Brand tone of voice — go specific or go home
While visual brand books typically care for every tiniest detail concerning a brand’s colours, fonts and imagery, when it comes to guidelines for verbal communication, companies often rely on extremely vague statements. That isn’t merely ineffective — it is, in fact, harmful.
Text matters
When we started our copywriting business, tone of voice guides (TOVs) were pretty exotic — very few companies thought they needed such a thing! If the verbal language of a brand received any attention at all, it usually amounted to just two pages in the brand book, with all the rest devoted to defining the visuals. Now such guidelines are much more ubiquitous, and many companies even have sub–TOVs for each of their brands.
We applaud this development, as more and more companies realise that not only logos, fonts and colours, but the style and tone of their texts matter for the integrity of their brand. We appreciate this awareness about how different a text can be in character and what kind of impact it can have on an audience.
Yet as the ranks of TOVs grow, their quality remains patchy. Unlike visual brand books, TOV guides rarely contain specific rules — most of them use broad and abstract terminology that doesn’t provide enough guidance.
What kind of blue?
“Emotional but factual”, “friendly and accessible”, “bold and punchy” — these are just some of the ways companies have described the desired tone of their communications that we have encountered in our practice. This is like stating in a visual brand book that a company’s colour is “blue”. Not very helpful, is it?
Brand books are needed to ensure coherence and continuity — every sensible designer should be able to reproduce a brand’s style after careful study, even when not previously familiar with the brand. That’s why instead of just “blue”, brand books define specific shades, such as “Pantone Dark Blue 00249C” or “Pantone Process Blue 0085CA”.
Companies should strive for the same level of detail in defining the rules for verbal communication. Yet terms we use to describe a tone or style are typically much broader and, unlike pantones, they don’t have a distinguishing code to make each unmistakable. Which makes the task of creating a truly effective TOV considerably harder.
Cut through confusion
First, what exactly is the problem with describing a desired tone of voice as “approachable” or “punchy”? Well, unlike the colour “Process Blue”, “approachable tone” can mean very different things to different people. If the concepts used in TOV guides still leave much to the interpretation of copywriters, creative agencies, managers, sales people and the boss, it simply does not deliver because the point of such guidelines is to exactly avoid (even crude) differences in interpretation.
Moreover, disputable terminology creates ground for conflict — while managers criticise the text for not being in line with the company’s TOV (and their feeling may be absolutely right), a copywriter is desperately trying to make changes for the better while lacking specific feedback about the use of words, phrasing and the other parameters that make up a copywriter’s professional world. Both sides may refer to the same TOV guide while having a completely different end result in mind.
Think like a copywriter
However, we at Levelup have discovered how to avoid such confusion — by supplying abstract terms with lots of specific examples. They translate big concepts into specific verbal instruments and help distinguish between “too little friendliness” and “too much friendliness” and the “wrong kind of friendliness”. They demonstrate how verbs make the text “dynamic” or how “factual” descriptions differ from “opinions”. They describe the right length of sentences, the right degree of intimacy or distance, the exact manifestations of “smart” or “playful”.
While “do this” is enough for a visual guidebook, for verbal guidelines “don’t” is as important as ‘do’, so the examples need to focus on differentiating the desirable from the undesirable as clearly as possible in many instances. Often the right style is only seen when enough opposites and misses are provided to mark the differences.
Visual brand books speak the language of visual designers, using the building blocks they use, such as letter spacing or colour shade. The same has to be true for TOV guides — they have to work on the level of the building blocks of language. That is why copywriters have to be an integral part of developing a TOV guide. After all, leaving designers out of the process of creating a brand book would be unimaginable.
