Brand Voice

Episode 7 of Position to Win. Brand voice. Belief, voice, tone. Why most brands argue about the top of the pyramid and never build the bottom. Why voice fails in the middle. Why Mailchimp's $12B exit was almost entirely about the sentences.

Voice is strategy. 

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Alright, so close your eyes and think about what comes to mind. Just do it. I'm loving it. 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. See, you didn't need the logos. You thought of it. Nike, McDonald's, Geico. A few words, and the whole brand walked into your head. And that's a little hint of what voice can do. The slogan starts there, but the personality extends much further. And Nike sounds like an encouraging coach, right? That's like daring for you to go further. McDonald sounds friendly, happy, and easy. Basically, like a good mood. Geico sounds witty, almost like they're winking at you. All state sounds protective, sounds safe and reassuring. Notice how the different brands, even though they are in the same industry, sounds completely different. We have Apple, who sounds aspirational. Microsoft sounds practical. Those are the same category. Sometimes nearly the same product, but the brand have entirely different voices. Voice is the sound of the brand's character. And every strong brand has committed to one specific character. A clear voice teaches the customer how to talk about you when you're not in the room. And if your language is consistent and clear, they'll repeat it. They can't help it. So you're essentially training your customers to use your voice. And that's what we're going to talk about today. This is episode seven, the brand voice. If you do not build your voice on purpose, it will get built anyway. So you can't avoid it. It gets built by committee, by interns, agencies, and by the loudest person in the room. And this can turn into a leaking bucket that your brand never really sees. Voice has a lot of power. So I'm John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands, the ones that accept a position in the market and the ones that challenge it. And this show is for the challengers and for the founders and CMOs who are responsible for making that happen. Anne Handley, in her book, Everybody Writes, makes a sharp point about a brand voice. And if you remove the logos from marketing materials and you just write out all the sentences there, and then you have a list of all the different companies there, you try to match which sentence belongs to which companies, most employees would actually fail. They wouldn't be able to know who said what and whatnot, because the words are interchangeable. There's not very clear positioning and there's not very clear uniqueness in each of the moist. Which means that the brand, as experienced through the language, does not actually exist. It's just a logo that's sitting on top of a bunch of words or generic sentences. There is no uniqueness. If your team cannot tell your copy apart without the logo in it, what makes you think the market can? Voice is meant to scale with your company. As you grow from 50 people to 500 people, you cannot personally speak through every customer or write every marketing copy or do everything and make sure that it sounds the same. You cannot review the sales emails, every support reply, every product release, every social post, every landing page. What you can do is you can build a voice so clear and so well documented that any writer in your company, any freelancers or agencies you hire can produce the same copy that sounds unmistakably like you. A logo can get attention, but a voice earns trust. And how you speak and when you speak and when you are silent. Jenny Romaniuk wrote this book about brand distinctive assets. And she talks about how brands actually get remembered through two key attributes. There's fame and there's uniqueness, right? Fame is what it sounds like being famous, what you are famous for, what you are what people connect that asset to you with. And then there's uniqueness is how many people connect that asset only to you versus anybody else, what you are specifically unique for. And brand equity grows when they have both. A famous voice, anyone can say, is generic. A unique voice that nobody can recognize is basically invisible. So the voice at last have both. So let's break down really what is a brand voice? And when I think about brand voice, I think about the verbal identity pyramid. So let me show it. Alright, so here we have the verbal identity pyramid. Now, this verbal identity pyramid is split into three parts. We have belief here, then the middle section is voice, and then the top is tone. Now, when you build it and you do this, you do this in disorder. So bottom up, all the way through the top, and as you can see, the most foundational element, the ones that stays static the most, is belief. Out of the belief, you end up coming with the unique value proposition, unique sales proposition, your brand values, etc. etc. And so these things might change over time because your unique sales proposition might change as your new product comes out. And then the tone will change depending on whether it's a new announcement or on the other side if it's an apology, if the brand made a mistake. And so the tonnage is not always the same. It will wiggle from one side to the other. Belief