Palmetto × WithFeeling
This is a private presentation of Palmetto’s sonic identity. Please enter your access code to continue.
WithFeeling → Palmetto · the rebrand’s missing layer
In 2025, Ragged Edge gave Palmetto the boldest rebrand in American energy. The look is unmistakable. The sound is still borrowed: library beds, silence, and masters that distort. We are WithFeeling, the studio behind the sonic identities of Expo 2020 Dubai, Dubai Airports, the Saudi Ministry of Tourism, and energy brands Yuno Energy and Prepay Power. We are entering the American market, and we want to build the new brand’s missing layer: a complete sonic identity, free, entered for the major audio branding awards with Palmetto’s name on it. You made Palmetto unmistakable to look at. What happens when people stop looking, and start listening?
An independent sonic branding studio audited a year of Palmetto’s published sound and found rented music everywhere and an owned sound nowhere. They are offering to build Palmetto’s complete sonic identity at no cost, in exchange for being able to say they did it. The first step is a one-hour workshop.
Roughly thirty films went out in the last year. Before writing a word of this, we audited them: fingerprinted, traced, and listened to. And to be clear before you scroll: this is what almost every brand we audit sounds like, including some of the most admired names in the world. The visual half is the hard half, and you have already done it. The sonic half is simply the asset nobody in your category has ever owned. These are the receipts.
The music on your brand’s biggest film is a stock item sold on AudioJungle as The Food Is Here, written for cooking shows. The music on your welcome film is an Artlist subscription track, famous online as a games streamer’s outro theme, on dozens of no-copyright channels, and licensable by any competitor tomorrow. Seven of the policy films carry no music at all, we listened to make sure.
Working through the year since the rebrand: the music pulled out from under the voiceover, or the rented track itself, so you can hear exactly what your brand is playing. Press play.
What we heard, across all of it: nearly everything Palmetto plays is stock library music. All of it upbeat funk and pop, running wall to wall under the voice, faded in at the top and faded out at the end, with not much thought in between. In fairness, the mood fits: bouncy and warm goes with the bold orange. But none of it is yours. The same tracks are scoring thousands of other businesses today, and none of it is remembered ten seconds after the film ends. Fun. Borrowed. Forgettable.
Put the whole year on one chart and the shape is obvious. The music Palmetto reaches for is consistently upbeat, warm and fun, which is exactly right for this brand. And none of it is distinctive, owned, or remembered. The vibe is right. The asset is missing.
Styles across the eleven tracks heard in the audit. One family dominates, and a different stranger plays it every time.
And one track keeps coming back. Dance With Me by Duodedos scores your newest film, and its disco groove is the closest thing Palmetto has to a signature sound. You already behave like a brand with one. You just picked a signature you can never own.
Inside the app, the rebrand moves: the wordmark comes alive every time it opens, and it is genuinely lovely. It is also completely silent. We checked the file itself, and the audio track holds nothing at all. And the animation appears nowhere else: not one of the thirty films on your channel uses it.
This is the one place a sonic logo already has a home built and waiting. The home is empty.
Ragged Edge did not just redesign a logo. They built a system: colour, typography, illustration, voice, digital. Every deliberate choice in that system has a sonic equivalent, and today every one of those slots is empty. They gave Palmetto a distinctive way to be seen. We want to complete the brand with a distinctive way to be heard, and we would welcome Ragged Edge in the room: it is their system we would be extending, and sound is best built with the people who built the look.
Instantly says Palmetto, on sight.
Instantly says Palmetto, without being seen.
Recognition before you read a word.
Instruments, textures and rhythm that are recognisably yours.
A voice for everything written.
Stops Palmetto sounding like every other energy company.
Makes energy feel warm, abundant, human.
The emotional layer a still image cannot reach.
How Palmetto speaks.
Voice and music become one personality.
Approved logos, films, reels and assets for 500 partners.
Approved tracks, beds and stings instead of random stock.
Carries the identity into the product.
Activation, milestones and alerts become Palmetto moments.
Large-scale presence that signals stature.
Walk-ons, presentation beds, and the sting on every endboard.
Today a dealer opens the Palmetto toolkit and finds the logo, the colours, the type, the photography, the films, the social assets. Everything approved. And the music? Whatever somebody happens to choose. Ragged Edge’s rule was that every time you see Palmetto, it should feel like Palmetto. Every time you hear Palmetto, should it feel like somebody else?
