Why your tone of voice deserves to be more than three words on a slide
Jamie Thorp, creative lead at Reed Words, explains why brands need more than vague principles to communicate consistently and effectively.
A friend asks you to bake a cake for their birthday. They email you a picture with a note. “Make it look just like this – recipe attached!” You open the recipe. It says:
Eggs. Flour. Oven.
Oh gosh. How many eggs? When do you add the flour? What temp should the oven be? But you already know: no matter how hard you try, your cake won’t look like the one in the picture.
A TOV that consists of nothing more than “We’re Witty, Bold, and Human” is like handing someone a three-word recipe and expecting them to bake a cake.
Because that’s what real tone of voice guidelines are. A recipe. They contain the ingredients of the voice, with advice, tips, and steps on bringing it to life. Ideally they’re a mix of definitive instructions, and ways to add your own twist. The best ones are packed with examples of what “good” looks like. The clearer your recipe, the more consistent your voice.
And that’s important, when you consider all the different ways today’s brands need to communicate. Ads, packaging, social posts, chatbots, emails, notifications, FAQs, UX, error messages – and the rest. With so many opportunities to say the right or wrong thing, you have to work harder than ever to be consistent.
Let’s pull an incredibly obvious example out of the cupboard: Monzo. They’re famous for their clear, friendly voice. Much of their success is built on it. And just look at their guidelines. They aren’t three words. They’re 3,000 (we counted). That’s a recipe. A systematic guide on how to create the Monzo magic again and again, from billboards to CTA buttons.
Their guidelines even cover what tone to take “When we have to say sorry.” Because even the chattiest brand will need to be serious sometimes – like in a product recall, apologising for cancelled services, or explaining their response to a pandemic. If your principles aren’t fully explained, you run the risk of putting out messages that are clumsy at best, offensive at worst. So much of it is in the unpacking. A single word can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people.
Good writing isn’t just about your customers. Think of how much language flows through a company day to day. Project briefs. Onboarding. Strategy memos. Investor updates. Company news. It’s all words, all the time. Making those words as pointed and polished as possible means less room for ambiguity, misinterpretation and corporate sluggishness.
We’ve all seen the time, thought, and precision that goes into the visual guidelines (don’t you dare put anything within 21 pixels of the logo). Why can’t the same care and attention be extended to the voice? Words are half the brand, but tend to make up about 5% of the guidance on it.
We say your brand deserves better. With guidelines that have core principles, and build on them with comprehensive advice, watchouts, and differences across channels and audiences – all backed with strong examples, and explanations of why they’re strong. Those are the ingredients for great brand voice guidelines. Anything less is half-baked.
