Today we’re here to talk about one of the most powerful (and yet most underrated) tools in branding: tone of voice.
Tone of voice is a fundamental tool that helps us shape and express our brand’s personality. But it’s also a highly strategic part of branding that, if done well, can achieve the following:
- Greater brand recognition: a consistent tone is more memorable and helps people identify your brand even without seeing your logo.
- People connecting with your brand: speaking in your audience’s language helps you empathize and humanize your brand.
- Truly standing out: when everyone communicates in the same way, how you speak is what sets you apart from the rest.
- Your strategy to be grounded: tone of voice activates your brand, turning the abstract concepts of your brand platform into tangible messages.
How do you create a good tone of voice?
As with people, the starting point for achieving a consistent tone of voice is to be clear about our personality. From there, we will follow three steps:
- Analyze the market
Before defining our tone, we need to see how others speak. Therefore, we will begin by studying our competitors’ discourse to identify gaps and opportunities. - Define the verbal label
Once we have identified our competitors and defined our brand personality, we will create the verbal label. In other words, the golden rule that any brand message we launch must comply with. - Develop a series of linguistic resources
Now, at this point, our tone becomes tangible. We will define three types of resources: differential or impact resources, style resources, and key concepts. (We will explore these in more detail below.)
The tone of voice from a real case study: KeepCoding
KeepCoding is a high-performance training center for programming and technology with a unique humanistic approach. When it came to us in 2024, KeepCoding needed to evolve its brand in a way that would allow it to expand its training portfolio and also consolidate its positioning, strengths, and unique value proposition in terms of communication.
Our strategic analysis led us to the concept of “Human-powered Future”, where the school’s humanistic methodology became a central asset of the brand.
In addition to this strategic territory, we defined four main personality attributes and articulated the brand around two archetypes from Carl Jung’s wheel: the hero and the creator. This combination allowed us to emphasize values such as the hero’s determination, high standards, and commitment, but also the creator’s innovation, nonconformity, genuine character, and vision.
With the personality defined, we moved on to the tone of voice. The first step, as you know, was to come up with our verbal tagline: “Creating the future.” So, after writing any content for KeepCoding, we must ask ourselves if that message contributes to creating the future.
The combination of our personality and verbal tagline results in a motivating tone of voice that inspires and empowers. It speaks from reason, but convinces through emotion, desire, and motivation, opening our eyes to a new perspective on the future.
To ensure that this tone of voice was consistent and memorable, we developed the following types of linguistic resources:
Impactful resources: these are unique structures or formulas that generate immediate recognition. Given that one of the objectives of the brand strategy was to broaden the meaning of the ‘coding’ in our naming, we built a message structure that worked in this direction:
- Learn skills that make us more efficient. KeepEvolving
- Analyze feedback to keep improving. KeepImproving
- Develop an app that helps reduce energy consumption. KeepInspiring
Style resources: these are guidelines that guide how we express ourselves (vocabulary, type of verbs, use of grammatical persons, linguistic licenses, etc.). The world of technology, marketing, and training is an Anglo-Saxon world. That’s why, for KeepCoding, we decided that messages could mix languages without fear.
Key concepts: these are ideas that we will introduce into our discourse so that, through repetition, the market will associate our brand with them. For example, humanity was an essential concept of the KeepCoding brand.
As you can see, tone of voice is a key tool for activating a brand’s personality. It is what turns a brand into a conversation, a discourse into an attitude, and an audience into a community.
If you feel that your brand speaks… but does not resonate, perhaps it is time to apply a little verbal engineering.