Branding, copywriting and tone of voice

Companies lavish great sums on ads, branding and websites. But they give less thought to the everyday writing they create. I’m not talking about copywriting in adverts. That’s poetry. I’m talking about prose. The humdrum stuff of daily business life: press releases, contracts, marketing collateral, website content and the rest.

We believe that writing is a fundamental part of a brand. Finding a corporate tone of voice and using it consistently adds weight and distinctiveness to a brand. Companies that neglect their writing risk short-changing their brand.

What is tone of voice?

‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

— Maya Angelou, American memoirist and poet

If copywriting can be broken down into two halves, the first is what you say and the second is tone of voice - that is, how you say it.

Tone of voice is about making people feel things. Ideally, good things. It’s about how you say what you say and how you make people feel when you say it.

There are four elements that make up your tone of voice. Those are:

• Attitude - What is the attitude you want to demonstrate as a business? Are you energetic and youthful, or calm and professional, for example?
• Energy - This is the overall vibe of your tone. Are you positive and optimistic? Interrogative and inquisitive? Bold and assertive?
• Syntax and rules - These are the practical details. For example, do you refer to your business as ‘we’ or do you always use your business’s name?
• Your audience - This is where being true to your brand, your business and who you are meets the needs of your customers. You want to resonate with your audience and reflect their tone of voice back to them to some extent, so it’s a bit of a two-way street.

Google vs Apple

This is the landing page copy for Google Pixel 10:

Then compare that to Apple's iPhone 17:

It sounds totally different, right?

Consider the content, though. They're saying very similar things about the powerful new cameras. But it’s how they say it that’s totally different. Apple’s tone is more divisive and emotive. People are going to love it or think it’s a load of waffle. But it’s fine to repel people because you want to build your tribe. Appeal to the people who will buy and don’t worry about putting off those who won’t. That’s the only way to stand out.

What influences tone of voice?

There are several things you can do to influence and therefore express your tone of voice.

Messaging

Your messaging gives you the concept of why you're saying what you're saying. Tone of voice only works when it's aligned to what you're saying and why you’re saying it. These things have to match if they're going to resonate and feel true.

If your messaging is that ‘you are seasoned experts’ and your tone is ‘authoritative’, don't say something like, ‘There are many ways to address this problem and it's hard to distinguish between them.’ What you’re saying doesn’t back up your messaging or your tone of voice. Instead, you’d want to say something like, ‘Having seen this problem countless times, we know there are many ways to solve it and how to distinguish between them is all in the detail.’ You’ve said the same sort of thing, really, but in a different way that both conveys your message of expertise and your authoritative tone. Messaging and tone reinforce one another.

Audience

There is another part at play here, and that’s the audience. Think about how your customers and their peer groups talk. When you write, you want to enact the attributes that your customers actually want. You might want to write in a way that’s factual, detailed and educational, but if you're in a market where your customers are all exciting, daring and impulsive entrepreneurs, is that going to resonate? Probably not. So, be empathetic to your audience. Echo the terminology and style that your customers use. Be distinct, but sympathetic.

Sources

When writing, what sources are you referencing? The Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal? Is it McKinsey or Harvard Business Review? Or is it academic journals and books? Your choice of sourcing indicates something about your tone of voice. Strategic, ‘voice of the people’, geeky - these sources have their own tone, too.

Structure

Particularly online, when people are scanning your copy, they're going to make an immediate decision about what kind of style something is based on structural elements such as headings.

In the New Yorker you've got blocks of text, so you know it's probably something packed with information that you’re going to need to sit down and digest. You go over to Buzzfeed, you've got a quote, a line, a one-sentence paragraph, an embedded tweet, a link, another sentence. It's very quick. It's energetic. It's high-level. Before you even know what those words are saying, you've got a sense of that energy and that tone.

The argument you’re making

Are you going to be very balanced and informative? Are you going to be opinionated and authoritative? Are you going to be inquisitive and inspirational? How are you tackling the argument you’re making in a given piece of content?

Where you pitch it

This is going to be influenced in part by the type of content you’re writing and where it sits in the funnel, but within those constraints you can still make some tone-based decisions around how you pitch it. How much knowledge are you assuming the audience has? How detailed and academic will you be?

Branding and copywriting

Google is a role model. It is no coincidence that it has a very consistent style and that its writing echoes the brand. Google’s home page is nothing but words, after all. Most people concentrate on the button 'Google Search.' Those two words define what Google does but the other button, 'I’m Feeling Lucky,' is more subtle. It reassures me that I’ll find what I’m looking for. It tells me 'I' am in charge. It radiates optimism. These few words tell me a lot about the Google brand.

