Talking brand

Why getting your brand’s tone of voice right speaks volumes and involves being more baboon... Top copywriter Mike Fleming explains.

Sending your brand out into the world is not just about communicating something visually, it is also about what you say and the words you use to say it – your brand’s tone of voice, in other words. But whereas visual identity can be fairly well nailed down in a good set of brand guidelines, summarising your verbal identity can be more like wrestling a bag of snakes – words are slippery characters, always ready to slide onto the page and nudge your message off-brand.

Any flavour but vanilla

Establishing your brand’s personality means you’ll know how to say who you are, what you do and how you do it in a differentiated way. But this is not an easy matter. The standard is to use just a few well-chosen words – friendly, sophisticated, reliable, for example – but the problem with that approach is that we all have a different perspective, agenda and bias. Three or four key descriptors give you very little room for error, but massive potential for misinterpretation. So, when organisations attempt to establish their core personality themselves, they often end up with a set of adjectives so ‘vanilla’ and general (and agreed by committee) that it’s difficult to derive a differentiated tone of voice from them, and their copywriters are given very little to go on. Inspiration, emotion and differentiation have each been chased out of the process because they cannot be universally agreed upon.

Steer clear of the same old, same old

Individuality is a particular issue with B2B brands who struggle to find a differentiated personality, and therefore a differentiated tone of voice, because what makes them unique is very often their depth of knowledge and how they apply it. That’s tricky to sum up with any degree of differentiation because all their competitors claim the same thing. What at first sounds like a logical, helpful and efficient way to define a brand’s personality and thus derive its tone of voice, give writers a leg up and keep them consistently on track, often ends up so ‘beige’ that it’s very little help at all.

Know thyself

The best tonal guides come from brands that really know themselves – who define their personality, explain why they do what they do, not just how they do it. Some of them have agencies that do the introspection on their behalf – the sort of agencies that take time to understand their client as well as their client’s business.

Listen to this, from Russell Davies of Wieden & Kennedy London, talking about how they came up with a planning strategy for their client, Honda:

“We’d embraced best marketing practice but it was... sucking the nuance and subtlety out of the culture we’d seen at Honda. And we knew if we were going to build a brand with scale and emotional depth we would need to embrace complexity.

“…‘Voice’ was an important idea in developing Honda advertising. ‘Voice’ means more than tone and manner; it means the seamless integration of what you say and how you say it; of strategy and execution.

“…We wanted to create a visceral understanding of the Honda ‘voice’ before we started making the work. As an inspiration, not a straitjacket.”

What they ended up with wasn’t a brand platform or four adjectives. It was a book. The ‘Book of Dreams’. Pages of inspirational thoughts, images, doodles and quotations that expressed the Honda tone of voice. It served both as inspiration and direction; idea and execution as one.

But if you don’t have the time/budget/people to create an entire tone of voice book, no problem – I’ve found similar inspiration elsewhere in shorter, easier formats.

Skype’s brand book, ‘The World According to Skype’, contains a short list of words and phrases that they like: ‘free, share, whole world, calls, baboon.’ These words sum up the brand’s personality perfectly and let us know the sort of language that forms its tone of voice – plain-speaking, inclusive, human and a bit whimsical. Nailed it. Such a clear personality, from which the tone of voice can be derived, gives a copywriter everything they need to know and the direction they need to take. And by including the word ‘baboon’, Skype gives writers room to play and explore.

Retrieving your personality

In a recent brand workshop for a heavyweight data management company, I asked one of their clients to describe the organisation’s personality by imagining who they’d be if they were a famous person. “They’re not a person,” came the quick reply, “they’re a golden retriever: hard-working, popular, loyal, energetic and often good fun.” This was what I would call tone of voice gold dust. The ‘Golden Retriever Voice’, although known only to them by that name, loosened their language up, inspired their internal culture and influenced everything from employee events to HR review metrics. It gave their writers a broader verbal landscape and resulted in messaging that was – surprise, surprise – hard-working, energetic and often good fun.

Be more baboon

Tone of voice is much more than a set of ‘bumper rails’ to ensure writers all proceed in the same general direction. Created with insight, passion, creativity and ambition, and inspired by the brand’s defined personality, tone of voice can be a significant and differentiating asset, becoming the inspiration for language that elicits emotional attachment rather than simply informing. So, to clients, agency planners and strategists everywhere, I make this appeal: fewer adjectives, more baboons – please.

The Luminous view

Mike makes a powerful case for being forensic about defining your brand’s tone of voice, but also for the value in ‘monkeying around’ and giving writers the freedom to explore. This degree of flexibility takes time, skill and patience to elicit. But it’s an investment that will give your brand, and all who express it in written form, the edge of confidence and differentiation so key to success in a highly competitive world.