Brands love to talk about voice, but a lot of them end up sounding the same. But how do you know where to start? AirBnB might choose a 30-something celebrity who anyone would be excited to sit next to on a plane: Jennifer Lawrence or Gina Rodriguez. Take Gap for instance. If your brand could come to life as a person at a dinner party, who would you be? Consumers do this marketing exercise for companies all the time, so you might as well give it a try on your end. Read your tweets out loud This is an exercise often practiced by novelists, playwrights, and fiction writers who want to make sure their dialogue really crackles. Study your audience from afar Social media marketers are eager to talk to their audience and build a sense of community. For instance, I would very much like to be a Free People woman, but budget-wise, I’m more like a TJ Maxx woman. Your brand’s voice has to make that clear.
What you say and how you say it matters. Brands love to talk about voice, but a lot of them end up sounding the same.
Every company wants to serve the customer and be conversational—which is fine. Those aren’t bad things, but they’re not differentiators anymore. They’re just table stakes. If your team feels stuck talking in circles about brand voice, you can avoid arguing about tone and POV by playing a few brainstorming games.
Now brainstorming as a concept has been misused for decades. You’re probably familiar with the old song and dance that goes, “Everyone yell out ideas while I write them down, no criticizing or editing until we’re all done!” Turns out, not ideal. As Harvard Business Review pointed out in 2017, professionals brainstorming in groups came up with fewer good ideas than professionals working alone. The key to brainstorming well is to carry out exercises independently first.
But how do you know where to start? Before you think about dropping upwards of $50,000 on a brand consultant, try these exercises first.
Choose a celebrity spokesperson
Have everyone involved write down three ideal celebrity spokespeople for the brand. These can be actors, musicians, businesspeople, activists, political personalities, fictional characters, or archetypes—as long as they don’t actually work for the company.
You can either lean into your brand or comically play with it, but either way, you should glean something about your brand based on the final decision. If you’re All-State, you want Dennis Haysbert, the kind of actor who seems like he could pull off a beleaguered police chief or senator. If you’re CapitalOne selling to moms who shop, you choose bubbly and smart Jennifer Garner, someone relatable to women with a proven track record of supporting Ben Affleck through his troubles.
AirBnB might choose a 30-something celebrity who anyone would be excited to sit next to on a plane: Jennifer Lawrence or Gina Rodriguez. Apple might lean into its music and multimedia capabilities, hiring Pharrell or Janelle Monae. Venmo might pick someone who at least looks like they’re still nickel-and-diming their friends over beers, which sounds a lot like Jonah Hill.
Describe the opposite of your brand
If you have an established strategy, it’s easy to get comfortable describing your brand voice with the same handful of adjectives. Once your team repeats those four words over and over for a long period of time, they start to lose their meaning. One way to combat this creative stall is to think about what your brand is not.
Take Gap for instance. Gap is whimsical, but not cheesy. Pixar films are universally acceptable, but not pandering. They’re emotional without feeling manipulative, and visually affecting but not overstimulating.
This gets easier as you jump from brand to brand, and…
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