What is Brand Voice?: How the Brand Develops Its Identity

When we encounter a brand, perhaps most of us suddenly just think about its visual look, from the logo, its color, fonts, and design. However, developing a brand that sticks in the audience’s mind is also about how the brand communicates to its audience. The memorable voice of a brand, also known as brand voice, plays a crucial role in ensuring the brand identity stands out in the midst of fierce competition. In this article, we will discuss what brand voice is and how the business develops its own brand voice, and tips for creating brand voice, along with an explanation of brand voices from big brands as examples. 

What is the definition of brand voice? 

Brand voice is a way brands or businesses communicate with their audience with their own distinct style on all platforms. It becomes the identity or persona to deliver the value of the company to the target audience. Thus, the audience will easily recognize the brands through how their content develops and the tone. 

Brand voice can be developed in any communication style, from cheerful, full of humor, to a formal tone. Yet, it must be ensured that it has a signature style that differs from other brands. It is similar to how a person talks or introduces themselves to someone, and they typically have their own way to communicate.

The application of brand voice is on all content across platforms, including advertisements, newsletters, social media posts, blog posts, and others. By using a consistent brand voice on marketing campaigns, it bolsters the identity of your brand and makes customers loyal to your brand. 

The difference between the brand voice and the tone of voice of the brand

Now, you have understood the meaning of brand voice, and you have perhaps heard of a brand’s tone. Brand voice and brand tone are somewhat interchangeable. Although they are quite the same and oftentimes confuse people, they are actually different from each other. 

Brand voice is a communication style from a brand to deliver its message to the audience, and most importantly, it needs to be consistent. Brand tone, on the other hand, is the tone of voice of branding, which means it is adaptive and more flexible than brand voice. 

The analogy of brand tone is similar to how you communicate with your closest buddy, your working colleagues, or your boss. You can say to your closest friend with an informal and more casual tone; meanwhile, you must adapt to a different or more formal tone when it comes to expressing the message to your working colleague or boss. 

Why is brand voice crucial for businesses? 

Brand voice is crucial for all businesses, especially the business who are conducted entire operations online. The operation of an online business, particularly SaaS or software as a service, must implement a consistent brand voice for all content across platforms. The written and spoken content will represent how your business communicates with the target audience. Here are the multiple goals of implementing brand voice: 

• Develop brand originality: As a brand, you must have originality that makes you different from others. If your brand is deemed a copycat of another brand’s style, it will definitely damage your reputation. 
• Enhance trust: The freshness of the brand personality will develop the audience’s trust in your products and lead them to be loyal to your brand rather than choose your competitors. 
• Easy to be recognized: By using brand voice, your brand will be easier to recognize from your competitors. The different and engaging brand voice will make your audience remember. 
• Forming a great perception: A distinctive voice is also a tool to shape a great perception for your brand. People will think that your brand is reputable and reliable based on your brand voice. 
• Guidelines for the marketing team: By creating a distinctive brand voice, it will be easier for marketing team members to align with each other. It prevents misalignment of tone when it comes to creating content marketing and ensures the message is delivered accordingly. 

These days, much of the content for social media, newsletters, or blog posts is created using artificial intelligence-generated content. This led to a flood of robotic content and a less distinctive style that comes from the human touch. Although using AI is preferable to enhance productivity, it must be edited by humans to ensure that your content’s voice and tone are different from others and show uniqueness. 

Elements of brand voice for business

Brand voice is applied to all content marketing team members, including writers, social media creators, email marketers, and other marketing-related positions. This is the key to executing the marketing campaign smoothly and reaching the marketing goals. For supporting the work of the marketing team, you need to know the key elements of brand voice to boost your business. 

• Persona or characteristic: This might be the most essential element of brand voice because the character is the most distinctive criterion. With the brand voice persona, you can be different from others in terms of speaking. So, you can define the style based on what your company needs, whether they are playful, cheerful, full of humor, or prefer a formal tone. 
• Tone:  This element must be added to the brand voice since it affects the emotional feeling of the audience. The tone of the brand voice varies based on the context, but it should be aligned with the general voice to make it recognizable by the audience. For instance, tone might be less formal on social media and blog posts, but it must be more formal in email marketing. 
• Point of view and value: As a brand, it should show its point of view and give an opinion on relevant issues to generate engagement and boost loyalty. However, not all brands show their point of view regarding some events, and some of them avoid taking a stance and maintain neutrality, particularly on sensitive issues. 
• Audience alignment: Brand voice must reflect the audience because they are the parties listening to our content. Hence, brands need to maintain the connection and how they resonate with the problem or pain points of the audience and give a better solution. 
• Language: The choice of words also plays a crucial role in brand voice. This makes the audience easily recognize your brand by its communication style, including slang, or more casual, or even more formal or serious language. 

