Building a Brand: What is “Voice”?

Last week, I started exploring the idea of branding. I wrote about how to determine what your brand identity should be, and explained that I found it most helpful to imagine your organization as a single person. Today, I want to take that abstraction a bit further and talk about brand voice.

In some ways, marketing is still pretty new to me. The global brand I worked on was already pretty established when I entered my editorial role, and I was pretty deep in the weeds editing weekly curriculum, which means I was less involved with the marketing efforts. However, this concept of brand voice is one I feel well equipped to discuss, as it’s not terribly different from voice in general writing. So let’s start there. 

Voice in General Writing

Imagine the voice of your best friend. Imagine the voice of your mother. You wouldn’t have to see their faces to distinguish them; as long as you can hear them speaking, you’ll know who they are because you are so familiar with what they sound like. In some ways, voice in writing is similar to this; obviously, it’s not an actual, audible voice, but it does identify you as a writer. 

In writing, voice is all the ways the work reflects little bits of the author’s identity. It includes technical things like: a consistent use of alliteration, a tendency to focus on tactile textures when describing objects, or a preference for metaphors over similes. But deeper than that, voice includes hints of your worldview: your biases, political preferences, and attitude towards life. Collectively, all these characteristics come together to form a writer’s voice. When you are very familiar with a writer, you can often pick out their work based on their voice in the same way you can hear a new song and guess the artist who recorded it. 

Unfortunately, no one can teach you what your voice is or tell you what it should be. You have to discover it for yourself, and the only way to do that is to write and write until it starts to become clear to you. Although trying to adopt someone else’s voice as your own is a bad idea, it can be very helpful to experiment with different voices to see what does and doesn’t feel right for you. Write a few throwaway samples, “trying on” voices from authors you love to read. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of what your personal writing should sound like based on your own personal voice.

Voice in Marketing

In marketing, voice functions in largely the same capacity as general writing, with the key difference that your brand will have a voice of its own. Depending on whether your marketing goals involve branding yourself as an individual or branding an organization you are leading, your personal voice may or may not be a decent place to begin when identifying your brand voice. For the sake of this article, I will operate under the assumption you are trying to build a brand for an organization, not for yourself as an individual.

Your brand voice will be an extension of the brand identity we discussed in the previous post. When you imagine your brand as a person, figure out how that person would speak and write. A certain level of self-awareness and witty sarcasm may help lend some authenticity to your brand, but if your brand identity is aiming for something like a gentle, kind-hearted, patient grandfather vibe, those same sarcastic remarks may come across as jarring, uncomfortable, or inauthentic. 

It’s important to note that voice and tone are not the same thing. Your voice should never change, but your tone will have to change depending on who you are interacting with and the context of the interaction.

For example, your brand voice will determine whether you should respond to a frustrated tweet with: “We are so sorry. Please DM us so we can collect some details and find a solution” or “Dang, that blows. Hit us up in a DM and we’ll make it right.” In either case, your tone should be sympathetic and helpful. (So “That’s a hard situation, but there’s nothing we can do about it; it sounds like an unfortunate user-error” and “Sucks to be you!” are both out.)

To determine your brand voice, it’s a good idea to have in mind who your target audience is. Who do you want to reach with the message of your organization’s content, services, or products? How will that audience respond to the kind of voice you are cultivating? This is where we move from theory to practice. You will need to do some actual research to find the right answer. This could be anything from surveys to marketing software solutions; probably both and everything in between. 

Guess, check, and revise is a recipe for a lot of wasted time and confusion—both on the part of customers who can’t relate to your inconsistent identity and members of your organization who are trying to hit a moving target.

The Importance of a Style Guide

Once you feel confident about what your brand voice should be, one great way to set the goal posts and keep them from wavering is to develop a style guide. In any organization, especially one with multiple writers or editors working together to develop content, a style guide is essential to keep everyone aligned on how content should be developed. 

Your style guide should start with high-level concepts, like descriptions and examples of your brand identity and brand voice. Select about 5 attributes you want your brand to embody in everything you do, and explain a bit about why that’s an important attribute for your brand. Think back to the “person” you imagined as a part of last week’s exercises. Can you describe that person using just a few words in a way that could help anyone picture the brand identity accurately? Is your brand a helpful neighbor? A witty brother? A cool aunt? A fun buddy? Include that description in your style guide to help communicate the brand voice you expect your content to adhere to.

Your style guide should also include the more nitty gritty aspects of your branding and brand voice. How is your organization’s name stylized? Will you use or forgo the Oxford comma? Will you avoid proprietary eponyms? This will be the place to develop best practices for your brand and disseminate that information to anyone who will develop content for you.  

Conclusion

Remember that the primary goal of building a brand is to help your organization communicate and interact with your audience to build trust and create new customers. Developing your brand voice will allow you to bring cohesion to your products, adding a level of professional (or intentionally unprofessional?) polish to all the content you produce. Like it or not, voice will seep into everything you make, whether it’s podcasts, videos, blogs, or social media posting. It’s important to make sure your content projects the right voice into the world.

Be sure to join me next week to take a deeper dive into how to determine your brand’s target audience.