The importance of brand voice

The importance of brand voice can’t be overstated. So it’s surprising how many people don’t even know what it is. But when you stop to consider, it’s obvious.

There are two aspects to a brand: the visual and the verbal.

 

It’s easy to think of a brand as its logo, colours, typeface, and other visual elements such as photography, spokesperson, illustrative style etc. But they’re only half the story.

Your brand voice is equally important. And in some cases, more so.

Your brand voice is the way you speak. The way you describe your products or services. The tone you take. The personality every sentence that you write portrays.

Get it right, and you’re instantly recogniseable.

 

Get it wrong and your communications jar with the reader, or worse still, don’t register at all.

One of the biggest problems is when companies use a generic voice. Writing like the category, rather than defining their place among their competitive set.

This can happen for several reasons:

• Because they haven’t given it any thought
• Because they assume there are rules about how an organisation like theirs should speak
• Because they don’t want to stand out, but blend in
• Because ‘it’s just the way we’ve always done it’

Branding is about finding ways to persuade people to choose you.

 

If you’re just like everyone else in the category, you’re leaving it to luck. Only the category leader can afford to be generic, so if you’re trying to build a share of the marketplace, you need to use everything to your competitive advantage. And that includes your brand voice.

The reasons for people choosing one brand over another are various, and very few of them rational.

 

If your product or service is clearly superior to everyone else’s, great. But that’s rarely the case these days. Most brands are looking for small increments of difference, and they’re mostly about how a potential customer feels.

• Are they excited about you, or reassured?
• Do they relate to you as a peer, or respect you as an expert?
• Do you make them smile, or help them sleep at night?
• Do you take away a problem, or open new opportunities?

None of these are binary choices. You could be reassuringly exciting, a friendly expert, as well as being an amusing brand, that takes away worry and offers exciting new things

And it’s how you say it that counts:

• Distinctively – because you won’t be remembered if you sound like everyone else (think of the oat milk category, compared to the Oatly brand).
• Simply – because your articulation of your offer must be succinct. Unlike you, the public aren’t that interested in your brand, so every word counts.
• Consistently – because if you speak with one voice on social media and a completely different one on your website, it’s confusing, disjointed, and often disappointing.

So, given the importance of brand voice, how do you get, and keep one? 

The best way is to use skilled and experienced copywriters. Either all the time, or to establish your brand voice at the outset.

The best ones will spend time immersing themselves in your organisation and asking lots of questions, to ensure they come up with something that’s not only differentiating, but true to you and very useable. It should be easy to explain so that anyone who writes on behalf of your brand is able to check what they’re doing against a simple guide.

Getting your brand voice right is an investment that will always pay back in terms of your reputation, profile, and the propensity of customers to choose, and keep on choosing you.

For any business, there can’t be anything more important than that.