Giving your brand a personality
It’s one of the things copywriters ask clients about most. It can make a huge impact to how your brand is perceived, and yet it’s not always a business priority. So what’s all the fuss over tone of voice?
It’s a slightly clunky terminology in itself and this can be off putting. The fact is, adjectives can mean different things to each person. It’s a tricky, slippery, and subjective concept.
Even asking seasoned business owners to define their business’ tone of voice can lead to some blank expressions. This overused phrase can easily lose all meaning, and lead to more ambiguity than clear answers.
The fact of the matter is that tone is exceedingly important. It defines a business and the relationship with its customers. Done properly, it can create powerful connections, convey mood, and elicit responses.
Look at Nando’s cheeky, irreverent radio adverts, or Marks & Spencer’s evocative TV campaigns complete with sultry voiceover and suggestive imagery. Tone of voice ultimately invites your customers into your world to share an experience.
So why do tone of voice guides often present themselves in stale, business-like word documents, or even worse, not exist at all. This isn’t the way to approach a thing with such a big personality. Because that’s what it’s all about. Injecting a brand with character.
The classic approach is to run through an almost a charades-type exercise, imagining your brand as a car, flower or animal. Personally, I prefer to keep it simple and do the tried and tested route of picturing a person, and exploring three attributes to sum them up.
Then, going one step further, imaging how that person may behave in different environments to hone the communications for varying marketing strands, whether that’s a sales website or a corporate brochure. This can’t eliminate subjectivity, but it does help bring things to life, making it relevant and real, rather than just words on a page.
But don’t stop there. Never stop there! Keep it alive with actual example sentences and phrasing. Make sure new writers are trained to fully understand the personality of the brand and how it communicates. Ultimately, the image of quirky might mean the whole nine yards, woman in a jester hat in a pair of oversized pantaloons to one person, or it could be a businessman with a handlebar moustache to another. You get the picture.
So, have fun with your tone of voice. Don’t get bogged down in dry terminology. Make it leap off the page and tell a story. That way you’ll be sure to nail it first time.
