Insights
29/07/2024
More and more brands are asking for brand voice guidelines. But what are they and why would you need them?
It’s tempting to think of brands purely in terms of their visual elements. Their logo, colours, typography, photography or illustrative style. But that’s only half the story. How a brand speaks is equally important and needs to be given the same careful consideration.
Often a company grows beyond its original founders, who know their brand on an instinctive level but can struggle to articulate it. They need to be able to pass on their legacy without having to explain themselves again and again. In other cases, organisations simply recognise the need to take a more professional approach to protecting their brand. Brand voice guidelines make sense, because they allow the brand’s voice to be identified and explained to their team.
Brand voice guidelines can take many forms, but the idea should be that anyone who is writing on behalf of a brand can refer to them for inspiration and guidance. Brand voice guidelines, at their best, are easy-to use documents that explain the personality of the brand: its purpose, vision, mission and values.
Then, in a practical way, they demonstrate how the brand speaks, ideally with adjectives describing the tone. For example, one brand might be witty and informal, while another might be authoritative and responsible. It’s useful for the guidelines to contain examples of things to do and not do. This can be a list of example phrases expressed in the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ words.
However, it’s worth remembering the word ‘guidelines’. A brand voice document should offer guidance, rather than a set of cast iron rules. Users should be offered guide rails for their writing but some latitude too.
Guidelines are usually distributed in the form of pdf documents. They should be as short as they can possibly be, with clear contents pages and signposting so that people who are using them on a day-to-day basis can easily and quickly find the guidance they are looking for.
They can be written internally, but it’s easier to outsource them to a trusted partner. Guidelines can’t be written by a committee, they need to be delegated to an expert. Once you have a structure and the basic content, it’s good to discuss, agree and finalise them. But in order for them to be useable and avoid stodginess, it’s best to let one person write them.
The writer could be someone in your internal marketing department who is familiar with writing for the brand. It could be your design agency, who have developed or created the visual elements of your brand. Both of these are perfectly capable but it’s not their primary skill. For example, an internal writer in the marketing department may have a hundred and one other priorities and will usually lack experience writing guidelines for other brands, so will face a steep learning curve. Similarly, a design agency may offer writing but it’s not their core area of expertise.
Our advice is to turn to a specialist copywriting or brand writing agency who can offer an external perspective on your brand, free from any ‘luggage’ associated with your legacy or distractions. (In other words, knowing too much can be inhibiting.) They will also have wide experience in creating guidelines for other brands, in different fields. So they will know what works best and will have ready-made ideas on format and content for your final document.
We’ve created brand voice guidelines for many world-leading brands across many industry sectors like tech, fashion, education, alcohol, automotive, healthcare, insurance, hospitality and more. Working with our highly skilled copywriters will mean you get to a tone of voice faster, and receive guidelines that are clear, concise and eminently useable.
To find out what Craft can do for you, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you at hi@craftwords.com.
Share
All our projects start with a conversation. Maybe you’re not entirely sure what you need, that’s fine, we’re happy to explore it with you.