An Opportunity to Practice
A friend of mine was working on her thesis for Grad school and was talking about presenting the data she had collected. The moment she said data, I heard a little voice in my head saying, “do it!”…
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Teaching A Brand To Talk
Moving client side two months ago, I was given my first opportunity to work on a full rebrand. Doing this in-house has meant that we get to define what’s important to the brand, and I’ve made it my mission to teach this brand how to talk. This is a reflection and summary on our first delve into codifying our brand voice and tone.
In the world of branding and rebranding, so often visual identity is executed exceptionally well. An Apple store ensnares you in its sleek, minimalist, died-and-went-to-heaven whiteness; McDonalds calls you to its juicy archways from half a mile away; even your favourite kombucha probably comes in its own emotionally cleansing packaging. But strip that away, and all you have are the words.
Are they unique to your brand? Why do they say what they say? Do they stand up on their own? Or do they just blend into the background?
These are questions I’m asking all the time as we teach our brand to talk.
When you walk into Future Super, there are three frames mounted on the wall. They describe why we exist and what we want to do in the world. These aren’t just words, they really are at the core of how Future Super operates, and so they seemed like the logical place to start.
We need our brand to be able to communicate with purpose at the core of everything. But, because we’re a superannuation fund (similar to 401k if you’re reading in America), we also need to speak the language of money to people of varying life stages, in diverse need and emotional states.
Brands that nail the way they speak have usually laid out the how and why. So I hunted down any brand books and copywriting I could find, and our team pulled together a huge range of copy (good and bad) for us to pick apart. This allowed us to see the journeys other companies had been on.
Some of the greatest hits of well defined verbal identity were:
The best examples of cohesive brand identity came from work that united a distinct brand personality with an authentic voice. With everything up on a wall, it was clear that when a brand’s voice connected to their reality, they stood out from the crowd. So how do you teach a brand to talk in a way that’s true to the business?
A brand voice works very much like a human voice. Your voice is your voice. That’s the one you get, and it doesn’t change. The same way you recognise a parent’s voice on the phone, or the voice of your favourite musician on the radio, a good brand voice should instantly ring a bell.
A brand voice, when unified by a set of unwavering principles (that are true to who you are, not pulled out of thin air), achieves the consistency required to be locked away in the memory vaults of people everywhere.
Think about tone in the same way. While your voice stays the same, your tone shifts with the context of who you’re speaking to, what you’re speaking about and why you’re speaking at all. You might take a stern tone with a misbehaving family member, an understanding tone with an upset customer.
A brand that can flex its tone is a brand that brings people into its conversations.
With months of shipped work, conversations and what-ifs in my pocket, I started thinking about what principles might define the voice of Future Super and why they might be true. These principles help to make decisions on when the brand has license to speak, what we say and how we say it, guiding the messages we put out in the world. The process of sharing early cuts of this work is important for progress in marketing, and allows an open and transparent evolution of the brand voice as we test. Here’s what I had:
Thankfully brand voice isn’t developed from a solo first cut. I’m here to champion the process of building our brand voice, but this was a really a sounding board for the team’s input, reflection and feedback. When we ran an exercise, the way everyone thought of the brand fell into similar territories:
What became clear is that tone is not as easy to talk about as voice. It’s a shifting sand and half of the equation is full of external, unpredictable factors.
One of the biggest takeaways that jumped out at me was the need to be more human in the way we speak. As a financial service it’s easy to forget that, at the end of the day, we’re people talking to people.
So we started to talk about tone the way it really should be talked about: as a spectrum. It seemed to match up perfectly with the way we’re thinking about our visual identity (more on that here).
In this early stage, existing along a sliding scale from the corporate, sensible, clinical speak of finance to a charismatic, out of the box, passionate human being made sense. It starts to break down the boundaries that normally exist between businesses and people, and invite people into our story.
That made the next exercise I had planned so much more fun!
(Sh)it gets personal/ Reverse Pen Portraits
Pen portraits are used in marketing as a tool to define an audience in a way that gives them more of a human element.
The point is to understand who the person is you’re talking to, not just the numbers and labels that make them an audience member. Your portrait is the centre dot on your target of all people you might speak to.
We used this technique, but in reverse, to explore our brand personality. The challenge:
Write a pen portrait in 5 minutes that captures Future Super – not our audience but our company – as a person. Who would we be if we weren’t a brand? How would that person think, feel and describe themselves? What would they be interested in? There are no wrong answers.
The output was better than I had hoped for and remarkably divergent. I haven’t cut anything because there was value in all of them. Here’s what we wrote (plus some hot takes from yours truly):
The image of Future Super that emerged was a personality of passion, ambition and want for responsibility. An amorphous image of someone who thinks big and isn’t afraid to reach for the moon. But they had character beyond the world of what ‘Future Super the company’ does, and a genuine humanity that raises exciting possibilities for how different we can be.
Our final exploration gave us just a taste of how far we still have to go. We took all those voice principles, all that personality, and we turned them into spectrums with extremes at each end.
By giving ourselves tricky scenarios and topics to talk about (or not talk about), we were able to gut-check tone of voice for the brand by mapping where we fell in each instance.
We weren’t all on the same page all the time, but considering we’re in the early stages of what’s really an iterative process between brand and strategy, we were reassuringly on similar pages.
What we learned? We’re not ready to make hard and fast rules just yet. We’re still learning a lot about our brand and its place in the world. But this is the groundwork that will help us develop new ways of thinking and speaking to people. This is the beginning of lots of testing as we stretch ourselves to develop an exciting verbal identity.
For me the most exciting thing about this process has been seeing what other brands have done, using that knowledge, and at the same time recognising that we’re on our own path. We’re shuffling through a wardrobe of brand outfits, and it’s ok to go rogue, try something different, fail and try again. That when the magic happens.
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