is what holds true, right? When we think about the category, the customer, and the way the work is done. Belief is the unique perspective that you have in the industry. And then the belief paves the path for the unique value proposition, the unique selling proposition, the key brand messages, the brand values, the taglines, and the positioning statement. Once you have that belief set, everything else can flow from it. So this is what you end up saying to the market once you actually know what you're going to stand for. You get the belief first, and then everything else writes itself. You skip the belief, and then you spend times rewriting taglines because you never really know what sticks. You don't have a core moral code or what you really stand for. So how do you make a belief? What do you end up standing for? Where's ends up being the moral code from all of this? And so, first of all, on a positioning level, Marty Newmeyer talks about the only this statement. And that's what makes you the one and only. That's not better, that's not faster, that's the only. The only thing in the category that does a specific thing for a specific type of person, a specific customer group. That's the only statement. Then separately, what does the brand believe that most of the competitors do not? And this is the worldview underneath the work, the brand that defends the opinion. Now, bringing this to life, when MasterCard said there are some things money cannot buy. For everything else, there is MasterCard. Okay. MasterCard said there are some things money cannot buy. This was a category outlier. A financial company saying there's some things that money cannot buy is a belief mode, one that stands out. An easy way to think about being a category outlier is to think about what the category is often saying and then seek to basically say the opposite. Then another layer of question is who is the enemy? People can rally much faster around a common enemy than they can among a common hero. An enemy can really bring on traction. And an enemy does not necessarily need to be a person, it can be a convention, a way of thinking, a category norm, a status quo that the brand really refuses to accept. And the voice gets sharper when it knows what it's standing up for and what it's standing up against. Apple really had a quiet war against the corporate IT culture. Patagonia is fighting against fast fashion and disposable consumerism. And Liquid Death made their enemy obvious by saying death to plastic. Each of these enemies is chosen on purpose, and they end up bringing the voice to life. And it makes the brand feel more human because they refuse to be like everybody else. And if you can answer those three questions, you have a decent belief system. So, and if you can't, the slogan is only going to be temporarily and it's not going to save you. So the next layer of the brand pyramid is the middle, which is the voice, the consistent posture that the brand carries when it speaks. A voice is the belief said out loud. And this is the part that brand customers recognize across the launch, announcements, support emails, and the voice is really what gets remembered. When we do this with clients, we build a manifesto worldview. We build a document that takes the belief and turns it into a language that the company can run with some principles and some core messaging pillars and a document that says, instead of saying this, say that. And then we end up adding this into type of like style guideline or voice guideline. So notice that a voice isn't a set of adjectives. Adjectives can be overused and are mostly useless, right? Every brand thinks they are authoritative. So if people are making a brand document says, oh, here is our voice, and we are authorities, it's like, okay, well, show me what authoritative actually sounds like in a customer service email, in a pricing page, in a social media post. Show me the flat version and then apply that voice to it and show the reason for the change. This is how you build a voice system. People understand those examples, those examples bring it to life, and they will understand the logic behind it. Here are some examples so that you could see this, you know, before. So before the voice, streamline team communication and boost productivity with collaborative messaging platform. After where work happens. Yep, that's it. That's Slack. And let's try another one. Book unique accommodations from hosts in destination all across the world. After we belong anywhere. That's Airbnb. And let's do one more. We offer premium athletic footwear and apparel that empowers athletes to reach their full potential. After? Just do it. I'm providing you examples and showing this to you through tagline uses, but this gets distributed through all of the touch points. A flat version is not wrong, but they're overly wordy and they're trying hard to prove themselves. They are interchangeable with every competitor. And the rewrites do something that the flat versions don't, right? They sound like a person that decided what to say. A person with a voice, with a message, and a person that's worth listening to that has a point of view. And when you hear the difference, you really can't ignore it. And branding has that power. All right. Another key voice element is not what you choose to say, but really what the opposite, what you choose not to say, the forbidden