Poland 2026 Sounds Like Sweden 2011 — and That's Good News

There's a moment in every market's development when gaining an edge doesn't require genius. All it takes is looking at a market that has already walked the same road. For Polish audio branding, that mirror is Scandinavia fifteen years ago — and it reflects something very specific: a space that, in Poland, still belongs to no one.

Sweden 2011: jingles everywhere, strategy nowhere

In 2011, two researchers from Linnaeus University — Lind and Ådell — conducted seven in-depth interviews with experts in sound and marketing, including Bertil Hultén and Jakob Lusensky. The diagnosis was unambiguous: sonic branding is underused. Brands have jingles and music in their ads, but no sound strategy. And the main barrier to adoption is the lack of metrics — companies ask about a return on investment that nobody can calculate.

Crucially, the interviewees weren't skeptics. They were people from the very center of the market — sensory marketing researchers and practitioners working with brand sound. They were the ones pointing out that the problem wasn't a lack of faith in sound, but the lack of a way to show its impact in numbers. And without numbers, sound kept losing budget battles to channels that could be measured.

Read that diagnosis again and swap "Sweden" for "Poland." It fits word for word. Polish brands have music in their commercials, sometimes a notification sound in their app. But a coherent sound strategy — the kind they have for their logo, colors, and typography — is something almost nobody has. Sound is still treated as decoration picked at the end of production, not as part of brand identity.

And that's exactly the good news. A market that looks like Sweden in 2011 has an entire maturing phase ahead of it. And as a market matures, the biggest winners are the ones who got in before it got crowded.

Thirteen years later: same questions, different countries

You might assume the 2011 findings are long outdated. Not at all. In 2024, Kisieliauskas and co-authors described the barriers keeping small and medium-sized businesses from investing in brand sound. The list looks familiar: unclear return on investment and not knowing where to start.

Thirteen years, same questions. That tells us two things. First — audio branding adoption barriers don't disappear on their own. The market won't "grow up" without tools that defuse them. Second — companies that overcome those barriers compete in a nearly empty space, because most of their rivals are still standing at the same wall Swedish brands faced in 2011.

There is one important difference, though. The same research team has since proposed a simplified, four-step model for implementing brand sound. Science has moved from diagnosing the problem to offering practical answers. Lack of knowledge is no longer an excuse — the knowledge is on the table.

One more thing: although the study focused on small and medium-sized businesses, the same questions come up in the boardrooms of large organizations. "How do we measure the return on sound?" sounds identical in a twenty-person company and a publicly listed one. The only difference is the size of the budget waiting for an answer.

What was missing in 2011 — and what we have today

Back then, the Swedish experts had no good answer to the measurability question. Today that answer exists, and it comes in two parts.

The first is emotion measurement. GEMS (Geneva Emotional Music Scale) describes music-evoked emotions across nine dimensions. Instead of debating whether something "sounds premium," you get a track's emotional profile — numbers you can compare against your strategy's assumptions and your competitors' music. The conversation about sound stops being a conversation about taste.

The second is positioning methodology. Building on GEMS, we developed Sonic Positioning Maps at TADADAM — a proprietary tool that plots a brand's sound and its competitors' on a single map. It shows which emotional territories in a category are already taken, and which stand empty, waiting for a first mover.

These are exactly the pieces the market was missing in 2011: measurability and comparability. The "you can't put a number on it" barrier no longer exists.

The Polish Patent Office accepts sound trademarks. Almost nobody is filing

There's one more advantage — the one talked about least: the legal one.

Since 2018 — with the implementation of EU Directive 2015/2436 — the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) has accepted sound trademark applications. Yet registrations remain scarce. The space where a brand can protect its sound the same way it protects its logo stands nearly empty in Poland.

Europe set the direction. The Shield Mark case (C-283/01) established the requirement that a sound mark be represented in a clear and precise manner. Since 2005, the EUIPO has accepted representation as a sonogram with an MP3 file. Registering sound is no longer legal exotica — it's a regulated, well-trodden path.

What does that mean for a brand? A sonic logo isn't just a communication element — it's an intellectual property asset. After 3–5 years of consistent use, you can register it as a trademark and build its balance-sheet value, exactly the way it works with visual marks. Sound moves from the marketing-cost line to the company's assets.

Registration also gives you the same thing a visual mark does: exclusivity. A competitor who sounds too similar will be in conflict with your legal protection — not just your sense of aesthetics.

The first-mover window: categories that don't sound like anything yet

Let's put it all together. Adoption barriers keep most companies away from audio branding — just like in Sweden fifteen years ago. The measurement tools missing back then now exist. The legal path is open and nearly untraveled. That's the textbook definition of a market window.

In most categories on the Polish market, no brand has yet claimed a distinctive sonic territory. The first one to do it will set the benchmark for the entire category. Everyone who follows will have to differentiate from it — or, worse for them, get written off as imitators.

The first-mover advantage has an extra dimension here: time. Since the road to registering a sound trademark runs through 3–5 years of consistent use, that distance can't be closed with budget. A competitor who wakes up three years from now can't buy those three years back — they'll be starting from second place, on territory that already belongs to someone else.

Where to start? Not with composition — with a map. A category sound audit shows how your competitors sound today, which emotions everyone is exploiting, and where there's still room for a distinctive territory of your own. Only with that knowledge does the decision to invest in a sonic logo stop being an act of faith and become a strategic move.

That's why the question isn't "will the Polish market mature into audio branding" but "who will build a position while it matures." If you want to see what the sonic landscape looks like in your category — and which emotional territories stand empty — book a consultation and we'll show you on a map.

Sources

• Lind & Ådell (2011), Linnaeus University — qualitative study: 7 expert interviews (incl. B. Hultén, J. Lusensky); sonic branding underused, lack of ROI metrics as the main adoption barrier.
• Kisieliauskas et al. (2024) — the same SME barriers (ROI, lack of know-how) 13 years later; a simplified four-step model for implementing brand sound.
• Polish Patent Office (UPRP) — sound trademarks accepted since 2018 (implementation of Directive 2015/2436), still few registrations.
• EUIPO — requirement of clear and precise representation of a mark (Shield Mark case, C-283/01); accepted representation since 2005: sonogram + MP3 file.

Poland in 2026 sounds like Sweden in 2011. Your brand doesn't have to wait fifteen years for the market to mature — it can get ahead of it. Drop us a line and let's talk about a sonic logo you can register as a trademark.