VIth Sense: It’s So Good to Hear Your (Brand) Voice
There’s a simple rule about consistency in advertising design: Each execution should have a similar look so that your campaign becomes recognizable, benefitting from the frequency of each impression with your target audience. Consistency results in familiarity, which leads to trust. We marketers know it and live it. That is, until it comes to the voice of the brand. Then, consistency hardly exists for most of them.
Brand voice is just as crucial to marketing communications as design, yet most people fail to define how their brands are represented in the written or spoken word.
Pause for a moment and listen to what’s going on in your office or home. You recognize the voices without even seeing who’s talking. The same should be true for your brand. Your prospects and customers should be able to get far more than words from how you ‘speak.’
Your brand voice represents your style and attitude.
The personality and tone of your ad copy, social media posts and website copy should become synonymous with your brand.
Your brand voice should be authentic of course, but it helps to view it like you would a character in a movie. You should develop a brand voice style guide for that ‘character,’ just as you would a graphic standards manual for your logo and corporate identity. Everyone writing on behalf of your brand should be in character when they do so — regardless of the channel or platform that they are writing for. Your target audience does not differentiate between the channels that you use to communicate, so you have to be consistent across all of them.
Branding is becoming more difficult as our mass mediums continue to lose audience. So, you need to use every tool you have to support your brand. Defining your brand voice and utilizing it consistently is good design.
