Question
What is an easy step by step process for creating a brand voice?
Answer
I kinda disagree strongly with the current trend towards "authenticity" and "be yourself." I think it is a meaningless fad that doesn't really work except for truly personal brands, like a blog or a one-person consulting shop, and by happy accident in other cases.
"Voice" must match product positioning in the marketplace, which may have nothing to do with your own identity. If you are a rockstar chemist and you reverse engineer and improve on Coke's formula to be even more addictive, how likely is it that your personality is the same as the one you want the product to project? In my marketing work, I actually face this challenge, since my natural personality is rather darkly humorous, cynical and ironic. It is not a personality that works for 99% of brands.
Maybe focus groups show that your new "Better than Coke" (BtC) product is most loved by young teens who like emo music, while you are a crotchety and brusque middle-aged man with no patience for that youth culture crap. Maybe you don't even like drinking your own product, and prefer coffee.
Do you REALLY want to be "authentic" in some meaningless feel-good way? Sure, you don't want a violent clash between the product's personality and yours (stay in the backroom if that's the case), but within your marketing "vocal range" pick the key that works for the product, not the key that is your own favorite.
Sure, you may want to hire a marketing manager who is authentically in touch with the target market culture, but the point is, the market leads in determining the voice, not you. You'd hire such a marketing manager AFTER determining you need that kind of voice. You wouldn't use the default voice of whoever happens to randomly take on the marketing role.
With that mini-rant against "authenticity" out of the way...
"Voice" is an outcome of disciplined backroom marketing thinking, not something you attempt to create directly.
Once you've done the backroom work, you can align all your messaging in all your channels (product copy, blog, Twitter, Facebook, press releases, interviews...) to march to the same tune. That "alignment" process is driven by a few anchor concepts, sentiments and attitudes that reinforce the positioning you want, and creates the voice.
I prefer to stick to the basics.
Most of this depends very strongly on the specifics of your product/service, so this is about as much of a step-by-step outline as I can provide in general terms. Happy to help with more specific suggestions if you message me with details.
"Voice" must match product positioning in the marketplace, which may have nothing to do with your own identity. If you are a rockstar chemist and you reverse engineer and improve on Coke's formula to be even more addictive, how likely is it that your personality is the same as the one you want the product to project? In my marketing work, I actually face this challenge, since my natural personality is rather darkly humorous, cynical and ironic. It is not a personality that works for 99% of brands.
Maybe focus groups show that your new "Better than Coke" (BtC) product is most loved by young teens who like emo music, while you are a crotchety and brusque middle-aged man with no patience for that youth culture crap. Maybe you don't even like drinking your own product, and prefer coffee.
Do you REALLY want to be "authentic" in some meaningless feel-good way? Sure, you don't want a violent clash between the product's personality and yours (stay in the backroom if that's the case), but within your marketing "vocal range" pick the key that works for the product, not the key that is your own favorite.
Sure, you may want to hire a marketing manager who is authentically in touch with the target market culture, but the point is, the market leads in determining the voice, not you. You'd hire such a marketing manager AFTER determining you need that kind of voice. You wouldn't use the default voice of whoever happens to randomly take on the marketing role.
With that mini-rant against "authenticity" out of the way...
"Voice" is an outcome of disciplined backroom marketing thinking, not something you attempt to create directly.
Once you've done the backroom work, you can align all your messaging in all your channels (product copy, blog, Twitter, Facebook, press releases, interviews...) to march to the same tune. That "alignment" process is driven by a few anchor concepts, sentiments and attitudes that reinforce the positioning you want, and creates the voice.
I prefer to stick to the basics.
- Do some introspection and figure out whether you are naturally more of a PR, sales or marketing person, see: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/1...
- Do some competitive analysis and figure out your initial positioning. Use Al Ries' "Positioning" as a guide.
- Then figure out a publicity strategy (not advertising), new brands are established through PR, not advertising. Read Al Ries' "The fall of advertising and the rise of PR." Whatever your natural inclination as revealed by Q1, you still have to start with PR. But your PR can have a dramatic flavor if you are more of a marketing personality, and more of a 'close the deal' flavor if you are a salesy-guy. If your natural personality is PR-friendly, you'll like this launch/brand establishment process as is.
- You then need to start hammering your positioning message home in every publicity opportunity. Almost, but not quite, like a broken record. If your brand is about "premium and youthful," reinforce "premium and youthful" no matter what the context. Doing some opportunistic PR around the BP oil spill? Use a "premium and youthful" take on the subject. You need a few such lighthouse positioning concepts that you can keep driving home at every opportunity. This is important because the point of PR is to get OTHER people (media, customers, analysts) to represent your core position as much as possible. You'll never get them to echo your words (in fact you don't want that because an echo chamber is not a useful situation for inbound marketing feedback), but if YOU are consistent, and the positioning has sticking power, the misinterpretations and noise will cancel out and your overall message will spread.
- If it doesn't work, your positioning hypothesis is probably wrong. Go back to Step 2, rinse and repeat. Product tweaks may be required. If 2-3 positioning stabs don't work, you may need to relaunch your product with a new name/brand, because you can't reposition a given brand name too many times.
- If, somewhere along the way, your brand positioning and message get hijacked by some viral PR that builds a strong brand that is NOT on message the way you want, you have two choices: run with it (if you can make money with it), OR rename/relaunch.
Most of this depends very strongly on the specifics of your product/service, so this is about as much of a step-by-step outline as I can provide in general terms. Happy to help with more specific suggestions if you message me with details.