From the outside, this is where Palmetto meets the public today, and what plays when it does.
500 companies sell and install as Palmetto every day. Your own strategy calls them the lifeblood of the company, and you already hand them overview films, social reels and brand assets. Right now, every piece of music in that library is a separate creative decision, made differently every time.
Thirty films in the last year. Rented beds, no theme, no end mark.
Campaign ads for every plan. A different rented track on each.
The rebrand’s films cut down for feeds. Mostly watched on mute, nothing to recognise when sound is on.
The rebrand’s billboards look unmistakable, and are silent by nature. The look works this hard; the sound does nothing.
A lovely animated logo, playing in silence, plus alerts with no voice of their own.
A recurring series fronted by a former FERC chairman. No theme, no title sound.
Silent since September 2023, still wearing the old brand. 2,016 followers waiting.
Still carries the old identity, a year after the rebrand.
No Palmetto presence found. In audio-only media, a sonic identity is the brand.
No current campaign found. The three second end-sting would be the hardest working asset here.
No presence found, in the medium your customers wear in their ears.
Imagine Nike sold almost everything through a thousand independent shops, and barely advertised itself. You would make certain that every encounter still felt unmistakably like Nike. That is Palmetto: a customer can meet you through their local installer, having barely heard your name, and stay in the relationship for twenty-five years. You do not manufacture the panels. You manufacture the experience around them. And when the hardware is not uniquely yours, the experience has to be.
The panels on the roof say Canadian Solar. The van outside says a local installer’s name. Palmetto is the invisible company holding the whole experience together, and an invisible company needs a recognisable signal more than anyone. Visual guidelines keep your partners looking like Palmetto. Nothing keeps them sounding like Palmetto, because there is no Palmetto sound to give them. You do not need to advertise Palmetto more. You need every Palmetto interaction to feel more Palmetto.
The evidence on sonic branding is unusually one-sided. These are the numbers the industry runs on.
Only around six percent of ads use a sonic cue at all. And in home energy, nobody owns one: Sunrun has over a million subscribers and is not known for a sound. The asset with the highest measured payoff is sitting unclaimed in your category. The first brand to take it keeps it.
When the three directions arrive, they will not be mood boards or decks of adjectives. They arrive as finished audio, cut against these four films you have already published, so you hear the difference rather than imagine it. And the direction is set by who you serve: optimistic, accessible, American. Never elitist, never tech for its own sake.
Eight seconds in, five seconds out, resolving into the sonic logo. A series without a theme reads as a webcam call. A series with one reads as a programme, which is what it needs to be when the host used to chair the regulator.
Repeats every episode · the government room
Ninety-five seconds, already in the new identity, ending on the wordmark. The music underneath is a stock track sold on AudioJungle as The Food Is Here, written for cooking shows: point Shazam at your own brand film and it credits an artist named Huncho Grey. We will replace it with a score that belongs to Palmetto, built so the film that opens your investor rooms ends on your sound, not somebody else’s.
Plays before anyone speaks · the investor room
A long form that closes a film, a two second sting for the logo slide, and a single note small enough to live inside the app. One idea at three scales. Your new brand film already ends on the script wordmark, and the audio under it fades to nothing at the exact moment a mnemonic should land. That slot is built, waiting, and empty.
The thing that gets remembered · every touchpoint
We take your own walkthrough film and drop the interface sounds in, in sync with the screen: a system coming online, a battery reaching full, the day your savings pass a thousand dollars, an outage alert that has to cut through a dark house. Your app currently ships silent, and your own App Store reviews say outage alerts are getting missed. Sound is part of that fix.
Currently ends in digital silence · the daily touchpoint
The four pieces above are the proof. This is the whole thing: one musical language in four registers, bright for homeowners, purposeful for dealers, sophisticated for investors, and two seconds long inside the app. Delivered as a working system with the files, the specifications and the licence, so it keeps working after we leave.
The audio equivalent of your logo and its brand mark. One musical idea in long, short and single note forms, plus a silent-friendly variant for captioned social.
A full length piece of music, re-arranged into ten variations so the identity stays recognisable without wearing out. Same melody, different clothing: one identity, re-dressed. Cutdowns off each: 60, 30, 15 and 6 seconds.
Fifteen to twenty tiny branded sounds, not background music: system activated, battery full, a day run entirely on your own power, savings passing a thousand dollars, payment confirmed. A proper alert hierarchy, so an outage never sounds like a rewards ping. Delivered to iOS and Android specification.
