The role of written communication in brand building.
With the growth in the use of AI by businesses to drive efficiencies and grab the attention of your audience, what is the role of an organisation’s written style and is it important?
Why does it matter?
When your brand was designed the style of image will have been chosen so that the visual grammar (or semiotics to give it it’s proper name) reflect in some way the values and aspirations of the brand. The linguistic grammar (whilst always remaining ‘formal’) too has been developed as a resource to reflect the aspirations, interpretations of experience and social interaction – both image and word working coherently together.
Tone of voice is important as it really is about how your audience feel about what they’re reading and about you as the author. It’s not the message itself, rather the mood and sense that is created around the message in a way that reflects a brand’s aspirations. A consistent tone will help elevate you in the mind of your customer. A consistent tone of voice can:
provide clarity and cohesion. It prevents the reader’s experience becoming fragmented which, in some cases, can lead to misunderstanding.
reinforce organisational integrity. Consistency in tone and style reinforces professionalism across the organisation and thereby builds credibility and trust.
ensure your organisation is seen as being authentic and human. At the moment, while still relatively in its infancy, AI has not yet managed to replace human interaction entirely. Granted, there are programmes and companies such as jasper.ai, happycopy, semji among others selling solutions to help with creating a tone of voice, but they all require machine learning in order to develop either a single or multiple organisational voices. Anecdotally, for example, feedback on LinkedIn on the merits of LinkedIn Rewind by Coauthor to produce a review of 2024 insights showed a healthy scepticism around the effectiveness of the results. In some cases, they simply made no sense, whilst in others, the feeling was that “It just didn’t reflect who I am”.
allow for easier collaboration and better end results. If all departments have little support in terms of house style and tone of voice, the result is often notably different styles. If the department’s outputs need collating into a single document, it will require more input from writers and editors to achieve a cohesive and coherent result, all of which comes at a cost.
Context and content is key
There is no doubt that guidelines form the bedrock – how the brand should feel, speak, look, think and behave – but application is everything and this has to be bound by context. For example, thinking about style and whether it should be conversational or formal, will, in part, depend on the nature of your organisation. Consider a funeral director – they’re hardly likely to adopt humour, but they can be both empathetic and friendly rather than over formal and standoffish.
Context – technical user instructions for kitchen appliances will use short, direct sentences whereas the promotional brochure will likely use aspirational images and text that seeks to motivate and enthuse the buyer. Although both come from the same company, they are adapted to meet the needs of the audience.
When developing your brand guidelines, the most useful written style guides will cover:
voice: is it formal, professional, conversational or technical etc?
tone: define the tone and when it should be applied or altered subject to the context of the communication.
style: the use of capitals, punctuation, preferred sentence length, use of abbreviations and whether, if a global organisation, if you are going to use American or English spellings. Will you use an active or passive voice?
Laying the foundations early will pay dividends in the longer term. New staff will be able to get on board more easily and quickly and you should achieve a better finished piece which, in turn, has a subliminal effect on brand credibility. Having a defined tone of voice will enable you to spend more time on creating better, more effective content than on correcting copy anomalies such as use of colons, en- or em-dashes. Correct use of grammar and punctuation is a given and there are many books and online tools to assist if they are needed.
It’s also worth considering employing the services of a professional proof-reader for the most important or high value communication pieces to prevent any inadvertent errors.
One of the most notorious print errors goes back to 1631 when Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, printers to King Charles I, were tasked to reprint the King James Bible. A disgruntled employee removed the word “not” from the 7th commandment, so it read “thou shalt commit adultery” which led to it becoming dubbed the “wicked bible” by a rare book dealer in 1855 and the name seems to have stuck. It provoked outrage and cost Barker and Lucas their license. Most copies were burned on order of King Charles I, but a few remain in museum collections as well as in private hands.
We have lost count of the number of times we have seen copy from new starters to marketing teams, who write in a way personal to themselves as opposed to the brand. It’s fair to say we believe a key component of staff inductions, for those in an organisation who write marketing content, should be understanding of the brand tone of voice and writing guidelines.
Branding, in simple terms, is about winning the hearts and minds of your customer. Your visual identity might create an immediate connection but if your written tone fails to back up and build on the immediate impression, then it’s less likely your audience will remember you or perhaps even believe you.
We believe tone of voice and written guidelines to be an essential part of any brand that all staff should be fully conversant in. If you don’t have these there are plenty of specialist agency that can help in developing your own. Given that words are a key part of business communications, without these guidelines how will your staff or your AI know how to write in a coherent way that reflects your who you are?
Cohesion Design is a creative agency working within the insurance sector. Established in 2003 they have over 35 years knowledge working in the insurance sector.