Tone of voice: Brand or bland?
Hands up who’s got — or worked with — a set of tone of voice guidelines that say something like this:
“The three pillars of our brand tone of voice are:
Human. Professional. Customer-focused.”
Frankly, adjectives like human, professional and customer-focused won’t give your brand a distinctive tone of voice.
They’re more like synonyms for ditch the corpspeak, proofread your work and leave out the stuff readers skip.
All of which is good advice for any business writer. But none of it is “tone of voice”.
As with your values, a good test of your tone of voice guidelines is to ask: do they pass the “as opposed to test”?
Professional as opposed to undisciplined, say. Would any organisation espouse not being professional? Or, more likely, is professional table-stakes stuff — the minimum you’d expect?
But then, perhaps not every brand needs an instantly recognisable tone of voice?
We can’t all be Oatly, the dairy-alternative that stole Innocent’s “wackaging” mantle and ran with it.
And, unless you’re touting “a planet-based beverage to get you through the first stages of a zombie apocalypse”, you probably shouldn’t try to be Oatly.
Sometimes Human, Professional, Customer-focused is all a brand needs.
But if you do want something that’s more unique and characterful, our advice is to listen to how your people actually speak.
In all likelihood, a human, client-focused professional in health-and-safety will speak a completely different language from a human, client-focused professional in the ad industry.
A team of coders at a startup could very well sound different from a team of coders at an established industry giant.
As we discovered when we worked with Mi9, there’s total gold in your people’s vernacular.
So listen out for it — and build your tone of voice guidelines from there.
Need help uncovering the authentic tone of voice of your brand?
