Saliō Sonic Strategy, founded by Ralph van Dijk and Ramesh Sathiah, has launched to help brands build salience through coherent sound systems that work across every touchpoint.
The founders previously led Resonance Sonic Branding (acquired in 2023), Australia’s most-awarded sonic branding agency, delivering award-winning work for brands including, Australian Open, ANZ, Budget Direct, Qantas, Woolworths, Optus and Canva.
Van Dijk and Sathiah built Saliō around a key insight: different brands need different sonic approaches. Some need distinctive sonic signatures. Others need to license well-known music strategically. Many need curation systems for high-volume production music, or frameworks to brief external composers and evaluate adaptations. Saliō is asset-agnostic—the solution fits the brand’s reality, not a predetermined template.
B&T sat down with van Dijk and Sathiah to discuss why the pair have foundered their own agency and why now is a great time to do so.
B&T: What are the most common mistakes brands make when trying to implement sonic branding?
Ramesh Sathiah: Honestly? Most brands aren’t implementing their assets consistently enough or for long enough. But that’s not really their fault as the strategy they were handed wasn’t set up for the reality of how their organization works.
A brand commissions a sonic logo. Beautiful work. But the strategy didn’t think about how the social team would actually use it, or what happens when they need to license music for a campaign, or how it scales across retail and product and corporate comms.
Six months later, it’s in a folder somewhere and different teams are making different sonic choices. That’s not the brand dropping the ball, that’s a strategy that didn’t factor in every touchpoint from the start.
B&T: How does a well-implemented sonic strategy impact business outcomes?
Ralph van Dijk: It builds salience. That’s the prize.
IPSOS looked at over 2,000 video ads and found sonic cues were 8.53 times more likely to show up in high-performing creative. But only 8 per cent of ads actually use them. We know it works, we’re just not doing it.
Look at Bunnings. Same music for 20+ years. You literally can’t think of Bunnings without hearing it. That’s not some creative accident; that’s deployment discipline compounding over time.
There’s operational stuff too. When teams know what “on-brand” sounds like, decisions happen faster, revisions drop. But the real outcome is building a brand that comes to mind first when people are making buying decisions.
B&T: How will Salio approach pitching to new clients?
RS: We don’t pitch assets—we work out what you actually need first.
Everyone knows audio matters now. But building distinctive brand assets isn’t something you rush into. Our whole thing is bringing decades of marketing and audio experience to define a strategy that works long-term.
We start by understanding what’s happening today. What sound already exists? Where’s it working, where’s it falling apart? Who’s making decisions? Then we figure out what you need. Sometimes that’s a sonic signature, sometimes it’s curation systems for high-volume content, usually it’s both.
The solution has to fit your reality, not some template we’re trying to sell.
B&T: What kind of brands or enterprises will you be targeting?
RVD:: Almost any business benefits from consistent audio assets. But brands that exist across multiple touchpoints and platforms—that’s where sound really unites everything.
Retail brands with in-store, broadcast, social, product experiences. Financial services where corporate comms, marketing, and customer experience teams are all making sonic choices. Consumer brands operating across markets with different agencies.
If sonic decisions are happening independently across your organization and coherence matters, you need more than a folder of files, you need infrastructure.
Even smaller setups with three to five touchpoints face this: how do you stay coherent without bottlenecking every decision?
B&T: Where do you see the biggest opportunity for brands using sound?
RS: Building salience. We named the company after it.
Highly salient brands get recognized, remembered, chosen first. Byron Sharp tells us distinctive assets build mental availability—your brand coming to mind when it matters. Sound is one of the most powerful assets you can deploy.
The gap is deployment. Brands know it works—the research proves it—but they don’t have the systems to use sound consistently. The opportunity isn’t creating more sonic assets. It’s building infrastructure so every investment compounds instead of fragments.
B&T: What opportunity prompted you into creating your own agency and why now?
RVD: Working within the larger organisation after the acquisition was valuable, but they were moving in a different direction. Saliō lets Ralph and I get back to what we care about—working closely with people who value real marketing experience, recognise craft and believe in what music and sound can do.
But honestly, we kept seeing the same thing: brilliant sonic work would launch, then six months later it’s sitting unused while teams make inconsistent choices everywhere. The work wasn’t the problem—it was that brands got assets without the systems to make them stick.
We wanted to solve that complete problem. Combine world-class creation with the organisational stuff that actually makes it work. And the timing’s right—the industry’s finally getting that this is infrastructure, not just creative output.
