Our journey to find our own brand voice
Establishing a unique brand voice is one of the most important steps in any start-up. A distinctive brand voice is a great asset, it’s how you connect with people and stand out from the crowd. I’m currently working in a new tech start-up with our target customers mainly being B2B, and I was tasked with finding our brand voice.
So… where to begin? With research of course!
I headed to Google and typed ‘how to create a company brand voice?’ there were 150,000,000 results. The problem was they want it now — there’s no time to trawl through millions of articles!
Instead of giving you a step-by-step guide on “how to make a brand voice” or showing examples of other companies’ brand voices, I’m going to run through my journey at Gradient and how I developed our unique brand voice. If like me, it’s your first time establishing a brand voice, I hope it helps.
How I tackled the task
- Establish why brand voice is so important
- Integrate Gradient’s company values into the tone
- Create a style spectrum of polar opposite words so everyone could have their say on where they thought we should sit
- Build a word bank and create sample phrases
- Experiment with the brand voice in blogs, tweets and other content
Why brand voice is so important
Currently with a limited online presence, but with a new release on the horizon, getting our voice right is important for our brand and the future release of our content. Our voice needs to be effective, personable and engaging when we interact with people and be consistent across all platforms. It is my job to make sure our established brand voice is understood and embraced by everyone on the team. It can’t be that hard, can it?
Gradient’s core values
The first step I took was to really understand Gradient’s core values because they would form the basis of our brand voice. Harriet Cummings’ ‘Finding Your Brand’s Voice’ helped me to understand that “a tone of voice is not what you say, but how you say it” and in order to stand out from the crowd our voice needs be unique and recognisable whilst also being distinctive. Harriet’s blog also gave some interesting examples of other companies’ brand voices which are great to compare with and see how others do it.
A company’s voice naturally stems from its values; our values here at Gradient are:
PIONEERING
We are constantly innovating, evolving and adding new features to our products. We never stop learning. Always thriving to define our category and be the best. We are always trying something new.
INTEGRITY
Relationships are built upon trust. We are honest with ourselves and our customers. We trust our team to deliver. We honour our commitments and always aim deliver against them. We treat our customers with fairness and respect. We do the right thing.
COLOURFUL
We believe in variation, diversity, ideas, different backgrounds and experiences, personality and passion. We draw people in with colour and website visuals that are memorable. We are bright, cheerful, warm, and engaging. Colourful in all walks of life.
KINETIC
We never stand still. We are always moving towards our goals and progressing in all aspects of the company to reach them. We strive towards ‘yes’ moments.
If you struggle to remember your values, think of an acronym. Ours is PICK. We want people to PICK us, whether they are customers or future hires, because of our values and the way we operate.
So, we’ve established what our values are and know that they need to shine through our brand voice, the next aspect of our brand voice is our tone. What kind of tone do we want this voice to have? And how do we want to come across? Google couldn’t help me here so I went back to old-fashion question and answers and sent all the team my list…
- What are our company values?
- What three adjectives best describe our company culture?
- How do you want our customers to perceive our brand?
- What is our company’s tagline or motto?
- Who are our major competitors?
- How does our product or service help customers become who they want to be?
The words listed below are the ones that appeared frequently, which help set a tone of voice for the brand, ‘essentially, there is one voice for your brand and many tones that refine your voice’:
AUTHENTIC . COLOURFUL . FUN . PASSIONATE
APPROACHABLE . INFORMATIVE . FRIENDLY . INNOVATIVE
INSTINCTIVE . AMBITIOUS . TALENTED . FAST
For Gradient, these words describe how we want to come across to customers, and are an important part of who we are as a company and what we stand for.
Style Spectrum
After establishing the different tones that can define the voice, it was time for the team to get together. I kicked off the session by showing them a style spectrum with polar opposite words at either end to get the team’s opinion as to where they thought our brand voice should sit. I asked each member of the company to mark on the spectrum where they felt Gradient would be.
This chart shows the combined results from the team. From this, we can see that at Gradient we want to come across as educational and conversational therefore being approachable, not uncommunicative. We want to be passionate and excited about our products and content, without using too much confusing jargon, therefore being passionate, not placid.
I like to think of Gradient’s brand voice as being in the centre of smart-casual. Not being the person at a party who is over-dressed and unapproachable or the person who is too casual and vague. We want to be that person who has just the right balance between the two and is both presentable and approachable.
This was a really useful exercise, it was awesome to understand everyone’s opinions. Even if you already have defined your brand voice or your developing it, give this exercise a go to see where your team think your brand voice should be.
Word bank and sample phrases
Lastly, to put some of the tone and language into practice I introduced InVision’s (found on Medium) brand voice template and got the team to think of some sample phrases using the brand voice tone we had previously established.
This chart was a great way to use all the words we had just established as the tone of our voice and capture vocabulary to produce sentences that replicate our brand voice. These phrases will be used across all customer interactions from the sign-up flow to our tweets. e.g. Excitement:amazing, fantastic — ‘check out this awesome new feature’. Concern: oh no, sorry — let me check that out for you and get it sorted’.
Experimenting
By reviewing our brand values and using techniques like the style spectrum and brand voice chart I have been able to define a brand voice that represents Gradient. But of course like every start-up, as we evolve and change so too will our voice.
This exercise has captured our brand voice of today, and given us some practical techniques we can reuse as we move forward and grow. The next task is to experiment with our new brand voice and integrate it into everything we do. This will be done via our content strategy, our websites and our social media posts as we continue to grow and evolve.
What next?
Check out our brand voice in action on our Gradient Twitter feed!
