Purpose of the article: The article’s primary purpose is to identify/define a brand voice and tone to create an organization’s unique identity for better exposure in the market.
Intended Audience: Software developers, UX Designers, Marketing people, VP’s, CEO.
Tools and Technology: User Experience (UX)
Keywords: Brand voice, Brand tone, Brand identity, Brand marketing, User experience, Customer Experience (CX)
A picture speaks a thousand words, but things are way more complicated when it comes to the world of brands’ business. A brand voice illustrates the personality of your brand that you have communicated to your target audience. That does not include just the visual identity that goes with the colors, images, tones, and language used.
A Person’s personality defines through their tone of voice; the same can be to the voice of a brand and its impression. From website content, internal communications, and social media posts, your tone of voice should be consistent in every way to stand out from the rest of the brands, especially to make your brand unique and influential.
For example, Let’s say you choose LinkedIn as a platform to promote your services/products. From the time you start your posts, you send a specific message of your brand and build a community. Does the message define your brand’s personality? Is it consistent with the brand’s vision, mission, and values? Is the tone formal or friendly or something different?
The right words can have a considerable impact on driving more engagement and sales. A good example would be changing two words improved user engagement, by Maggie Stanphil, Google’s UX Director, in Google 2017 conference.
Stanphil and her team identified that the prompt “book a room” when searching for hotel rooms in Google is “too committal” for the user’s early booking process. So, they changed that to “check availability,” where they saw a 17% increase in user engagement.
Source: Click here
Another great example is Tata Motors’ marketing of its “Tata Nano car” launch in 2008, where it markets as the World’s Cheapest Car but failed to impress the customers. Eventually led to shutting down the manufacturing facility in 2019, where the Tata Motors Chairman Ratan Tata himself admitted to the branding mistake, saying the car should have been sold as India’s “Most Affordable” instead.
Source: Click here
Thus, UX Writing plays a significant role in crafting interaction directly used in user interfaces in an interactive user device. The primary aim of UX writing is to make easy interaction between the users and the product. The UX Writing includes components of text which serve according to the users. To be more specific, UX Writing includes buttons menu, error messages, security notes, terms, and conditions, popups, onboarding screens, UI names, instructions of product usage, etc.
UX Writing growing attention is one of the first reasons marketing and UX design specialists have agreed that content is a significant element influencing both UI and UX. Badly written or poorly phrased content can ruin even a beautiful user interface. Many usability/user tests have proven to show that it affects the User Experience (UX). From the user’s perspective, we’ll see how beneficial these writings are, like when people start to interact with it for the first these UX writings make adaption fast and easy. When UX Writing has once done right, the navigation system across the application becomes much clearer to use. The essence of UX writing is a process of building UX Writing elements that aim at improving the user experience of the product.
To build a prestigious brand, voice, and personality synchronized to the marketing community.
Why does having a powerful Brand Voice matter?
To resonate with the people and the brand.
Your brand constitutes what you do, the people who do things as your company does, brand values, mission, vision, visual style such as a color scheme, logo, slogans, typeface, and pretty much everything the customers remember your company. As long as the necessary care and effort have been put forth in the practical and emotional aspect of your brand development process/strategy and your brand voice is reflecting the elements as mentioned earlier, you are good to go.
To distinguish you from the rest of the crowd.
Just as every individual has unique, distinctive traits, choice of words, and communicates in various languages, sometimes being impacted by cultural norms, your brand should stand out from the rest as well. It should set you apart from the rest and affiliate your brand identity and visibility.
To help in building trust with your consumers.
Successful communication comprises three fundamental components: the words you use, your tone of voice, and your body language. Being consistent throughout your interaction and communication will lead you to establish an adequate brand familiarity and identity.
According to psychological research, there is a strong link between familiarity and trust when a specific community shares common traits such as goals or ideas, where a level of trust is present. Therefore, being consistent in your approach and conveying a message coherent with your vision and values can reach the community that resonates with you; building trust with your brand ultimately makes your brand a primary go-to source.
How to define your Brand Voice?
What do you think about your brand personality and what it should convey? Should you relate to the “Big Five” personality traits or any other traits that can be better for your brand? Your brand voice principles could include the following factors:
Name
What’s the brand’s name?
Does it have a nickname?
How do its customers and employees refer to it?
Personality
What are the core principles of your brand?
What does your brand believe?
What about your brand passion?
What does it hate?
What does it strive?
Slogan
What is its catchphrase?
What words should it remember?
Visual style
How does it look? Is it colorful, neutral?
Does it have a mascot? If yes, is it a human mascot, or is it an animal type of mascot?
Is it modern or contemporary?
Is it class-related? High-end, blue-collar?
Verbal style
What language and tone does your brand use?
Does it use contractions or slang?
Does it whisper or shout?
How does your brand pronounce words? Formal or informal?
As you have the answers, you should have personalized brand voice guidelines compelling enough to create an identity you could use in your communications.
How is Brand Tone equally important?
It is crucial to get a spot on of your tone of voice from the onset and throughout. Your tone of voice should both embody and express your brand’s personality and values. It is a significant factor in differentiating your brand from the crowd of big brands. Even if your brand tone is not that recognized, you’ll want to still stand out from the rest of the crowd; it should be distinctive, recognizable, and unique.
Using your Brand values to define your tone of voice:
Your brand values should portray everything you do, from your website, logo, slogan, and marketing materials- tone is no different. All of them are linked intrinsically. Your voice tone should be consistent throughout your communications. To simply put, the tone of voice is a broader expression of what’s your organization is, including its values and thought process.
Being Consistent is the key.
Once the tone of your brand voice is defined by brand values, ensuring consistency is the key which perhaps the biggest challenge is facing by many brands. Brand guidelines should be in place outlining your tone of voice, but it’s often challenging to make sure it follows. In this case, the team should make sure they understand the brand values and their voice of tone and be comfortable following them. In this evolving, variation will often occur, but make sure to remain true to who you are throughout with your brand values would be pivotal.
3 Steller Examples of Brand Voices translated into the User Experience.
Zomato – Food Delivery App
Zomato uses fun facts to connect with the user in its preloaded screens.
Myntra – Shopping App
Myntra uses quotes from various prominent people in the fashion industry to connect with the consumers effectively.
Virgin America – Flight booking app:
Virgin America’s witty, humorous comments help ease tension, and some industries (like air travel) could use more of it.
- References / Sources of the information referred:
- https://www.brafton.com/blog/creation/4-brand-tone-of-voice-examples-to-use-when-building-your-own/
- https://coschedule.com/marketing-strategy/brand-voice/
- https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/10/define-brand-voice/
- https://99designs.com/blog/marketing-advertising/brand-voice/
- https://elementthree.com/blog/best-brand-voice-examples-from-companies/
Which MOURI Tech service, this article relates to (please refer to website service section) – Digital Transformation > User Experience
Final Word
While being colloquial or slang terms can be excellent, making sure it’s relevant to the current trending times or else it might look drastically out of date at one point of time and isn’t going to look drastically out of date or cringe at some point of time. Keeping things timeless, consistent in communications, natural and straightforward across the business and its audience is the best possible route.
Karthik Rahul Namani
Sr. Specialist UX-UI, Digital Transformation
MOURI Tech
