of mobile apps and speech assistants. The demands for functional, aesthetic and at the same time brand-conform sound design are by no means trivial. It has to be created by experienced experts. For Sivantos, formerly Siemens, for example we developed brand-specific sound design for hearing aids. Creating good sound design for the hearing-impaired was a particularly educative experience.

Healthcare Marketing: That does sound like an exciting task. How did you master the challenge?

Cornelius Ringe: The hearing aids are used for a wide variety of hearing impairments and have to be set up for the individual needs of the wearer. The spectrum ranges from balancing out a slight impairment to almost complete deafness. Modern hearing aids are really super headsets with numerous features. For elderly people with limited fingertip sensitivity, they have to be easy, intuitive and accessible to use via tiny switches that are usually found behind the ear and of course they have no display. To primarily guarantee very good signal legibility, we developed three simple and prioritized design principles which transformed the brand sound with decreasing audibility into ever clearer signals. The positive results of market research provided impressive confirmation of this methodology.

(to be continued)

Part 1/5

Part 2/5

Part 3/5

***

Source:
HEALTHCARE MARKETING – Das Fachmagazin für Gesundheitsmarken
Interview: Anna Jäger
No. 10/October 2020, Issue 15, Pages 40-43
New Business Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Hamburg.
https://www.healthcaremarketing.eu/

See also: https://www.wesound.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20201119_WESOUND_Healthcare_Marketing_EN_FINAL.pdf