When it comes to your brand voice, being friendly, funny and little bit quirky just doesn’t cut it anymore.
When I’m talking to businesses in the initial stages of thinking about their brand voice, I often hear things like ‘we want to sound friendly and approachable’ or ‘we just want our voice to be funny or quirky’.
(Side note: during my days as a copywriter, almost every client I worked with used to want a ‘funny and friendly’ tone.)
And don’t get me wrong, those things are great as the starting points for the brand voice development process, but they’re nowhere near enough to develop a unique, customer-grabbing voice.
(Especially not as more and more brands start to develop their own unique brand voices that go way beyond just funny and friendly.)
Why ‘funny, friendly and quirky’ isn’t good enough any more.
A few years ago, a funny, friendly and quirky voice used to be enough to differentiate you from the number of brands producing boring, stilted and stiff corporate copy.
It used to say ‘we’re a real brand run by real people. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.’
Jumping on the trend early, Innocent capitalised on this like motherfuckers.
Everything they produced was friendly, funny and quirky and it stood out from the noise because it was different. And as a result, sales soared, brand equity went through the roof and the brand went from strength to strength.
But then, of course, came the swarm of quirky Innocent knock-off brand voices.
Suddenly, everything from your email provider to your toiler paper wanted to be your oh-so-kooky best mate. (In the UK, this trend even got its own name — wackaging.)
Here’s a particularly egregious example. Somewhere, somebody looked at syrupy-sweet milkshake and said ‘if that could talk, it’d sound just like Danny Dyer’…
(It’s worth noting that while the quirky voice is slowly evolving into the artisan brand voice — where everything is ‘handcrafted’ and ‘meticulously pored over’ — the mechanics are still the same; a friendly, humorous tone with artisan phrases replacing the quirky asides. Plus, there’s still far too much wackaging on the shelves for us to be able to declare this trend dead.)
And so, as more and more brands develop individual brand voices and conversational copy is increasingly becoming the norm, funniness, friendliness and quirkiness aren’t differentiators any more.
In fact, they’re quickly becoming old hat.
In the backlash against corporate blah and business speak, funny and quirky has become the new normal. Brands aren’t speaking like this because it’s on brand, authentic or right for their customers, they’re doing it because it’s the done thing.
In other words, a ‘friendly and funny’ brand voice is no longer making you stand out, it’s making you blend in.
(As a quick aside, a study found that 54% of all language that brands use is generic and that brands are investing more in saying the same as competitors than in trying to say something unique. Ain’t that crazy? Businesses are spending lots of money just to blend in.)
But there’s another problem, too.
Going beyond the fact that almost every brand wants to sound friendly and approachable (have you ever known a business that wants to sound hostile and standoffish?), the two terms are so broad term that they’re almost entirely useless when it comes to applying them in the real world.
‘Friendly, funny and a bit quirky’ might sound like a good direction for a brand voice in theory, but how does it work in practice?
Do you want to be friendly like a best friend or friendly like a dental receptionist? Do you want to be friendly in a way that makes people feel safe and relaxed, or a way that makes people want to grab a beer with you?
And saying you want to be funny and a little bit funny? Well, that is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, my friend.
Funny and quirky are such incredibly subjective and broad terms, that they’re almost impossible to apply consistently. (And consistency is key when it comes to communicating with your customers.)
Is your brand’s sense of humour British, American, surreal, everyday, dad joke-y, sarcastic, dark, edgy or self-deprecating? A delicate mix of two or three of them?
And what do you mean by quirky? How quirky? Quirky in a David Bowie kind of way, quirky in a Jeff Goldblum kind of way or “quirky” in Zooey Deschanel kind of way?
Without pinning down exactly how they want to be funny and quirky, brands often end up subconsciously (or consciously) aping how other brands are doing it well (cute asides, puns for days, and the occasional burst of safe surrealism) without giving thought to whether it suits their brand or their target audience.
Is ‘funny, friendly and a little quirky’ right for your audience?
Sure, friendly, funny and quirky voices have been incredibly effective for several brands.
And if you can nail down a way to use that tone in a way that’s different than any other brand (particularly your competitors), then you’re likely to notice a spike in your engagement and brand awareness.
However, it’s also important to stop for a second and question whether funny and friendly is right for your brand and for your target market.
In a study of how brand voices related to customer perception of the brand, Judy Delin found that while many brands benefited from using more personal, clearer and informal language, sometimes brands would be better off keeping things a little more formal.
After getting feedback on an informal, friendly brand voice for a government agency, Delin found that customers thought that the voice was patronising. They preferred voices that were direct, but not too chatty, accessible but still business-like and, most importantly, not too pally.
Key takeaway: your brand voice should be determined, at least in part, by how your customers expect to be spoken to.
The solution? A new brand voice based on research into your brand, your competitors, your customers and your soon-to-be customers.
Did you know that a customer is four times more likely to buy from a brand that makes an emotional, personal connection?
But with so much noise out there, it’s never been harder to make that all-important connection.
The digital age, it seems, has taken a gargantuan dump on the old Rule of 7 idea.
Now, you don’t just have to be seen by your customers 7 times, you have to be seen, noticed and create more of an emotional connection than your competitors.
Simple right?
However, a distinctive brand voice that’s rooted in research into your customers can make a massive difference.
If you can develop a voice that hits that sweet spot between how your brand sounds (and wants to be seen), how your customers speak (and like to be spoken to) and ways of speaking that are completely distinct from the way any of your competitors speak, then you’ll be well and truly off to the races.
Look at how brands like Apple, Virgin and Firebox have got their brand voice dialled all the way in.
Their brand voices are for everyone, but that’s exactly the point. They’ve all worked out what their brand stands for, how they want their brand to be seen and how their brand is different, and then they’ve discovered how to communicate that in a voice that chimes (but doesn’t mimic) their customers.
(I made a fancy diagram to show you what I mean.)
I guess the main point I’m trying to make is this: developing a distinctive brand voice isn’t hard, it’s just hard work.
It’s all about doing the research (and a lot of it), experimenting and trying on voices for size and then refining it down until it hits that sweet, sweet spot in the middle of the Venn diagram.
Or, as my boy Jed Bartlet says:
Of course, once you’ve done all of that research, you may still want your brand voice to be friendly, funny and quirky.
But I reckon you’ll want it to go way beyond that too.
You may decide to be friendly like a mate over a pint or two or friendly like your barber, or you might decide that your audience appreciates rude humour, sarcastic humour or no humour at all.
But you’ll probably also decide that your voice should be a whole host of other things too; authoritative, bold, controversial, in-your-face, self-aware, youthful, dynamic, customer-focused, cheeky, outspoken, inspirational, adventurous…
The list goes on and on…
Once you’ve decided on those things and put your new brand voice in place, everything your brand produces from that moment on, whether it’s a tweet, blog post or piece of sales copy, will be produced to immediately make an impact with your target audience.
You’ll be heard over the noise. (Because you’ll stand out from everybody else.)
You’ll seem authentic. (Because your voice is authentic, consistent and rooted in your brand’s story.)
And you’ll make a connection. (Because your voice has been designed to chime with how your audience speaks and like to be spoken to.)
And that’s far more than a simple ‘friendly, funny and a little quirky’ brand voice will ever get you.
If you want to develop your own knock-out brand voice — based on the same process I used to help 7-and-8 figure brands — you can sign up for my FREE brand voice email course here:
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