Title theme, outro, transition beds and lower third stings, built to drop into every future episode.
Menu prompts and on-hold music for the customer line. The place where "it's taken care of" is actually tested.
Third-party Implicit Association Testing with EmotiSphere Insights, led by Joe Sauer. Neuroscience methods measure the subconscious emotional pull of the finished sound, blind and anchored to the brand, so direction is validated and risk is reduced before any media spend.
Joe Bennett, Professor of Songwriting and Musicology and a recognised expert witness in music copyright cases, independently validates the structural originality of the work. After a year of renting other people’s music, Palmetto’s identity arrives legally robust and uniquely its own.
A written standard: how loud, how clean, where each asset lives and where it must never go. Plus a one page fix list for the masters we measured.
Every asset above, all media, worldwide, forever. The industry standard for an owned identity, and the exact thing no library subscription will ever give you.
No discovery phase that lasts a season. One workshop, three directions you can hear, then the build.
One session with your brand and product teams, and Ragged Edge if you would like them there. We leave with the brief. You leave having heard how we think.
Three distinct sonic identities, each cut against your own films, so you hear them the way your customers would.
The chosen direction becomes the sonic logo and the hero brand track. Composed, mixed, mastered, yours.
The silent animation in your app finally gets its other half. If the timing needs to move, we will re-animate it to the music, frame-accurate, with your motion team.
Variations, the app sound kit, the Policy Notes package, the support line, guidelines, testing. Scheduled around your teams, not ours.
One studio, in-house, in Dubai. Composers, producers, engineers and voice specialists under one roof, and every one of them on this project. The same rooms have made campaign music and sound for Google, Amazon, Ford and Kia.
These are the objections we would raise from your chair. They deserve straight answers.
Exactly. Five hundred partner companies advertise for you, with films and reels you hand them, and every one of them currently sounds different. Sonic branding matters most to brands that are experienced through other people. A brand that advertised heavily could paper over an inconsistent sound with sheer repetition. You cannot. If the brand is delivered by other people, consistency is not optional. It is the product.
So has your entire category, which is exactly the point. Only around six percent of ads carry any sonic cue, nobody in home energy owns a sound, and the first brand to take the asset keeps it. Managing without it is what everyone does right up until a competitor stops.
Three, all independent and cited in section 07. Ads carrying sonic brand cues are 8.5 times more likely to deliver strong branded attention (Ipsos, 2,015 US ads). Brands using music that fits their identity are 96% more likely to be remembered (University of Leicester). Audio assets outperform visual assets by 3.4 times on ad effectiveness (Ipsos). And because averages are not your brand, the identity ships with independent Implicit Association Testing, so before rollout the number is measured on Palmetto, not on the industry.
The catch is printed in the next section: permission to name you as our first American client, and award entries with your name on them. That is the whole price. There is no fee later, no licence that lapses, and if you stop midway you keep the files anyway.
This is not another project, it is the last mile of the one you already finished. It asks for no budget, one workshop hour, and footage you already own. And it protects the rebrand investment at the exact moment content moves from still to moving.
Different craft, same system. They built how Palmetto is seen; we build how it is heard, to their rules: their warmth, their wit, their consumer-first idea. We would genuinely welcome them in the workshop, and the work should feel like it came from the same brand mind.
On social feeds, largely true, which is why the identity ships with a silent-friendly variant for captioned video. But your app is not on mute. Your support line is not on mute. Investor rooms, conference stages and the policy series are not on mute. Sound works everywhere attention actually finishes the journey. Mute is an argument for owning a two second mark, not against it: when sound is off you lose nothing, and when it is on, you are the only brand in the room.
In week four you hear three directions cut against your own films, and you judge them as a viewer, not as a client reading a treatment. If none of them feels like Palmetto, we shake hands and you have lost one workshop hour. That is the entire downside.
Your afternoon is our evening, and we staff it, that is how a Dubai studio works with American clients. Worth noting: everything in this document was researched, measured and built without asking Palmetto for a single meeting. That is the working style you would be buying, at the price of zero.
There is no invoice attached to this and there is no invoice coming. We would rather be straight about what we want in return, because a gift with a hidden hook is worse than a quote.
You have built the infrastructure for a twenty-five year customer relationship. We want to build the emotional identity that holds it together, and America should hear it. Nothing is needed from Palmetto to begin except a yes: we already have everything else, because you published it. Give us your footage, and we will give you a sound.