Tips to develop an effective brand voice 

Building brand voice is not easy, since there are many elements to consider. Additionally, beginners are more likely to face challenges in defining how to communicate with their audience. Thus, we can give you tips to build an original and effective brand voice that is distinct from others.

1. Define core values and review recent voice

Before executing brand voice, the initial step is to define the core values of your brand. This is essential to ensure that you know the original voice to shape your brand identity that differs from others. You also need to review your content and gain insight by classifying what content performs well and following that content. Additionally, check if your current brand voice is already aligned with the brand’s core values.

2. Understand the audience

When we build a brand voice, we need to pay attention to the people who are going to listen to or read our content. These are the crucial tips to ensure that your content reflects the audience’s problems and relates to their condition. Yet, understanding the audience is not a simple task, and it takes time to get accustomed to what the audience wants as well as build a suitable tone.

3. Do competitor analysis

Inspiration to develop brand voice can come from anywhere, including your competitors. So, competitor analysis is a recommended tip to inspire your voice. By doing this, you will understand how they develop their brand voice, what tone and language their used, and why their brand voice can be successful in delivering their core value.

4. Determine the characteristics of your brand voice

By doing research about your audience, auditing current content, and conducting competitor analysis, you will find the basis of your brand personality. You can find your brand traits, whether it is bold, warm, playful, direct, or straightforward. These characteristics will help your content to be consistent across platforms. However, you should write a sample first before publishing the content with a new brand voice.

5. Create the brand voice guidelines

After you find the most suitable sound for your brand, you need to create brand voice guidelines, also known as a brand voice chart. This document acts as a template for your team to create consistent content marketing across channels. 

Example of brand voice from big brands

To better understand what brand voice is, you need to review the examples from the big brands. What is their brand voice, and what are the personalities that make them different from their competitors? These are 11 examples of brand voice from big brands that successfully make them easily recognizable. 

1. Adidas 

Character: Empowering and motivational

As one of the largest sports clothing brands, Adidas promotes the empowering and motivational trait as its brand voice. Similar to other sports brands, Adidas wants to give a clear message that their products are dedicated to athletes who work hard to cross their limits to achieve their goals. 

2. IKEA 

Character: Friendly and playful

IKEA is known as the largest furniture brand which understand their audience, mostly young adults in urban areas. Therefore, the Swedish brand is focusing on using a clear, friendly, playful, and humorous tone. IKEA shows a straightforward and clear message to show the benefits of their products to address the audience’s problem. 

3. Kokuyo 

Character: Minimalist and curious

Kokuyo understands that its target audience is mostly students, creative professionals, and educators who need its stationery products. Kokuyo uses simple and direct language to be easier to understand by its audience. On its social media, Kokuyo provides demonstrations of its products and how its products efficiently address the students’ issues. 

4. La Roche-Posay

Character: Scientific and accessible

La Roche-Posay is a popular cosmetic brand from France that has gained popularity for its scientific and accessible branding. To deliver its message to its target audience, La Roche-Posay has built a brand voice that sounds convincing by saying dermatologist-tested, but it presents with a casual tone. 

5. YSL 

Character: Bold and confident

Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) is a well-known luxury brand from France that includes cosmetics and luxury fashion products. The chosen language from YSL mainly focuses on conveying the trustworthiness of using luxury products and showcasing their own quality. Interestingly, YSL mostly uses simple words to represent its products, which is a symbol of simplicity. 

6. Apple

Character: Simple, minimalist, confident

Apple’s brand voice is pretty striking despite its minimalism. Represented by the products, they offer advanced and innovative technology that offers elegance and functionality. They use short taglines, but clear and concise. This mirrors their consistent, simple, and elegant designs. 

7. Netflix

Character: Conversational, fun

Instead of acting like a big corporation, Netflix has always given you a friendly impression. Their social media tone is always conversational and playful, instead of dictating and robotic. This seems like an effort to build relatability and relevance, particularly among young audiences that dominate their target market. 

8. Spotify

Character: direct, youthful 

Spotify has a similar brand voice to Netflix in many ways. From their modern user interface and casual language, everything seems to match the young audience’s taste. Spotify always uses fun and youthful copywriting as well as targeting users to interact with their products through something viral or hit on the internet subculture. 

