Chris Young
Explore the importance of a unique brand voice in distinguishing your business and resonating with customers, using examples from successful companies like Poo-Pourri, Chomps, and Life Is Good.
Just like a fingerprint, each individual has a unique voice that distinguishes them from every other person on the planet. The best companies with the most astute marketing have learned to adopt the idea of a voice and use it as a differentiator in their unique customer experience. Unfortunately, many businesses haven’t put much thought or effort into creating a voice, which is tantamount to not having an identity. A voice is how you speak and communicate with your customers – it’s the primary way that they will resonate with your products and services. However, if you haven’t put any thought into a voice, chances are that it is generic and uninspiring – not exactly the best way to make an impression. However, those companies that do have a voice have a certain gravitas and are able to live in the minds of their customers (and competitors) rent-free. With the help of a brand voice, converting that attention into revenue becomes an easy task.
A brand voice is essentially a company’s personality – that enduring set of characteristics and qualities that sets them apart from all other competitors. But how exactly do companies convey personality? When interacting with other individuals, it’s easy to see that we all lie along a multidimensional matrix of joyful, melancholy, friendly, exuberant, and more. All of this is done through micro-movements, body language, and verbal expressions. Yet, these are things that a company (by its very nature) cannot engage in.
In the absence of a physical body, the voice of a company can be thought of as a sort of undercurrent that lies at the base of all their client-facing communication. A brand can be friendly, edgy, comical, mystical, exclusive, and more. What’s more, they can, just like people, be any combination of these characteristics. To put it simply, voice is the intangible quality within communication that makes consuming a company’s marketing materials a delight rather than drudgery.
Almost every successful brand will have a defining brand voice and this is no accident. Having a brand voice isn’t just a “nice to have.” It is a defining characteristic of any successful company, especially B2C and eCommerce companies.
Poo-Pourri has become a nearly ubiquitous brand over the past five years or so and has helped many, in their own words, “control the shit-uation.” Their content, especially the hysterical YouTube videos, gives us all a bit of comic relief in an ironically “prim and proper” voice. They masterfully make fun of normal anatomical functions (and all the attendant odors) while branding their product as a solution. The voice they use is a combination of comical while not being overly vulgar – perfectly winsome for a mother keeping her house clean or an eager bachelor who needs to make an impression after a night on the town.
Chomps is another niche brand that sells minimally processed grass-fed jerky sticks. This is an extremely niche product; however, this works well for Chomps to be able to craft their voice to their target market. Chomps focuses on the health aspect of their product (keto, paleo, gluten-free), while also not being overbearing. If Chomps were a person, they would likely be an upbeat friend who enjoys spending time camping and hiking outdoors. They’ve done a wonderful job crafting this image with their copy as well as customer highlights on their website.
Apple is the least niche of all the examples (almost everyone has an iPhone) but certainly has something for companies to learn. Since the inception of the iPhone, Apple has consistently branded themselves as the “smart person’s” product – sensible, elegant, and simple. The Apple voice could be considered something like the nerdy friend who’s smarter than everyone in the room but makes you feel like the smart one. Think Sheldon from Big Bang Theory but with better social skills. This voice was first launched in the early 2010s with the Mac Vs. PC commercials we all love and remember. All of their voice marketing since then has built on top of this archetype, refining it into something as simple and striking as their phones and laptops.
Red Bull’s voice is, well, adrenaline-pumping. When you think of Red Bull, you likely think of some Tony Hawk figure that’s fueled by some combination of caffeine and adrenaline, and that’s exactly what they want. With all the content and sponsorships Red Bull puts out, the ignorant bystander knowing nothing of the company may mistake RedBull for some sort of national sports league.
However, it’s just an energy drink with one of the most brilliant marketing strategies ever conceived. To truly understand their voice, one must understand that their main product is a humble drink most frequently consumed with bottom-shelf vodka and a bit of ice. How then do we get to propeller planes landing on the top of a building in Dubai? Because their voice is the voice of living life on the edge and having an extremely good time while doing it. It’s Tony Hawk, the Dukes of Hazzard, and mountain climbing in a can.
