How to Find Your Brand Voice
Creating a brand voice is one of the most rewarding parts about branding work.
I can’t think of a less creepy analogy at the moment, but it’s a little like being in the room with the scientist who is about to bring Frankenstein to life, and we get to program the personality. We get to figure out how Frankenstein is supposed to talk and act and be.
Anyway, brand voice involves way more than that and it’s a lot less creepy—let’s dive in.
First, what is brand voice?
Brand voice is the unique verbal identity of your brand—its personality. It’s how your brand writes and communicates with the world and its customers.
Brand voice is an incredibly important part of the branding process that impacts how your customers connect (or don’t) with you. When done well, it can do a lot of heavy lifting across every area of a business, from customer service to marketing and internal team culture.
Even brands with the most basic visual brand identity systems have built billion dollar businesses by relying on their unique voices. For example, Mailchimp launched with a barebones visual system but built an extremely recognizable voice and way of communicating that was very unlike their competitors at the time. These days they have far more budget for creative, but it all still feels in service to this eccentric personality that was cultivated early by smart, funny writers.
Where does brand voice fit in to branding work?
We think of voice as one of three primary parts of brand:
strategy
voice
visual identity
Brand voice is generally developed in tandem with your overall brand strategy and visual identity.
Strategy informs, well, everything. Voice informs visual identity. And, once established, all three of these brand parts work together.
How to find your brand’s voice
Do your research (ahem, your brand strategy).
Strategy comes first. Consider your mission, values, positioning and the things that set you apart from your competition. These important foundations will drive!
Consider your customer, what they value and how they talk naturally—mirroring language may be a useful part of your approach, but only if it’s not forced. How do you want them to feel about your brand? Are you the expert they can rely on or the friend they can relate to? (Or somewhere in between?)
If you have an established business, audit your own language from your website to your social channels to your customer services messages—look for patterns and the examples where you really sound the way you want to sound.
Choose your brand voice attributes.
Time to get more specific! Build a short list of adjectives to describe your brand’s personality—this will help you decide what belongs and what doesn’t. You might have a long list at first, but try to distill everything down to 3-5 words that your brand truly embodies—no fluff.
For example, we chose clever for one of Minna’s brand voice attributes because it reinforced a few others descriptors that are important to us like curious, witty, thoughtful, smart, savvy, etc. (without the academic formality that would come with something like intelligent).
If you’re looking for a place to start, we created a giant list of brand voice words.
3. Explore your tone of voice.
Tone of voice is the way you say something. Tone is honestly sort of like “read the room” in many scenarios—depends on the message itself, the audience, what’s going on in the world, etc. Of course, you’ll naturally change tone if you’re writing a customer service message vs. celebrating a big milestone on social. However, it’s super important to understand where your brand tone maps by default so you can return home to it and use it as a guide.
This simple exercise is based on NN/g’s four dimensions of tone of voice. The example below in the graphic is for our own tone of voice at Minna and where we aim to land.
formal vs. casual
serious vs. funny
respectful vs. irreverent
matter-of-fact vs. enthusiastic
4. Demonstrate how your brand attributes and tone come to life with key messaging.
Workshop time! Write, write, write—with your product and customer in mind. Edit, edit, edit—filtering with your brand voice and tone lenses on. When you’re done, you should have a useful bank of copy in your brand’s voice that anyone could pull from directly (taglines, about blurbs, FAQ) or take inspiration from when creating new content.
5. Document voice and writing guidelines in your brand guide.
If you’re an early founder, you might inherently understand your brand’s voice because you are your brand’s voice at the beginning—but eventually you need to document this somewhere outside of your brain and gut. (And you need to run that voice and your instincts through the steps above to create a strategic brand voice vs. something overly personal.)
For new brands, those that work with freelancers or agencies or those ready to grow and scale internally, you’ll save so much time by creating a single source of truth to guide everyone who is writing, making or doing things on behalf of your brand. Your brand guide doesn’t have to be hundreds of pages long, but practical guidance on voice and writing is just as essential as the hex codes for your brand colors.
Without a good brand guide, companies can wind up in a whirlpool of feedback, revisions, feedback, revisions, consternation, feedback, revisions, churn, etc. And nobody we know has time for that nonsense. Certainly not you.
Need help to find your brand voice or update your company’s writing guidelines? Get in touch to learn more about our branding services.
