For your tone of voice to stick, your guidelines have to become a part of everyday work.
You want everyone to turn to them as a starting point for a project, bringing them to meetings to make sure their work is on brand. Which means they’ve got to be truly useful.
But how often does that really happen? I’m losing count of the number of times I’ve started a working with a company who’ve already got a ‘tone of voice’. But what they have is either too brief and unstructured to give clear direction. Or too long, academic and similarly unstructured to be usable to anyone without an English degree.
If you do it properly, though, starting from your brand positioning and giving people a clear, practical approach to their day-to-day work – you’ll turn your brand’s tone of voice guidelines into an asset.
The key is in getting the structure right.
- start with your vision and strategy
- use that to understand your personality
- give people clear ways to bring that personality to life in their writing
- give them the right level of information, whatever level they’re working at
- ask yourself whether you’d use them – if not, they’re not good enough
As soon as people are using them, you’ll see the consistency permeate your whole operation, internally or externally.
Tags: brand, guidelines, tone of voice
Interested in other articles like this one? Go to ‘Get more like this’ at the top of the page.
