Brand voice is one more way your brand is distinctive.
While designers and art directors are thinking about how your brand looks, copywriters are thinking about how it sounds. How does your brand express itself? Is it hip and sassy? Or more erudite? Formal or casual? Folksy or uptown?
Voice helps reveal – and reinforce – the personality of your brand. Ensuring your voice is consistent throughout your company is akin to staying “in character.” You expect the Queen of England to speak a certain way, much as you would expect a pop princess to have another way of expressing herself.
Your voice should always be true to your brand.
The voice of your brand is, quite literally, the manner in which your phones are answered. The tone of your advertising. The way your sales force interacts with customers. The attitude your literature takes. How your CEO speaks to the press. Inflection, style, vocabulary choice and even punctuation all are part of your voice, and convey more than just the content of the words themselves.
Listen to your own brand voice in its many iterations around your company. Is it appropriate? Is it distinctive? Is it consistent?
Imagine the language, the tone, the style and attitude a cell phone company would use in a web banner aimed at college students … compared to what a pacemaker manufacturer would use in a journal advertorial aimed at surgeons.
That’s brand voice.
December 14, 2006 at 11:55 am
Good post. It makes a lot of sense, but I have one question. How do you find your “voice” and manage consistently across all brand platforms?
May 24, 2007 at 10:15 am
Good question. “Voice” is just one component of the way your Brand is expressed. The architecture of your headquarters would be another. The color scheme of your logo is another. The kind of photography used in your print collateral yet another … and so forth. Determining your authentic Brand is the launching point from which all these other decisions can be made. The Brand will porvide you with personality traits, core value and other very useful information from which to create — and judge — all your communications efforts. Your “Voice” must be appropriate for and reflective of your Brand — and while copy approach might change across platforms, (ie, web writing is not PR writing is not radio script writing) the common thread of Brand will provide the rulebook — the structure, the tone, the flavor, if you will — that guides you to achieve the Brand Voice.