Brand Voice Strategy: Developing Tone and Personality

Brand Voice Strategy: Developing Tone and Personality

“Congratulations! You have reached the end of this Domestika course. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and feel ready to develop your own brand voice. Remember, your voice will determine the expression of your distinct personality. It will be the basis of your relationship with consumers and will inform their perception of your brand values. So it’s important! With this in mind, you should feel ready to develop your voice. Let’s revise the necessary steps to complete your project: your brand voice playbook. As you work through this book, mirror my example of the fictional brand KOOB and apply my process to your own brand!

• First, conduct a SWOT analysis. This is a simple framework that will help you to understand your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Why bother? It’s important to ground yourself in a deep understanding of your brand before you can make informed decisions about how you’re going to project yourself in the market. If you’re not clear on the essence of your brand, how can you expect the consumer to be?

• Next, identify your audience. Who will be your customer? Research into their needs and learn how to target them.

• Now it’s time to think about your principles—the “why” behind the “what”. What will be the things that define your brand and drive you forward?

• Develop a personality to anchor your voice. Then, think about tone. To do this, I recommend exploring similar brands and distilling the traits that you most relate to. This way, you can make a considered choice about the top traits you want to be associated with. When it comes to tone, consider how you plan to address your core audiences across different example situations.

• Finally, draw out the style guidelines. These are the details that will bring your voice to life. It will affect the copywriting of all departments, including marketing, customer service, scripting, and more. Each of the choices you make sends a message, whether it’s capitalization, perspective, formality, etc. Any inconsistency will breed distrust in your brand. Having clear rules and guidelines will ensure cohesiveness across all the different. So, when your voice manifests in a jingle or an advertisement pop-up, it will reflect the same values as an email from customer service responding to a complaint. Don’t overlook the details! This is how you will effectively carve out your space in the marketplace and establish positive recognition.

And that’s a wrap! I can’t wait to admire your brand voice and see how you put it to use. You can share your project with all of us by clicking on "Create your project". Remember to share both the final result and the steps that have led you to it. It would be great if you showed a picture of each step and added a brief explanation about what you have done in each one. Then, I can give you feedback. I will try my best to engage with your posts as often as I can. But, I also encourage you to help and give advice to other students in this course—working together can be very helpful and inspiring. See you in the forum! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“ Final Project Thank you so much for taking this course. I'm truly passionate about brand voice as you can probably tell, so it feels good to share it with you. It can be intimidating to decide where you want to go with an entire brand identity. Hopefully, these lessons have helped demystify the process for you. Remember, take the pressure off of yourself. You can go back and make changes to your playbook if you change your mind. I told you about my inspirations at the beginning of the course, which may seem trivial but are vital for discovering your brand voice. What I learned from my voi...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Brand Voice Strategy: Developing Tone and Personality

• Level: Beginner
• 91% positive reviews (55)
• 1624 students
• 4 units
• 12 lessons (57m)
• 3 downloads

• Category

  Marketing & Business

• Areas

  Brand Strategy, Communication, Digital Marketing