Finally, Life Is Good started out as a small clothing brand in Massachusetts that grew like wildfire. The company’s voice starts in its name, “Life Is Good;” a positive, upbeat message that millions of people across North America have supported. The brand started out selling T-shirts but has since transformed into the eternally optimistic lifestyle brand that confidently declares the inherent benevolence of life. The brand, in large part due to its voice, is now seen as the reassuring friend that insists that “everything will be okay.” After COVID, it’s a message and a voice that people are supporting to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
One of the best ways to create a brand voice is to synthesize the natural internal culture of the company with what customers want to hear. Ideally, these two will overlap almost exactly and the voice will feel natural rather than manufactured.
The best companies with the best brand voice are born of people that have solved their own problems and want to help solve the same problem for others. However, there are many intermediate steps between solving a problem and being able to communicate that solution to others with the same problem. Developing a brand voice in this position can be more a matter of intuition, but this often comes at the expense of having a high-resolution plan for the voice. To help advance beyond this, there are a few questions and exercises that can help define and systematize your brand’s voice.
One of the best questions to help your brand’s voice is to ask who your brand would be if it were a person. It’s best to think about this in archetypal terms such as a friend at the bar, a parent, a teacher, or perhaps even a spiritual guide. More frequently than not, a brand voice will be made up of a central archetype with several other distinguishing traits thrown in. For example, the central archetype (like Poo-Pourri) is “prim and proper literature teacher” with a dash of irreverence and vulgarity. The irony of the two archetypes existing in one brand is one of the reasons the brand is so engaging.
This is a crucial question to develop a solid brand voice because your brand and customers need to be speaking the same language. In business school, this would be called “product market fit.” The key is to understand what language your customers are using when describing your product and the problem your product solves. One great way to understand this is by conducting interviews with your target audience, and pay attention to the words that they are using! Figure out what the most popular words they’re using are, see if it reflects well with the brand identity, and use that same language to sell your product back to them.
One of the best ways to develop successful marketing strategies is looking at your competition or even companies in unrelated industries. These findings should always be filtered through your own marketing plan and brand identity. However, looking at other companies’ voices can help you determine if there’s a missing element to your own brand voice or if there’s a missing type of content you could be creating. Looking laterally at other companies and industries helps you avoid having to reinvent the wheel by borrowing ideas that already exist. This frees up efforts to customize the voice or strategy to your own business rather than having to start from scratch and create it.
Just as children change by maturing into adolescents, and adolescents change into mature adults, so will your brand’s voice change as it matures and becomes more refined. One of the best ways to help the maturation process is to A/B test different voice modalities. For example, Apple took their “friendly nerd” voice from the Mac Vs. PC commercials and refined it into something still nerdy but sleek, high tech, and smart. This was done through hundreds, if not thousands, of small iterations on the same message while tracking performance. Likewise, companies must continue to make small, incremental changes to their brand voice to see if different “tones” of voice elicit better reactions. There will, of course, come a point of diminishing returns, and it no longer makes sense to tweak the voice. The first and most important step, however, is to simply find the brand voice that most resonates within the company as well as without.
Your brand’s voice will affect nearly every aspect of how your brand interfaces with customers, and time spent developing a coherent and consistent brand voice is always time well spent. One of the best ways to attract and retain customers is by building a bona fide relationship with them, and this cannot happen without a useful and likable brand voice. However, for as helpful as having a brand voice can be, it is just a small part of a much larger marketing plan to generate revenue. If your company is having trouble developing a brand voice or struggling to find sure footing for your marketing efforts, get in touch with Be More Digital. We’ve helped companies in several different industries reach their revenue and marketing goals with targeted marketing campaigns. Get in touch with us for a free marketing consultation or take a look at some of our case studies for more information.
.png)
