For decades, brand work has focused on what we see and what we read: logos, colors, architecture, slogans, imagery. Increasingly, companies dilute their brand identity with short-lived campaigns designed only to capture attention.

Yet one sense has been left aside: hearing.
Or more precisely – resonance.

In marketing, audio branding usually refers to sound logos or jingles. Functional, recognizable, effective. Intel’s chime. Netflix’s tudum.

Sonic branding goes further. It creates not just recognition, but sensation. Frequencies, soundscapes, atmospheres that shape moods and inner states such as calm, focus, or connection – all without a single word.

The paradox is that the wellness industry – dedicated to healing, presence, and transformation – has remained strikingly quiet here. Silence has value, of course. But silence alone does not create resonance. Too often, hotels, spas, and retreats rely on generic playlists: birdsong, spa piano, off-the-shelf ambient tracks – or, worse, radio. What’s missing is identity.

The Untapped Potential
Imagine a brand that owns not just a visual design, but a sonic field.
Guests could feel it in their bodies – through bespoke frequencies, sonic rituals, atmospheres tuned to the rhythms of the day.

This is more than background music. It is acoustic identity.
The missing code in a landscape of sameness.

The future of wellness brands will not be louder.
It will be deeper.
Not more storytelling. But resonance.

Artistry and Collaboration
This vision is not theoretical. In developing PULSE, I collaborate with leading artists and composers – among them the creator of the score for The Last Shaman, a documentary produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. In that work, indigenous healing chants were woven into a contemporary cinematic soundscape, creating a visceral experience of transformation.

That same artistic sensitivity flows into PULSE. Each project is not a playlist, but a carefully composed resonance field – a fusion of frequency, atmosphere, and brand identity that cannot be replicated.

Beyond Wellness – Into Health and Hospitality
This is not only about spas or retreats. The broader health and hospitality sector has yet to fully integrate sonic branding into its identity. Clinics, hospitals, health resorts, and hotels all invest heavily in architecture, design, and visual codes – but the potential of resonance remains largely untapped.

In my work, I call this principle Embodied Branding: an understanding of brand that moves beyond surface communication and into atmosphere, frequency, and resonance fields as the deepest codes of identity. A brand is not what it says – it is what continues to vibrate within us after the encounter.

Sonic branding is a powerful expression of this philosophy. It makes spaces tangible, calms the nervous system, fosters recovery, and anchors a brand not in words, but in the body itself.

The Future Is Resonance
In an overstimulated, hyper-visual culture, attention is no longer the rarest currency.
Presence is.

This is what sonic branding provides: a way to regulate, to clarify, to transform space into resonance fields that truly move people.

It is time for health and wellness brands to stop confusing silence with absence.
It is time to make frequency part of identity.
It is time for Sonic Branding – and for Embodied Branding, where sound becomes not an accessory, but the very atmosphere of trust, transformation, and belonging.

Thomas Zerlauth
Founder of PULSE – Sonic Branding for Hospitality