Liberty's 'sticky' jingle is driving consumer awareness: ‘It doesn’t hurt to mention the brand four times’
Less than a year since it launched in-market, the 'Liberty, Liberty, Liberty...Liberty' ditty from Liberty Mutual has rocketed to the top of Veritonic’s annual Audio Logo Index, thanks to what its chief marketing officer calls its “simplicity and stickiness”.
Liberty Mutual's jingle entered the public consciousness in July
Veritonic surveyed more than 1,600 consumers across the US and UK to establish consumer levels of brand recall, engagement and emotions associated with a selection of sonic logos.
In the US, Liberty’s jingle had the second-highest brand identification rating after Nationwide. It was named the sixth-most effective in the market overall.
Farmers Insurance came out on top of the latter rankings, followed by Nationwide, Old Spice, Intel and O’Reilly Auto Parts. Haribo, McDonald’s and Heinz Beanz topped the UK poll.
Veritonic praised Liberty’s composition in the report, declaring it the ‘poster child’ for including the name of a brand in a sonic logo – a tactic that yields higher levels of recall and much higher levels of brand identification, according to the analytics platform.
Liberty’s new jingle saw the brand’s Audio Logo ratings leap across almost every metric the index evaluated. Its recall rank increased by seven percentage points – the most of any brand in the survey.
Liberty didn’t just stumble upon this audible success. When its chief marketing officer, Emily Fink, decided to rework the insurance brand’s jingle last year she had more than “a dozen” potential tunes made.
“We put them in front of consumers in a quantitative study trying to understand recall, playback, memorability, likability and fit for Liberty,” she said.
The brief was clear: make it sticky, make it memorable and to make sure it would connect to Liberty Mutual as the company at large, rather than as single campaign.
The familiar jingle by Elias Art Music House, which jovially repeats the brand name no less than four times at the end of each ad, is the audio logo that performed best in testing.
Fink believes its “simplicity and stickiness” to be the keys to its success. And coupled with the its creative’s new mascots, Limu Emu and Doug, the humorous package has contributed to Liberty’s “recent unaided awareness growth”, according to the CMO.
“Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have your brand mentioned four times in the actual jingle,” she said. “We love how it’s not only been an effective marketing tool – it’s been awesome to see how people everywhere are embracing the jingle – Harry Connick, Jr. even gave it a recent shout-out on the Today Show.
“We look forward to incorporating it throughout other channels in the coming year along with Limu and Doug.”
The sonic logos of Audi, BMW and Metro by T-Mobile scored the worst for brand identification.
Mastercard, which heavily publicized its own audio sting earlier this year, was also poorly recognized (brand recall score: 26%). However, Veritonic attributed this ranking to its newness.