The brand voice describes how a brand communicates with its target audience. The exact style of communication is based on the brand persona or the collection of personality traits and values that a brand embodies regularly, and it needs to communicate the brand’s essence to the desired target audience.
Aspect
Explanation
Concept Overview
– Brand Voice is the consistent expression of a brand’s personality, values, and messaging style through written and verbal communication. It is a crucial element of brand identity and plays a significant role in how a brand connects with its target audience. A well-defined brand voice helps establish brand recognition, build trust, and differentiate a brand in a competitive marketplace. It encompasses the tone, language, style, and messaging principles used in all brand communications, from marketing materials to customer interactions.
Key Elements
– Brand Voice comprises several key elements: 1. Tone: The emotional and communicative style used in brand messaging, which can range from formal to informal, playful to serious, or empathetic to authoritative. 2. Language: The choice of words, phrases, and vocabulary that align with the brand’s identity and resonate with the target audience. 3. Style: The overall writing and communication style, including sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation. 4. Messaging Guidelines: Specific principles or guidelines for creating consistent, on-brand messaging. 5. Brand Personality: The human characteristics and traits associated with the brand, such as friendly, professional, or innovative.
Importance
– Brand Voice is essential for various reasons: 1. Consistency: Ensures a consistent and recognizable brand identity across all touchpoints. 2. Connection: Helps establish a connection with the audience by speaking their language and addressing their needs and desires. 3. Trust Building: Consistency and authenticity in brand voice build trust and credibility. 4. Differentiation: Sets the brand apart from competitors with a unique voice and personality. 5. Engagement: Engages and resonates with the audience, increasing the likelihood of brand loyalty. 6. Emotional Appeal: Allows the brand to evoke specific emotions or responses from the audience.
Development Process
– Developing a brand voice involves several steps: 1. Define Brand Identity: Start by defining the brand’s values, mission, and target audience. 2. Audience Research: Understand the preferences, language, and communication style of the target audience. 3. Voice Exploration: Experiment with different tones, styles, and messaging to find the voice that aligns with the brand and resonates with the audience. 4. Create Guidelines: Document brand voice guidelines, including tone, language, and messaging principles. 5. Train Teams: Ensure that all team members involved in brand communication understand and follow the guidelines. 6. Consistency Checks: Continuously monitor and adjust the brand voice to maintain consistency and relevance.
Applications
– Brand Voice is applied in various forms of communication: 1. Marketing Campaigns: Used in advertising, social media, content marketing, and promotional materials. 2. Website Content: Reflects the brand voice in web copy, blog posts, and product descriptions. 3. Customer Support: Ensures consistent and empathetic communication in customer interactions. 4. Social Media Engagement: Maintains a consistent tone and style in social media posts and responses. 5. Product Descriptions: Conveys the brand’s personality and benefits in product descriptions. 6. Email Marketing: Guides the language and messaging used in email campaigns.
Benefits and Impact
– A well-defined and effectively executed Brand Voice offers several benefits: 1. Brand Recognition: Makes the brand easily recognizable and memorable. 2. Audience Engagement: Engages and connects with the target audience on a deeper level. 3. Trust and Loyalty: Builds trust and fosters brand loyalty through consistent and authentic communication. 4. Differentiation: Sets the brand apart from competitors with a unique voice. 5. Emotional Impact: Evokes specific emotions or responses in the audience. 6. Consistency: Ensures a consistent brand identity across all touchpoints.
Challenges and Critiques
– Challenges in establishing and maintaining a brand voice include the need for continuous adaptation to changing audience preferences, the risk of appearing inauthentic if not aligned with the brand’s values, and potential difficulties in scaling the voice as the brand grows. Critics argue that overreliance on a brand voice can lead to formulaic or insincere communication. However, proponents emphasize the importance of maintaining authenticity and evolving the brand voice to stay relevant.
A core component of brand voice is the personification of a brand. A surf shop adopts the vocabulary and care-free attitude of surfers in their advertising campaigns. A clothing company selling blue-collar workwear embodies the tough, rugged exterior of deep-voiced construction workers.
Importantly, brand voice must be consistent wherever a brand “speaks” to its target audience -whether that be radio, television, social media or email newsletter. Consistency ensures that a brand does not give mixed messages to consumers, who may have difficulty determining whether the values of a brand align with their own.
Developing a brand voice
While methods vary, this five-step process will help businesses establish, create, and then maintain a consistent brand voice for future success.
1. Assess a representative sample of content
A business should first critically assess the content it has released thus far. Does the content accurately reflect what the business wants to communicate? Or conversely, is the content more closely aligned with the brand of a competitor?
The business should set aside content it feels is an accurate representation of its brand, grouping them according to the emotions or feelings they conjure.
2. Describe brand voice in three words
Here, the business should review the set-aside content and have a group discussion on the common themes or values present in each. Then, it is important to link these themes and values to personality traits. To get a better idea of the personality traits a brand embodies, it may be helpful to assign personality traits to competitors also.
For example, one brand may be authentic if a competitor tends to imitate others. Another may be passionate and joyful if the competitor is calm and austere.
3. Create a brand voice chart
With the personality traits identified in the previous step, briefly describe each and then list actions that do and don’t support these traits in marketing initiatives. Visually represented in the form of a table, this chart will be an invaluable reference tool in ensuring that content is consistently aligned with brand voice.