9. Muji

Character: calm, hyper-functional 

Muji is well-known for its minimalist products with earthy and muted color tones. Not only that, their brand images always mirror typical Japanese mindfulness and calmness. Each product was designed with rational functions, rather than mere meaningless decoration. They actually want people to spend without being called out for promoting hyper-consumerism. 

10. Uniqlo

Character: accessible, minimalist 

Another Japanese brand that also uses mindfulness as the core of the business. Uniqlo emphasizes neutral color tones and shapes in its products to lure consumers. This minimalistic approach gives certain impressions such as liberation, versatility, inclusivity, and elegance, which are also shown in their advertising campaigns. Rather than being exclusive, their elegant products are highly accessible, and that is why, despite minimalism, they offer colors. 

11. Canva 

Characters: casual, accessible 

Accessibility and democratization of design are the core values of Canva as a brand. Canva’s brand identity orbits around something simple, modern, but also inclusive. Their user interface is intuitive, easy to handle, and understand. In social media ad campaigns, Canva consistently uses bold colors that give out eclecticism and artsy impression as its brand voice. 

Conclusion 

This article has answered the question of what a brand voice is. The brand voice is not merely a way for a brand to communicate, but it is actually an essential part of developing a brand. Brand voice also ensures that it has a different style to communicate and deliver value to its audience and customers. By defining a brand voice, you can use the appropriate language and tone to align with the content necessity, whether it is for a formal or casual tone. Thus, all businesses are recommended to determine their own brand voice to enhance credibility, personality, and trustworthiness with their customers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): What is Brand Voice? 

1. Why does a business need to develop a creative brand voice? 

Because brand voice is the identity of a brand to communicate with its audience. Therefore, all businesses need to determine their brand voice, and it should be a priority before creating content marketing across channels. A consistent brand voice will shape the identity of brands and make them easily distinguishable from their competitors. 

2. What are the consequences if businesses are not using a consistent brand voice? 

If brands or businesses are not using a consistent brand voice, this might lead to a lack of brand personality. The impact will be severe because it erodes trust among customers, and people might see that this company is not legit because they just imitate others. 

3. What are the common mistakes in creating brand voice? 

The common mistake in creating a brand voice is relying too much on AI without the use of a human touch. As we know, AI is mostly too generic and cannot generate specific text that made them different than others. In addition, inconsistency is also one of the biggest mistakes in maintaining brand voice on all platforms. 

4. What is the initial step to determine brand voice for beginners? 

The initial step to determine your brand voice by discovering your brand characters or traits. With a complete understanding of your brand persona, you will be able to develop a brand voice and brand tone for your target audience. 

5. Why do we need to create brand voice guidelines for the marketing team?

Because content creation is mostly not a task for one person; it is teamwork. Therefore, it would be better if a team creates a guideline or template to ensure that all content follows the guideline as a template to create consistent content for all platforms. 

6. Can you make a brand voice with AI tools? 

Yes, you can train AI to help you make a brand voice by giving it examples and ask them to analyze your brand identity. Use them to brainstorm what impressions you want to create. You can also use AI tools to do roleplay, such as asking them to impersonate a person according to your brand identity. 

7. Are brand voice and brand tone the same? 

They are often mentioned as interchangeable terms, but actually, there is a slight difference. Brand voice is a personality that is attached to you and consistent. Meanwhile, brand tone is the realization of that voice when you need to attend a specific occasion. As an analogy,  you might act differently when you talk to your friend compared to your supervisor. There is an adjustment in language and gesture, but you are still you in a way that people can recognize your personality.

8. What are the best tips to define a brand voice? 

Start by determining your main target audience. Continue with the values you offer and end it by stating boundaries, meaning you also need to define what your brand is not identified with. 

9. How do you ensure that your team also uses brand voice within their job description? 

First, create and distribute the brand guide that your team can learn from; make it as detailed as possible to avoid confusion. Second, evaluate existing content and learn from the past; do a side-by-side comparison if necessary.

10. Do we need a specific brand voice guide according to the platform we use?

Yes, that can be helpful, as each social media has specific cultures that may need adjustment from your side. For example, LinkedIn is for professional networking, while Instagram is creative and TikTok is for fun. Your interest is the same, but the approach can be different for each social media. This classification seems unimportant at first, but if you want to scale up your business, each little detail matters.