You Can Learn to Have a World-Class Brand Voice. Here’s How.

The following is adapted from Strong Language by Chris West.

It could be a fright dream.

You find yourself in a big office, sitting behind a big desk with piles of papers scattered across it. It feels familiar but somehow not. There are 20 people in there, sitting, standing, younger, older, all staring at you. It takes a moment to work out what’s hand-painted onto the other side of your office door:

Editor

You look down at the piles of papers on your desk: each of them is an article, and all the people in the room are watching you and waiting for you to approve or improve their story. They need you to edit all those words, no time to waste, the presses are waiting. Fifty thousand words in the voice of this newspaper you’ve somehow found yourself in charge of.

You flick through the papers — some writing is great; some is just terrible. But why’s the great great and the terrible terrible? It’ll be all right if you can just work fast enough. Then a feeling of nausea surges through you: this is just today’s newspaper. Tomorrow there’ll be another 50,000 words to edit. A bell starts ringing, the red light in the corner of your office starts flashing: the presses are turning, giant rolls of newssheet are now running through them. They’re coming out totally blank. The bell keeps ringing. And ringing.

You wake up. The bell is your alarm clock. It’s just a dream.

You get into the office with the sound of the alarm still echoing round your head. And there are already 20 people queueing up outside, and each of them has a piece of paper in their hand: the new web copy, the new social media campaign, the new contact centre scripts, the CEO’s speech, the Head of Investor Relations’ quarterly report, the packaging copy, the internal comms campaign, the new employee’s pack. Everyone is looking at you expectantly. And then the phone on your desk starts ringing, clashing with the alarm that’s still sounding in your head. It’s the CEO’s line. Why’s she calling? What does she want? Your arm reaches out; why are you wearing pyjamas in front of these people? You pick up the phone, but it doesn’t stop ringing.

And now you wake up for real.

And as you lie there, you work it out in your head: every day, you’re responsible for more words coming out of your company than the Editor of the Guardian newspaper had to put into today’s printed edition. But unlike the Editor of the Guardian, you’ve never been told how to edit, guide, or inspire writers. And unlike newspapers, no one’s choosing to hear what you want to say.

If you want your brand to grow, if you don’t want to have to squander budget just to win attention, if you want to engage your customers, if you want to build loyalty, if you want to shine in Customer Experience, if you want to motivate your company, if you want your packaging to tell your story, you have to find a way to say everything your brand wants to say, and say it in a voice that grabs everyone’s attention.

In the last ten years, the number of channels has exploded: web, social, CRM, loyalty comms, Customer Service, internal comms, and there’s still advertising, packaging, brochures, investor relations, legal, and all the rest.

But these aren’t one-way channels. Today, consumers expect to be in a dialogue with brands they like. And who hangs around for a response in a real dialogue? You now have to be able to trust your writers to send out brand comms through multiple channels, at greater volumes than ever before, and without you ever seeing it. Are they staying on-brand? Are they interesting? Are they flexing the writing to suit the channel’s environment so you’re not showing up like Dad at a school disco?

When budgets are being cut, expectations are rising, and there’s less time than ever before to do anything, you have to learn a fast and effective way to define your brand voice and guide all your writers in using it.

But everyone can write, can’t they?

The truth is, everyone can’t write. Not well. Not in a way that makes your brand stand out. But everyone can be taught how to do it.

Everyone can be taught to write in a strong brand voice. A voice that does sound different and engages people, painting pictures in their minds. A voice which can be consistently on-brand but also flexes to suit the moment and the channel. It is possible for you to critique your writers so they stay on track and march out of your office inspired. It’s possible to walk through your contact centre and not cringe at how someone’s describing your brand. You can be regularly signing off Version 2 instead of Version 22. You can field a call from a member of the Board and describe objectively why your team’s written something in a certain way. You can direct your writers to use language to reposition your product into a new category. And you never ever need to look at something your brand’s written and say, ‘It’s not right, it’s not us, but I just don’t know what’s wrong with it.’

I can tell you how you do all that. It’ll show you how your brand language always works on three levels — and how you can make those three levels reinforce each other. It’ll show how you can achieve Quick Wins to get the program moving, how you can align all your writers — internal and agency — with that voice, how you manage and inspire your writers, and how you can build the processes (and the budget) for permanent change.

Best of all, you can have a brand voice that establishes your brand as world-class.

We humans are language animals. We invented language to share ideas and deepen relationships. We invented brands for the same reasons. And so, an authentic, differentiated brand voice is uniquely suited to building understanding, building relationships, and building your businesses.

All you have to know is how to build your brand voice.

To learn more about how you can build a world-class brand voice, Strong Language is available on Amazon.

Chris West is the Founding Partner of Verbal Identity, the world’s most successful strategy agency specialising in the power of language. His firm has guided global and national brands, relaunches, and start-ups, from B2B and B2C to tech and luxury and everything in between, including LVMH, BASF, the John Lewis Partnership, Toms, and the global skincare growth brand Votary.

A multi-award-winning copywriter, Chris also contributes to national newspapers and guest lectures at business schools. Chris lives in Oxford, England, with his wife, twins, and a handful of Siberian Forest cats.

You can find him online at verbalidentity.com.