Brand messaging: Developing your company’s voice and tone, and style guide
How to establish your company’s voice and tone to align with your core values, and how to put together your brand’s verbal identity style guide.
by Kathryn Reynolds & Anna Bogdanova
In last week’s blog post we examined the how-tos of creating your all-important brand value proposition and your positioning statement. With these two pillars in place, this week we look at how this all influences your external messaging plan.
Your external messaging is all the content that your company puts out into the world, and how to get your whole team to align on brand voice, tone, and style.
Why is it important to get these guides right? Because it’s not just about what you say, it’s about how you say it. It’s an expression of the team behind the brand. It’s a way to build customer trust. And it’s what sets you apart in a busy marketplace.
What is a brand’s voice and tone, and what is a style guide?
Voice: this is the overall personality of your brand that can usually be summarized in adjectives. These are adjectives that won’t change regardless of the situation.
Tone: this is how your brand voice comes to life in different situations. It adds a particular flavor to your voice depending on the audience, channel, and context.
Here’s an example of a great voice and tone guide from Shopify.
Style Guide: this is your reference point for preferred spelling and grammar conventions, and text and number formatting. It makes your writing consistent.
Here’s an example of a great style guide from Microsoft.
Where to start with this whole process? Assess what you’ve already got going on.
Your current brand messaging — what’s working and what’s not? How are your competitors and peers communicating — what works for them, and what doesn’t? Take a look at your market landscape and notice current communication trends.
Finding your brand’s voice and tone
What’s the difference between a voice and tone guide and a tone of voice guide? The voice and tone guide emphasises range. Your brand voice is a fixed asset, while your tone is much more situation dependent. Take a look at the example below:
Voice: You know your mum’s voice.
Tone: Her tone lets you know if you’re in trouble.
How do you develop your brand’s voice and tone? First you need to imagine your brand as a person. Then you can develop your brand’s personality and persona.
Creating your brand’s personality/ persona
First — what’s the difference between a personality and a persona?
Brand personality: your brand personality is a composite of your company’s characteristics, attributes, and qualities that make your brand who it is.
Brand persona: your brand persona is much more of an assumed character and a desired public image that you want to show to your clientele.
(Think Beyonce versus Sasha Fierce, if you will.)
Your company’s personality is likely already there, but it can be difficult to nail this down in writing, especially in a larger company with more than a couple of opinions weighing in. It’s important to eke it out though, to make sure that everyone on the team is on the same page with regard to these attributes.
If you don’t, you may have a broad mix of individual personalities creating mixed messages. And mixed messages are never fun. They make a company seem unclear in its vision. A clear message lets your audience know where they stand.
To easier understand your company’s personality, here are the five standard attributes; brands (especially established brands) tend to fall strongly under one category, with a second supporting (compatible) quality that backs up the first:
- Excitement: carefree, spirited, and youthful
- Sincerity: kindness, thoughtfulness, and an orientation toward family values
- Ruggedness: rough, tough, outdoorsy, and athletic
- Competence: successful, accomplished and influential, highlighted by leadership
- Sophistication: elegant, prestigious, and sometimes even pretentious
How do you know which attribute your company brand falls under? Think about it.
A bank, for example, may be competent, but also sincere, whereas a clothing line might choose excitement, or sophistication, depending on its particular clientele.
Imagine your favorite brand — which characteristics would you attribute to it?
Where does the brand persona come into this process?
Your brand persona is evolved from these attributes, and the process of developing your persona brings a third dimension to your writing. It gives your content wings. It takes your writing from where it is to where you would like it to be. So, how do you develop your brand persona (with your brand personality as a springboard?)
Think of your company as a person with a body, a face, thoughts, emotions, the whole nine yards. Workshop with your team. Create a fully-dimensional character.
You’d be surprised with what you come up with! Here’s a starter exercise:
Imagine your company brand as a dinner party guest…
- What’s their name? How old are they? What’s their profession?
- Are they quiet and reserved or the life and soul of the party?
- What are they likely to say when they meet a new person?
Bear with us — now consider this person as the voice of your website…
- What does this company’s landing page say to a new customer?
- How does this website ask a reader to take a particular action?
- What does their 404 page look like? Does it show their personality?
Nothing like a good 404 page (or lack thereof) to tell you what a company is about! Here are some great examples, we really like the lego one, and the IMDB one too.
By placing your “brand-as-a-person” in different situational contexts, like a new subscriber or a client with a complaint, you brainstorm scenarios and responses.
The voice and tone that organically develops through this workshopping is then formatted as a guide for your team as a blueprint for content ideation and creation.
How to put together your style guide
Your style guide is a reference manual for the whole team to make sure that all spelling, grammar, and formatting conventions are aligned. You’d be surprised how often they aren’t. Spelling analyse and organize with an “s” or a “z”, anyone?
When you have a small team, a style guide probably doesn’t seem as necessary. But if you grow your team and need to delegate writing tasks to more than one person — or across several channels — then this process becomes highly important.
Not convinced? Do an analysis of your current copy
Consider a piece of content from each of your communication channels, your website, your blog, your social media, your emails, your user guides, etc. Is it current? Is it consistent? Is it grammatically correct? Does it reflect your brand?
Creating a cohesive voice and tone guide, alongside your style guide, allows your whole team, from customer service to back end devs, from content writers to the CEO, to feel comfortable and confident that their writing reflects the overall brand.
This process won’t happen overnight and it will need to be a work-in-progress. We recommend researching and writing your guides as a reference point, but we also recommend round-tabling, like Mailchimp does, to be sure you’ve gotten it right.
Unsure how your brand’s voice, tone, and writing style line up? You may want to bring in an experienced team to assist you with your research, workshopping, and user guide creation. It could save you a lot of time and expense in the long run!
Previously in our verbal branding series:
Verbal branding: what do your words say about you?
Brand discovery: why would you bother with that?
How to discover your brand identity — step one: soul searching
How to discover your brand identity — step two: market research
Brand messaging: getting your value proposition just right
Next week’s verbal branding post: Moving on to your company’s external messaging — what’s in a name (and a tagline?) Quite a lot, so it would seem…
Shiba500 is a boutique marketing agency that helps startups and scale-ups navigate brand building, storytelling, and growth marketing. We act as a bridge between growth companies and new business opportunities.
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