Siemens Healthineers is a leading global medical technology company with over 170 years of experience and 18,000 patents globally. With their innovative products and services, they support the customers in achieving their business goals. They have a wide range of products and services for diagnostics, therapy and healthcare IT.
“As part of their strategy for 2025, Siemens Healthineers wanted to move from the healthcare segment to the medtech segment. This also meant a shift to a high value, premium positioning. A holistic rebranding process, including an audio expression for the brand, needed to be developed. The new visual brand design has a strong impact on the perception of the Siemens Healthineers brand. A sound was sought that would best translate this design.” (Siemens Healthineers – Audio Branding)
Embarking on a unique journey with the German music branding consultancy Why Do Birds?, Siemens Healthineers now sounds like a medtech company. This project is particularly insightful in terms of translating visuals into audio. Starting from the description of the company values, Why Do Birds? was able to translate the following personality adjectives into sound elements that laid the foundation for the whole system: visionary, intelligent, responsible, inspiring, energetic and active. From there, they started from the new visual identity in order to translate it into sound by keeping in mind the musical descriptive adjectives identified earlier.
The dot matrix that is part of the brand logo was translated into a forward moving triplet beat, the wordmark was pictured on a piano and each letter that corresponded to a musical note was played and recorded. The letters that weren’t related to a specific musical note were transformed into a digital heartbeat. Putting all of this together, the sound logo was derived.
Another interesting element of this identity is the dot pulse. It is an attention grabbing sound that element that embeds the Fibonacci sequence into a very peculiar low-to-high and high-to-low music scale system
Dot-pulse
Then a full package for events was developed, including music for going on stage, gongs, PA and event soundscape. Other sonic assets were also developed, such as ringtones and a very peculiar package for Health music destined to be used with medical devices across the globe. And, for the first time, Why Do Birds? also innovated the delivery process by creating ad-hoc software for the company.
Gong
Ringtone
Health music
“A complete technological innovation was the introduction of an easy-to-use software that allows employees to produce their own on-brand soundtracks, ensuring consistency and brand recognition.”
Siemens Healthineers is another example of a well-rounded, holistic music branding 2.0 process that ensures recognizability and goes beyond the classic advertising music by solving real challenges for the brand and its applications.