Investing in brand voice is too often an overlooked component or viewed in isolation. What steps can we undertake to make this key component grow our brand?

As a creative agency with branding at its core, we view ‘voice’ from a perspective of what works. This in essence means two things: firstly, from an effectiveness point of view – ‘what good looks like’ – and secondly from a practical application perspective through working with brands and seeing first hand their challenges to getting brands understood, embedded and fully delivered across all areas of a business – which is what is needed for a brand to truly exist and be leveraged.

Borne’s Head of Client Services, Holly Bamford, was invited to speak at the GO! Network’s workshop, where she provided her thoughts on its importance, the difference between brand tone and tone of voice, and some practical steps to undertake when defining and implementing it into the real world.

The Critical Role of Brand Voice

The importance of a brand voice is critical in driving long-term effectiveness. As with any brand asset, it can help brands to stand out in a competing market space. Through consistent application, it plays a key role in developing invaluable distinctiveness in a journey to growth.

To start, it’s important to pull out that brand voice and tone of voice are different things. Brand voice is what you say, and tone of voice is how you say it.

Within both of these, there is then a plethora of decisions to be made. What words do you use and not use? What kind of language constructs do we opt for? For example, are you straight talking & pithy or are you more of an explainer. But probably most importantly, ‘How do you want to make people feel?’ is a good question to ask when you think about voice and tone – do you want them to feel excited, make them laugh, feel reassured or educated?

These are a few core principles to be thinking about and give you that anchor and lens to check yourself against. However, it’s important that formulating – and deciding on – them shouldn’t happen in isolation.

For example, when we rebranded Virgin Wines, the brand voice built directly from a core brand sentiment – Joy that flows, naturally – and that inspired all aspects of their brand – from the visual identity and voice, to the products, services, and holistic brand behaviour.

Aligning voice, tone, and strategy

It’s important that your voice and tone are aligned to a foundational brand strategy holistically. A positioning and proposition are comprised of many factors in which we search for insights. To do that, we need to tune into culture and our audiences.

Particularly in the latter, it’s critical that our voice is informed by how they speak and what is important to them – which doesn’t necessarily match what the marketing team and decision makers within the brand want to sound like. When done correctly, it sets you up to have a degree of flexibility and room to play with your tone of voice across more tactical executions.

We see this particularly in disruptor brands which in a lot of their advertising opt for a copy and/or type-led approach. It helps them stand out from the crowd, it’s often different, and informed by where their audiences are present and how they speak, like Surreal’s ‘Don’t Look’ campaign to marketing people.

On the flip side, one of the biggest challenges in brand building occurs when an insight isn’t up to date or simply trend-led, it will likely not be important to your buyers or be too short lived. So, the main question to ask yourself here is “Is this right for our brand?”

Strategies and best practices: Engage stakeholders and capture insights

The key is to ensure your brand positioning and voice are fully understood throughout your business (and particularly across marketing). Opportunities to interact in a moment don’t often give time for deep recalibration and consensus; you need teams delivering your brand, to have the confidence in knowing how that brand can flex authentically and to the power of the brand, rather than its detriment.

Imagine your voice as a person at a dinner partner: the guests are your target audience and, of course, your objective is to connect with those people. What you say needs to be appropriate to that audience – and you’re unlikely to being say one thing to one guest and the something different to another. You’re not a robot, you’re a person, so you’re also going to be talking in a way that is appropriate to the occasion, but also based on the level of relationship you have with that person.

This is no different to brands and why it’s so mission critical to engage key stakeholders from the very beginning and getting everyone involved in the direction of travel for the brand, and what that means for its voice. This can be achieved in many ways such as workshops, brand personas, or other stimulus like social listening and Reddit – after all, a brand needs to resonate with its audience and give the people within the organisation the tools to deliver it.

Listen to your audience and your people

Consumer feedback is always something to consider and listen to. If people are rising to messaging, then it’s worth reviewing why. It could be that some of the audience insights have dated and what we thought was important to that audience has changed, or maybe there’s a more global cultural shift that our brand needs to consider more holistically, or maybe it’s actually brand voice being mismanaged.

And there are many ways in which we can test that. The rise of self-serving data platforms has removed the need for big budgets; they allows you to use key brand image statements, for example, to track relatability and awareness – and take action on any learnings.

More practically, particularly paid advertising performance metrics can be useful when testing different messaging to continuously learn and optimise to hit that sweet spot in an efficient way.

Finally, setting up a brand champion group can be really helpful. They can be the organisation’s eyes and ears to understand the brand from the ground up, highlighting any challenges with delivery and how it’s perceived.