list. The words that the brands will never use, sentences, patterns that'll never get published. You have the repel list of who you're not trying to appeal. The reader should bounce from the homepage if you cannot name them. When you've done the ICP work from the episode, these phases become much easier. Voice is not an adjective, it's really a set of decisions. Then there's the last layer on the top of the pyramid, and this is the tone. This is when the voice gets applied through context, when things are intentionally designed to change. So thinking about mood, there are right words at the wrong time, and tone is here to help solve that. For example, being more careful in an apology, being more energetic in a launch, being more precise in a support document, being looser and less restricted in a social media post. The tone moves, but the voice does not. So Nielsen Norman group build a framework with the four dimensions. I'm gonna show it to you now. So you have formal versus casual, serious versus funny, respectful versus irreverent, matter-of-fact versus enthusiastic. And so in this tone dimension, you end up picking two things. You end up picking where you are at your most conservative or where you are in your most energetic or daring times, right? Your conservative versus liberal levels. Think about this. Let's say you're doing a launch. A launch, you might have the conversation being a lot more casual, but if it's an apology, it might become more formal. So maybe you have formal here, and then when you have a launch, you are way more casual. And so your tone of voice exists in this range. Then maybe when you are doing an apology, you are maybe you are not completely serious or completely funny, you're just a tad, tadmore, you're somewhere in the middle, and then you know, maybe your brand is absolutely hilarious, like Doritos, and you kind of live here in this middle. So this is essentially how the tone dimension works. Essentially, you put two dots and you show your constraints on what is your tone range through to different mood. See, a brand can choose to be funny in one moment and then serious in the next, which is often the case, right? You don't always want to be funny, there's a right time for the right thing. And they still have a strong voice altogether. Most brands argue about the top problem and the top of the pyramid, and they fight over whether the sentence is too casual or too irreverent, and they never ask about the belief that is underneath it, and if that belief is even real and if it's showing up. If the foundation is missing, the amount of tone tunage is a distraction, and it's not going to save the voice or the whole verbal identity pyramid, right? We got to start from the bottom up. People get distracted by the things that are more variable because really they're more fun and it produces more variety, it's a bit more stimulating, but the most important part that people forget is the belief. So that's why you should build from the bottom up. Belief first, voice seconds, tone last. And anyone who starts at the top picking the adjectives and plotting sliders is missing the point of what's actually remembered. Belief is the most characteristics for leadership. Now, bringing this into leadership, strong brands, voices empowers leaders and empowers brands. If you say I have the best cookie in America, nobody will believe you. Because, you know, you say you have the best cookie in America, everybody says you have the best cookie in America. What makes your cookie the best? But if you say, I have America's favorite cookie, well then, if you have America's favorite cookie, then your cookie must be the best, right? And that's Oreos. One sentence brags, and the other sentence establishes itself that you're the leader, not by showing credentials or by proving itself, but just showing by who the followers are, who they've been chosen by. Because a leader is not a leader without any followers. So the strongest leaders do not beg to be believed, they show their room that they're already moving in a direction they already have followers. So sentences to avoid is best. Best is weak. Anyone can use it. Rather than most trusted, most used, favorite, chosen by, built for, each of those carries proof inside of it that words like best or better can't. Confident brands tend to use fewer adjectives, and weak brands stack up the adjectives and more descriptions because the idea underneath is not really clear enough, mostly because the belief is not there. MailChimp has five postures in their thing. They are plain spoken, they are genuine, translator, familiar, funny, but not silly. Those aren't adjectives that describe a personality, they are really commitments to the brand voice. Now, Katie Kafer Lee, who was responsible for MailChimp's guidelines, wrote a book called Nicely Said, and one of the most practical guides you can read for a brand voice out there. And what Milchimp figured out before almost anyone else did is that voice is really an engineering problem. You have to write down, give examples, and give it when things are used, and then train people in it. You use examples and to bring everything's to life. So they really built a strong brand because of this. And years later, Millchip was acquired for $12 billion, which is almost impossible to do with just the software alone. And so the voice brand was a core reason