Google’s word-branding goes deeper than its home page – it permeates everything they do. Its terms and conditions also talk straight to the reader ('Thank you for trying out Google Desktop! Google Desktop is made available to you by Google Inc….'). It tells you what’s important (When you enable advanced features it said 'Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada yada').

Good writing, like Google’s, enhances a brand in different ways. It can reinforce the reader’s idea of what the brand stands for. For example, Virgin Atlantic shares the Virgin brand’s cheeky irreverence. Tired by a long flight? 'Pretend you’re already there,” says Virgin Atlantic. Bored by safety announcements? Watch a cartoon instead.

On a more practical level, good writing can increase sales. Amazon’s login screen has a big friendly button which says 'Sign in using our secure server'. This reassures me that Amazon will keep my details safe. Similarly, on the penultimate page of the checkout process it says 'you can review this order before it’s final' right under the 'Continue' button. Amazon has analysed where and why people stop buying and they’ve added these cues to get more people through the process.

Breaking faith

In contrast to Amazon, Virgin and Google’s success, most corporate-speak is bland, undifferentiated and hard to read. Meaning is obscured by jargon, waffle, hype, verbiage, legalese and conventionality.

The cost of bad writing far outweighs the value created by good writing. A typical example is the heavily-promoted ‘free’ online trial that opens with a daunting click-through contract. Another common problem is website copy that just doesn’t answer your questions. Yet another is the pious press release that takes 200 words to clear its throat and get started. My pet peeve is application forms that might as well be written in Medieval Latin. In fact, once you start looking for bad business writing, it’s easy to spot.

It is possible to track the impact of clear product descriptions on sales, well-written manuals on support calls and snappy website copy on traffic. On the other hand, it is very difficult to add up the costs that come from poor marketing collateral, obscure press releases or badly-worded letters.

The cost of bad writing is two-fold. First, you lose the money you spent delivering the words to the reader. Expensive website? Waste of money. 50,000 brochures? Recycling fodder. Second, you lose the hoped-for result. Have you ever read a brochure that bored or confused you? Did you buy the product afterwards?

Once you get past the glossy ads and shiny exterior, most companies sound like a headmaster, bank manager or lawyer. Is this how you want your company to sound to its customers and employees? In a wider sense, a company breaks faith with a reader any time a company’s words don’t match its brand. It’s like a witness squirming under cross-examination. The truth will out.

What is good writing?

Good grammar, punctuation and spelling are necessary but not sufficient. Business writing is about hooking and persuading the reader. The best way to engage a reader is to use stories because human beings are wired for them. We look for believable details, natural speech and a flow from beginning to end. Journalism has evolved ways of creating credible, persuasive and readable stories and books like Donald Murray’s Writing to Deadline have a lot to teach the business world. But journalism stops short of persuasion and that is the objective of a business writer. The ‘call to action’ often comes at the end of a piece but good business copy has a logical thread running through it that persuades the reader as it goes.

Writing for the web

We’re all internet entrepreneurs now. The internet has done what technology always does. It has gone from being gee-whizz to ho-hum, from avant-garde to comme il faut. Business writing – so important in this new medium – has not caught up with the change. The BBC has got it right, though. They know that people don’t read web pages the same way they look at newspapers or books and they write accordingly. Their website uses short paragraphs, short sentences, scannable text (clearly labelled links and headlines), hype-free language (in the journalistic tradition) and crisp micro-content (“Falklands return. How going back 25 years later helps heal veterans’ scars”).

One of the problems with less switched-on websites is the low priority given to web copy during development. A 2006 survey of digital agencies found that over half of them blamed delays on content problems but only 10 per cent said that content was a priority. They thought that design, development and search engine optimisation were much, much more important. To me, this is like building a missile but forgetting the payload. The gap is filled by ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder copy. If you see this on a development website, consider it a warning sign.

We’re all writers now

Thanks to email, blogs and social networks like Facebook, we’re all business writers now. Microsoft positively encourages its employees to blog. Its thousands of employee-bloggers put a human face on their business. But most companies prefer to muzzle employees rather than develop their writing skills and embed a corporate tone of voice across the business. As these new media burst into life, we have a chance to embrace every written word as a tool that can make a brand strong, fresh and different. Otherwise it’s just the usual yada yada.

(This article appeared first in the Business Superbrands handbook.)