4. Liaise with content and marketing teams
Arguably the most important step involves obtaining buy-in from any employee who will be involved in brand messaging. To achieve this goal, personality traits and examples of on-point content should be made available as these employees create future marketing content.
5. Revisit and revise
While the core traits of brand voice should never change over time, elements of brand messaging will need to be tweaked in response to a new competitor or other fluctuating market conditions. For example, the current pandemic has forced most brands to incorporate empathic, understanding, and community-minded messaging.
In any case, it is a good idea to evaluate strategies quarterly to ensure that brand voice is sensitive to wider societal and organizational contexts.
Benefits of a Strong Brand Voice:
1. Brand Recognition:
A consistent brand voice helps consumers recognize and remember your brand, even when they encounter it in various contexts and channels.
2. Trust and Authenticity:
A well-defined brand voice conveys authenticity and builds trust with consumers. When your messaging is consistent and aligned with your brand’s values, it fosters a sense of reliability and credibility.
3. Emotional Connection:
A strong brand voice can evoke specific emotions in consumers, creating a deeper emotional connection. For example, a friendly and approachable voice may make customers feel more comfortable and valued.
Challenges in Establishing and Maintaining Brand Voice:
1. Consistency Across Channels:
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across different communication channels, from print materials to social media, can be challenging but is crucial for brand integrity.
2. Evolution Over Time:
As brands grow and evolve, their voice may need to adapt to changing customer preferences and market trends while retaining core brand values.
3. Competitive Landscape:
Brands must ensure their voice remains distinctive in a crowded marketplace. It’s essential to stand out without compromising authenticity.
When to Use Brand Voice:
1. Content Creation:
Brand voice guides content creation, ensuring that all written and visual materials align with the brand’s personality and values.
2. Customer Service:
Brand voice extends to customer service interactions, shaping how representatives communicate with customers, whether it’s through chat, email, or phone support.
3. Advertising and Marketing:
In advertising and marketing campaigns, brand voice plays a pivotal role in crafting persuasive and consistent messaging that resonates with the target audience.
What to Expect from a Strong Brand Voice:
1. Improved Communication:
A well-defined brand voice helps streamline communication efforts within your organization, ensuring that everyone speaks with a consistent voice and message.
2. Enhanced Brand Loyalty:
Consistent and relatable brand messaging fosters a sense of belonging and loyalty among customers who align with your brand’s values and personality.
3. Positive Customer Experience:
Customers appreciate a brand that communicates clearly and authentically. A strong brand voice contributes to a positive overall customer experience.
Long-Term Impact of a Strong Brand Voice:
1. Brand Recognition and Equity:
Over time, a strong brand voice contributes to increased brand recognition and equity, solidifying your brand’s position in the market.
2. Customer Relationships:
Brand voice fosters lasting relationships with customers who resonate with your messaging and values. These relationships can lead to long-term loyalty and advocacy.
3. Consistent Brand Image:
A consistent brand voice ensures that your brand image remains intact and aligned with your core values, regardless of external changes or market dynamics.
Key takeaways:
Brand voice is the communication of particular personality traits and values to a target audience that represents a specific brand.
Brand voice must be consistent across all marketing channels. Otherwise, a consumer may become confused as to the alignment of brand values and their own values.
Brand voice can be developed in an iterative, five-step process. Among other things, the process ensures that a business does not adopt the voice of a competitor.
Key Highlights
Definition of Brand Voice: Brand voice is how a brand communicates with its target audience. It’s based on the brand’s personality traits and values, aiming to convey the essence of the brand to the desired audience.
Personification of Brand: Brand voice involves personifying the brand, adopting a specific style of communication that aligns with the brand’s persona. For instance, a surf shop might use the vocabulary and attitude of surfers in their communication.
Consistency is Key: Brand voice must remain consistent across all platforms where the brand interacts with its audience. This consistency ensures that consumers don’t receive mixed messages and can better understand the brand’s values.
Five-Step Process for Developing Brand Voice:a. Assessment of Content: Analyze existing content to determine if it accurately reflects the brand’s intended communication style. Separate content that aligns with the brand.b. Three-Word Description: Identify common themes and values in the selected content. Describe the brand’s voice using three words and link these traits to personality traits. Compare with competitors for contrast.c. Brand Voice Chart: Create a chart with the identified personality traits. Briefly describe each trait and list actions that support or don’t support these traits in marketing efforts. This chart becomes a reference tool.d. Team Collaboration: Involve employees responsible for brand messaging. Share the identified personality traits and examples of on-brand content to guide future marketing efforts.e. Continuous Review: While core brand traits remain constant, adapt messaging based on changing market conditions or competition. Regularly evaluate and adjust brand voice to stay relevant and sensitive to societal context.
Importance of Consistency: Consistency across all communication channels ensures that the brand’s values are understood and recognized by the audience.
Sensitivity to Context: Brand voice may need adjustments due to external factors, like market changes or societal events. Periodic evaluation of strategies is important to maintain alignment with broader contexts.
Brand Voice Definition: Brand voice represents a brand’s personality traits and values in its communication with the audience.
Consistency is Clarifying: Consistent brand voice prevents confusion for consumers about the alignment of brand values and their own.
Development Process: A structured five-step process aids in developing and maintaining a consistent brand voice, while distinguishing the brand from competitors.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
Discover more from FourWeekMBA
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
