Brand voice: Bend it. Don’t break it
Kris Moore, writer at Reed Words, argues that the trick to help a brand flex across different audiences and touchpoints is to find a simple, intuitive way to bring its voice to life.
Imagine: your brand voice is weird, wise and wonderful. On paper, it sounds great. But how does it sound on a billboard, in FAQs or an Instagram post about your new COO? Surely a billboard is more wonderful than an FAQ? Should FAQs even be weird? (That might be weird.) And if your voice isn’t the same everywhere, is it still your voice?
It can be, but only if you “flex” your voice. That’s how a brand voice adapts to different situations, without losing its identity. Flex matters because brands are writing in more places than ever, to more people than ever. One moment you might be talking to gen Alpha on the back of a cereal pack. In another, to your shareholders in an annual report. Not flexing your voice is like talking to both audiences in exactly the same way, which would be very strange indeed.
Brands understand this in theory, but often make flex far too complicated to work in practice. In their brand voice guidelines, you might find dozens of rules and caveats for every channel, audience, touchpoint and moment. Explained through complex diagrams and metaphors, and vague, lofty language. What started as an attempt to make a voice flexible ends up as a Rubik’s Cube for teams to figure out.
Externally, your brand suffers. In one email, your wise voice comes across as deep and philosophical. In the next, pompous. Weird becomes outright bizarre, or wonderful becomes sycophantic. Or your guidance is too rigid to flex anything (oh, the irony), and your billboard really does sound like your FAQs.
Brands end up in this sticky situation because, admittedly, flex is tricky. It’s malleable and open-ended, and that makes it hard to know when and where to draw the line.
But flex doesn’t have to be complicated, and there’s always more than one way to skin the cat. For our work with Sainsbury's, we treated voice traits as if they were ingredients in a recipe. Need to add some energy? Reach for the Beans. A little edge for an ad? Add some Spice.
Sainsbury’s writes thousands of words every week, across hundreds of touchpoints, to millions of people. Writing consistently at that scale is hard enough. Flexing your voice at the same time – even harder. So our guidance had to be simple and memorable enough that the team didn’t have to dissect the guidelines before every brief.
For the radio station SiriusXM, we framed voice traits as volume dials. The team could then adjust each trait depending on the context, using a tool that felt fitting for their world.
The point is: flex is flexible. Whatever system you create, though, it needs to be simple and intuitive. Enough that your teams can – and maybe even want to – use it day after day. That’s the crux, and it’ll be the difference between your voice bending, and breaking.
