22/05/2026
MY SOUND STORY- 15 YEARS IN THE MAKING!
Okay, I’ll admit it.
When I started this journey, most people thought I was slightly mad.
“You want to do what with music and brands?”
Fair question. It was 2011. India was just finding its footing as a serious marketing market. Brands were spending crores on logos, taglines, packaging. But sound? Sound was the jingle guy. The last minute creation in a dimly lit studio, and if you were lucky something would stick and the jingle would become popular.
And here I was — a musician who had wandered into advertising and stayed there for close to 25 years. I worked by day as National Creative Director at DDB and played by night with my jazz fusion band, Rajeev Raja Combine.
THE MOMENT THAT STARTED IT ALL.
I was to play a big concert with some of India’s best musicians. Due to the demands of my day job, I was falling short in my flute playing as I couldn’t practise as much as I would have liked to.
In a moment of epiphany, I realised I wanted the rest of my life to revolve around music.But how was I to feed the family if the generous monthly pay check stopped?
So, the single line brief to myself was ‘Monetize Your Passion’.
Thus was born BrandMusiq, India’s first sonic branding company, bringing the two worlds of brands and music together, merging the science of branding with the art of music.
WHAT 15 YEARS ACTUALLY TAUGHT ME.
Sound is the most primal sense we have. Before a baby can see clearly, it can hear. Before we understand language, melody and rhythm are already shaping how we feel. Brands that ignore this are leaving their most powerful emotional lever completely untouched.
I created the term MOGO®, short for ‘musical logo’. A MOGO®️ is not a jingle. It’s a compressed sonic signature — a 3–5 second distillation of everything a brand stands for. The shortest distance between a brand and a consumer’s heart.
But the MOGO®️is part of a larger sonic sonic identity system. Designed to deliver high impact across the multiple ‘earpoints’ of the digital economy.
And this takes craft and coding. There’s a reason we built the MUSE™ methodology. And why we go deep into a brand’s persona and emotional essence before we write a single note.
UP MEMORY LANE.
When I look back at the early years, they were in equal parts, exhilarating and exhausting. We were essentially creating a category from scratch in India. There was no playbook. No case studies to point to. No “sonic branding” line item in anyone’s marketing budget.
Every client conversation started with education. What is a MOGO®️? Why does it matter? How is it different from a jingle? What’s the ROI?
But here’s the thing — I didn’t mind. Because the questions were good ones. They forced us to build rigour into what we did. We couldn’t just say “trust us, sound matters.” We had to prove it. And prove it we did.
15 YEARS. 100 SONIC BRANDS. AND COUNTING.
Nothing gives me greater joy than when someone hears a MOGO® and they say: “Oh, that’s Mastercard, or 7 Up, or HDFC Bank or Zomato” without looking up.
Most brands are happy that their brands were recognised. But they’ll be happier when they realise that their sonic brand is working at a deeper, more sub-conscious level the MOGO®️, triggering the emotional centre of the consumer brain. And in this transactional, trust-deficit economy, if you feel it, well it’s true. That’s not just ROI. It’s ROE(Return on Emotion)
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SONIC BRANDING.
The audio revolution that we predicted, way back in 2011, has very much, emphatically, arrived. Earbuds everywhere. Voice interfaces. Podcasts. Connected devices. Streaming. The share of ear has never been higher.
Sound fills the spaces that a visual identity can’t reach. It works when screens are off. It works when eyes are closed. It works in the car, in the kitchen, in the moment before sleep. It works on the deepest, most pre-rational levels of human experience.
For brands, sound is no longer ambient; it’s intimate, it’s intentional. It goes directly into people’s heads, literally.
IS YOUR BRAND SONIC?
And yet, most brands are still winging it sonically. Still using random, unlicensed tracks. Still treating sound as an afterthought in the brand identity process. Still leaving their most powerful emotional lever completely, bewilderingly untouched.
That gap — the one we spotted in 2011 when we started BrandMusiq, it’s certainly narrowed. But it’s still there. And that excites me as there’s a thrilling journey ahead.
Today, 15 years on, I still wake up with this question. Can brands transform the human experience with their sound?
And the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’
