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A Guide To Crafting Your Brand Voice

What is a voice of brand? That is today’s question. And what does it really matter? Well, it seems that brand does matter—a lot. The average person is estimated to encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day. This includes ads across all media, such as digital platforms, TV, radio, print and more.

Think about that. We are advertised to ~8,000 times on average per day. How the hell are we supposed to stand out? Well, one way is through a well-defined, nicely fitting brand voice.

Your brand voice, as much or more so than logos, fonts and colours, is how you want to talk to the world. How you want to be seen. A consistent voice can make a brand feel more relatable, distinctive and most importantly—trustworthy.

So today, let’s dive deep into what it takes to craft the ultimate brand voice for you and your organisation that will have your customers dashing for the Kool-Aid.

Brand voice through a historic lens

The ‘brand voice’, is somewhat of a novel idea. Rewind 150 years and advertising was really about features and not much else. Take John Smedley of Matlock, Derbyshire, and his famous Chillie Paste as an example.

We really only now what it is, supposedly, good for. We know it is for rheumatism, lumbago, gouty paints—whatever the hell they are—bronchitis and so on. We are even told what the ‘outer package’ and ‘inner package’ look like. Everything was quite literal.

During the mid-20th Century though, as the advertising industry grew, companies began to recognise the importance of differentiating their brands beyond just products.

But possibly the most famous example of beautiful ad copy from the last century was Volkswagen’s famous Think Small campaign. Written by Julian Koenig at the Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency in 1959, the campaign was ranked as the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century by Ad Age.

*_{Don’t worry if you can’t read the text—I share the full copy below.}

The copy for the famous ad was light-hearted, playful, free-flowing. And it pushed against the competition. It was the perfect ad.

And it really was one of the catalysts in a new beginning of advertising. Mad Men style ad-pusher all across the globe were trying to emulate Volkswagen’s hit and in doing so, moved the idea of a brand voice forward.

Brand archetypes

One of my favourite examples of brand archetypes was from a pitch I was forwarded more than a decade ago. It lays out ten different personas your brand can take on. *Some places will often cite 12 archetypes.

With a quick glance you get it right? Selling stocks: speak as The Wise. Selling porn, The Seductress is probably a better fit.

When building out a brand identity though, you don’t need to speak in the same voice all day every day. Like humans with real world personalties, you need different strokes for different folks. With this in mind—usually—you would choose a primary persona, followed by a couple of secondaries. My startup Athyna, for example, used The Joker as our primary tone, followed by The Rebel and The Dreamer as our secondaries.

You might be a design agency that works with a range of clients, from tech startups to fashion brands. When working with startups, you may adopt a casual, energetic tone that resonates with their fast-paced, innovative culture—kinda like The Joker or The Rebel. But when engaging with an old-money, luxury fashion label, you may shift to a more refined, sophisticated voice that reflects their premium brand image, using an elegant, discerning tone. More towards The Friend, The Maiden or The Wise.

A real world example

At Athyna, we spent some time working on our brand voice. It’s been refined over the journey but the original exercise went something like the following. First, my co-founder and I (yes, for a few months I had a co-founder) modelled out the business itself on a quick Lean Canvas Exercise. Then we worked on our mission, vision and value in a few very short exercises.

This gave us what we wanted to do in the world, who we were building for and what we aligned with from a cultural perspective. Next was the fun part.

Our Creative Director, Josefina, has worked with Google, RedBull, AT&T, Paramount, Estée Lauder and more, so I asked her for a quote on how she thinks about brand voice.

I am somebody who probably over-indexes on brand as a strategic advantage. And overall, although it’s not perfect, I think we are in a nice spot with our tone of voice.

Other examples from lesser known companies (lol)

Now that we have heard how the greatest company on the planet does brand voice, let’s take a look at how some of the also-rans—Nike, Google, Rolex and M&Ms—communicate their brand voice.

Example #1 - Nike and The Hero

Nike are the perfect example of a company that leans heavily in the archetype of The Hero. And an example of this in action was the support Nike showed to NFL star, Colin Kaepernick, when he took a knee during the national anthem.

That being said, at the same time, I imagine this would have deeply entrenched the love they have from their main target market. Which would be the more affluent, liberal folk living in big city America.

Example #2 - Google and The Wise

Google on the other hand is an excellent example of a company embodying The Wise brand archetype. Their mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" positions them as a knowledgeable guide helping people navigate through the ‘information superhighway’ (or German: infobahn).

Google's minimalist design and focus on delivering the most relevant search results positions them as a trusted source of information and insight. By constantly innovating and expanding their offerings, from search to maps to AI assistants, Google establishes itself as a wise leader ushering us into a more connected, technologically empowered future.

Example #3 - Rolex and The King

Another example is Rolex, who comfortably wear The King as their brand archetype. Known for their luxury watches, Rolex positions itself as a symbol of success, prestige, and exclusivity.

By owning a Rolex, customers feel they are part of an elite group that has achieved a level of mastery and success that the average human peasant could only dream of. James Bond type.

*_{Not sure why I went to hard on Rolex just now. Something took over my fingers. I simply could not control it.}

Example #4 - M&Ms and The Joker

And finally we have M&Ms, the ultimate gagster of a brand. If you don’t love the famous M&Ms commercials that have run for decades on our screens, you have either been living under a rock or simply have a cold, cold heart. And you cannot be my friend. Seriously though—the value M&Ms have accrued over the years but these friendly little chocolatey friends should not be underestimated.

Some of my favourite brand voices today

Here are a few of my personal favourite brand voices that I see around the internet today. First, we’ll start with beehiiv, the tool this very newsletter is built upon. It’s lighthearted, silly, irreverent. Lower case is en vogue thanks to Chipotle.

I don’t know about you but either the same 13 year old is running Hubspot’s account as well, or this is one of the biggest coincidences (coincidi?) since The Great Dennis The Menace Coincidence of 1951.

When good brand goes wrong

As with all things people hold dear, pivoting away from a brand people know and love can result in massive backlash. Clothing brand GAP, have seen this happen on multiple times in the last decade. In 2012, as Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast of the United States, The Gap tweeted, what could in fact be the most insensitive tweet to ever hit the twitterverse.

The tweet was seen as highly insensitive and out of touch with the severity of the situation, a clear lack of awareness of an appropriate voice during a crisis. The archetype they must have used here was The Idiot.

Fun fact: this faux pas came on a couple of years after an attempt to fancy up their brand, following the 2008 recession which was a huge disappointment. This 72 hour blunder cost $100M of design work and a 3% drop in stock price.

The point here is not to poke fun at GAP and Nivea. And it’s also not to say that you should never take risks or move outside your tone of voice. But the fact is your audience listen. They care. They have an emotional attachment to the colours you use, the fonts you chose, and the jingle your advertisements made in between their Saturday morning cartoons. And they sure as hell have an attachment to your brand voice—the thing most likely to make them feel something. Advertising great David Ogilvy said it best.

In sum

In summary, I think of brand on the same scale as you would think of an NPS score. If your brand is a 1-6, it’s working against you. A 7 or an 8 and you are ‘meh’ but build a brand to a 9 or god forbid, a 10/10 and the world is truly your oyster.

So build wisely my friends. Take the appropriate care to set the foundation of your brand because in business—just as it is with culture—brand is the gift that keeps on giving.

How you can apply this

Further study

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed it!

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See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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