why the value was so high. So a lot of marketing professionals, when they work on the voice, they'll end up brainstorming together, and maybe they end up writing something like friendly but professional. And it gets added to a slide and then gets emailed to the team, and then nothing changes. Six months later, the marketing team is still writing like they always have, and the voice doesn't really exist in practice, it just exists in this document inside of PowerPoint that people don't really open very much. Now, you can discover a voice or you can create one. Discovery is when the brand already has a voice in the room, it's inside the founder's head or in the customer's mind. Um, and the way the team actually talks. And this is sometimes it's a language that the customers can already repeat back. And then so the job here is to surface what actually exists and to sharpen it, to consolidate it before it fragments. So you do this by asking good questions, you collect real sentences, find out what the patterns are, and kind of merge it. Then there's a second phase, which is creation. Creation is when the category itself is the problem, when you're lacking positioning, where every competitor sounds the same or sounds like you, and every brand reaches the same five adjectives. In that case, voice is really a positioning move, right? You look at the category, what it has too much of, and you decide how to be a category outlier, how to be a leader there. And then everyone, if everyone in your category is warm, you go precise. If everyone is technical, perhaps you go more human. And if everyone is enthusiastic, maybe you you go calm or reassuring. If everyone is overtly safe, maybe you dare, you dare to be different. Discovery can sharpen what the voice is already there. Creation chooses what's already missing. Most projects are a combination of both. Many people use the brand archetypes to find a voice. Um, we have Jung Yan framework, has a lot to take from, right? We have hero, outlaw, sage, caregiver, etc., etc. We can go deep into that next episode. I also run an exercise that helps with that voice. It sounds playful, but it pulls values out of the founder's head that no direct questions can reach. Right? The trick is to push past the first answer. The test at the end is what really matters. Real working questions, right? Headlines, apologies, LinkedIn celebration posts. We rewrite. All of them into the new voice so that you can see the before and the after. When you have a voice, one voice can survive a hundred different writers. But in reverse, a hundred different voices cannot survive one brand. Typically, in a brand, a voice doesn't fail in the beginning when it's starting out because the founder is the voice. And it also doesn't fail at the maturity stake because we have active professionals that are cultivating the voice full time. However, it tends to fall in the middle when the founder stops being able to write everything, and the company has not yet written down their voice or what the founder knows. The more your category offering looks the same, the product looks the same, well, your the service looks the same, the more your voice has to carry the difference. When the products are interchangeable, then really the language, the voice is the product. Without a voice, if you hire a marketer and the marketer writes differently than the founder, you hire a second marketer and the copy on the web starts sounding like it was written by two different people. Then you hire an agency and now it sounds like three different people. Then the sales gets involved and you have four different people, and you become less unique, less distinctive, less memorable. Inbounds leaps stop converting, and the CEO is confused, and nobody can explain why. A voice that was never written down is a voice that really doesn't exist. Every piece of communication the company produces dilutes the brand's voice a little bit further. The fix is not complicated, but it requires commitment. Write the voice down, give it examples, train the team, revisit URL, audit your content with your own voice, and when you bring in a new writer, the voice document is part of the onboarding. If you run a consulting firm, this is important for you too. Voice is part of your expertise signals. If you sound like every other consulting firm, you're undercutting what makes you unique and special. Voice is trust, right? Voice is not copywriting decoration. It is the strategy. It's your brand strategy, your brand positioning expressed in sentences that runs through the core of who you are and what your belief sounds like at scale. To step back, if your brand had to survive without any visual identity, no logo, no colors, no fonts, would customers still recognize you from your words alone? Voice is one of the highest leverage investments you can make right now. It builds faster than advertising, it costs less than a rebrand. It's the one branding asset that scales perfectly with headcount. So the next episode, we're gonna go underneath the voice and the character that drives it. Humans have recognized the characters across every culture. The strongest brands have quietly committed to one of these characters. The 12 brand archetypes.com, so we'll love jumping into this. We'll talk about Nike as a hero, Harley as an outlaw. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon.