Who Are You? How To Determine Your Brand’s Voice with Ann Handley
How to evolve and stay consistent with your brand voice at the same time.
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Finding Your Voice is HARD
Figuring out your voice is HARD and we all have to go through it.
Whether it’s your pimply awkward teen years and you’re trying on different identities to figure out where you fit in, what you’re interested in, and who your tribe is… or whether you’re a writer, a podcaster, a leader, a speaker, or any other public-facing communications role as an adult, finding your voice is a stressful process.
Do you try to fit in and copy what else is popular?
Do you stay generic and low-risk to avoid embarrassment?
Do you let your freak flag fly and attract lots of attention, even if a bunch of people might not like it?
It’s the same with brands. How many boring, generic, corporate voices are out there that no one pays attention to because… they’re boring, generic, corporate voices? How many copycat funny or snarky brand voices are out that don’t match the values of the brand itself?
It’s HARD to nail this voice stuff.
Thankfully, Ann Handley is an expert in helping brands find their voice and she’s here to help.
Brand Voice Is Human, Not A.I.
Ann is the author of the very popular email newsletter, Total Annarchy, as well as the author of Everybody Writes. One of the instantly recognizable traits of Ann’s newsletter is that it is 100% Ann Handley and nobody else. Ann is the antithesis of “corporate mumbo jumbo” - the writing comes from a real human writing in her own voice.
“It's funny because when it comes to the growth of the email newsletter, I think that's a massive piece of it. I know that sounds like an ego thing, but it's not. It's just that the way that I write it is inherently personal. It could only come from me. AI will never produce that email newsletter. It just is not possible. Even if a robot writes like me, there's going to be something off about it, you know?”
Ann has been writing a lot about AI and writing since the launch of Chat GPT last November and while she’s been supportive of AI as a helper, she also advocates for leaning into the areas where AI will not be able to compete… like brand voice.
“My hope is that AI is one of the things that will start to shed some new light and attention on brand voice. It’s not because AI can do it, but because if we want our content to feel unique - that it could only come from us and that it's uniquely ours - voice is one way to do it.”
Brand Voice Isn’t Static
A big theme in our conversation about brand voice was that it needs permission and space to evolve over time. People don’t stay the same and companies don’t stay the same. And yet, most brand voice guidelines are locked in a PDF document, gathering digital dust deep on the company intranet or Google Drive.
“Your voice is always changing. My voice even two years ago is a little bit different than it is now because this is 2023 and I'm two years older and I have much more experience in everything.
“Your voice is not a static thing that you decide once. It's not cast in amber. And I think that's where a lot of brands need to think differently. We just need to make it more of a living, evolving, breathing thing.”
I’ve witnessed the smart evolution of brand voices a few times and it’s impressive when it’s done thoughtfully. When I was first doing podcast work with Slack, they were a quickly growing, scrappy start-up and the brand voice was quirky and fun. As they grew into delivering enterprise-level solutions, the voice became more professional and sophisticated, while still maintaining the core attributes of its younger self.
Again, much like a teenager evolving into an adult, brand voices naturally evolve with time and experience and maturity as well.
Brand Voice Should Be Consistent Across the Ecosystem
Evolving does not, however, mean wild experimentation every time a new trend or flavour-of-the-month voice emerges. Ann very smartly calls out the inconsistency of brand voice from one channel to the next. When your Twitter voice is radically different than your website voice, there’s a big problem - ultimately, who are you?
“The brands that I see celebrated online very often for their tone of voice typically feel like they came out of agency conference rooms. It feels like they wrote a bunch of stuff on a board, and one of them was snarky and one of them was humorous.
“I love that voice. I get it but I don't think it's really useful for us to look at those kinds of brands and say, ‘Yeah, we should be communicating in that way,’ because it's about taking the attributes of your brand, of your company and figuring out ‘What would we sound like if we were a person?’
“You'll notice that a social channel is really, really funny. But then you go to the website and it's flat and corporate. This is a mismatch. This is weird.”
“For example, Wendy's is celebrated on social media because of their voice, because they're fun and they're snarky. And that's how a lot of consumer brands like that show up on social. But then when you go to their website, it's completely different.”
“It's like a Jekyll and Hyde situation.
“Who is this brand? And that, to me is something that was created in an agency boardroom where they sat around with the Wendy's execs and they decided, “Okay, here's how you're gonna show up on Twitter: you're gonna troll McDonald's.”.
“I don't think that really serves Wendy's. That's not their identity. Their identity comes from Dave Thomas. What do we know about Dave Thomas? He was adopted. He has a daughter named Wendy. That's who their persona should be.
“And maybe that's not as exciting to a younger audience, but then find a way to make that interesting to a younger audience, because that's the brand.”
How to Manage Voice Across Channels
Ann’s point is bang on - you can’t have different voices on different channels. However, at larger brands, it’s almost inevitable that different PEOPLE are writing on different channels, so there needs to be a way to create consistency (and consistent evolution) across those channels.
“They have to have ongoing conversations internally about voice and how to educate the writers and the content creators.
“You can’t have it feel like that your voice is in solitary confinement over here on the social channels and it has nothing to do with what's going on on the website over here. You need to bridge those two things.
“And the only way that I know how to do that is to just keep it alive. Have those conversations on an ongoing basis. I talk to a lot of leaders who have already defined their brand guidelines. They know what it is. But then when you ask them how they talk about it on a regular basis, they say they don't.”
Create checkpoints, conversations, and ways to make sure your brand doesn’t end up in a Wendy’s jumble-o-voices situation.
How to Determine Your Brand Voice
At this point, you may be nodding and agreeing with this strategy and ALSO asking, “So HOW exactly do companies do this properly?” Is there a process for how to think about building a more human, consistent brand voice?
Good news - there IS a process! It’s longer than we can explore in a single newsletter, but it is thoroughly explored in the second edition of Ann’s book, Everybody Writes.
“I outlined a process based around the work of Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group.
“It identifies four dimensions in tone of voice.
“And I invite brands to figure out where they land on each one of those dimensions. It’s a fun exercise to do, but it also avoids the sort of cloying “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”
“That is not useful. I don't even care about that. That’s where a lot of brands get it wrong, too - they follow this sort of silly advice around that.
“Keep it simple.
“We sound like this. Give an example from your website or your social channels, and it could be aspirational if it doesn't exist.
“And we DON’T sound like this.
“That's enough to give it some guidelines. We did that exercise at Marketing Profs and it was enormously helpful just in terms of figuring out our differentiation versus a competitor.
“And our opportunity as brands is to revisit that. Don't let it gather dust. Go back to it every six months or so. Is it still relevant? The world has changed, and has our voice changed? Especially in the post-COVID world, I think the way we communicate now is a little bit different than we did pre-COVID, at least for a lot of brands. Has your voice changed since then? And if so, how?
“So let's re-document it. Let's make sure it's a living, evolving thing versus this ‘cast in amber’ artifact that we're never going to look at it again.”
The Best Voice Test
So you’ve figured out your voice across the four components. You’ve got all your teams talking about your voice regularly. You’re evolving your voice over time. You even have consistency checks across platforms so you don’t end up in a Wendy’s Jumble-O-Voices situation.
There’s one last golden piece of advice from Ann to make sure your voice stays consistent on a day-to-day basis. Read it out loud before you post it.
“Read it out loud. I will never stop talking about this. I do it all the time with every single thing I publish, whether it's a tweet, whether it's a post on LinkedIn, or whether it's my own email newsletter, I will sit there and literally read it out loud. You'll just hear how people will stumble.”
Warning: you will feel ridiculous doing this. But try it. It’s kind of amazing how powerful a trick this is. You will hear when something sounds corporate. You will hear when it sounds jumbled. And you will hear it flow like magic when you’ve nailed the voice.
Thanks again to Ann for sharing her wisdom about brand voice. Part 1 of our conversation is about optimizing your content for relationships. You can sign up for Ann’s newsletter here.
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