The other day
I asked AI to write something for me
for the very first time.
Now, I’m not saying this to open up the oh-so-topical can of worms that is AI and its role in copywriting.
Instead, let’s call this an exercise in empathy.
First, I had to get into character.
I told the bot that I was the founder of a brand called “Jardin” and that we made cocktail mixers with fruity and floral flavor profiles. (By the way, if someone decides to make this brand? Inform me immediately.)
Then, the painful part.
Without any additional context, I asked it to act like a copywriter and write a piece of my brand story.
In a whimsical brand voice.
The results were just as uncomfortable as you might expect.
Again, this isn’t a commentary on the writing abilities of AI.
But right now, somewhere out there, some poor brand founder just opened up a PDF with their brand guidelines.
And, like my poor bot, they’re having a profoundly confusing experience.
Because in the section of that guideline marked “brand voice” is probably some killer graphics, a word bank, and a handful of adjectives.
Like “clever”
And “approachable”
And “whimsical”
And if Gemini’s AI doesn’t know what to do with that, I bet you anything that poor founder doesn’t either.
If you're that founder, you can quietly send that page of the PDF to your recycling bin.
And if you’re a creative director, brand strategist, or brand designer who is about to send one of those gorgeously formatted and very confusing pages to a client?
Woah, nelly. Maybe hold off a second.
Fair warning: we’re about to veer out of “general information everybody needs to know” territory and head into the wilds of “Lexicon’s proprietary process.”
Which means that it’s impossible to talk about with out spilling a few trade secrets.
Brand Voice
which in this context?
is a very unhelpful term
Technically, it’s the written or verbal component of your brand personality.
Defining a voice is a big ask. Documenting that voice in a way that someone else can implement is a bigger one.
Think about it this way.
Pretend you’re talking to someone who’s never had the * distinct pleasure * of meeting me.
They ask, “You’ve met Zoie, right? What does she sound like?”
You might say something like, “She’s like millennial-grade funny. Talks kind of fast. Long, meandering stories with a lot of context. Anxious energy but in a fun way.”
You would be right, and I’d have to unpack a lot of that later.
But you would have also unconsciously revealed that a “voice” is not a singular thing. It’s made of multiple facets.
Here's the first one.
Brand Tone
WHAT IT IS
The grammar conventions that you use while writing for a brand.
WHAT IT'S NOT
Enough. Tone alone does not a brand voice make, my friend.
WHY IT'S IMPORTANT
Without some grammar guidelines associated with your brand,
you’re stuck trying to translate vague concepts into written copy
(which leads to way too many “mischievous sprites” and “whimsical waltzes” for my taste.
Brief tangent.
When I was 15, I had a regular gig teaching other high-schoolers how to write short fiction. It was a charter school, aka the Wild West of education.
I needed an elective and wanted to be a teacher. So my advisor said, “What if you taught a class on creative writing?”
Yeah, sure. Why not?
I’ll tell you why not. I had zero training and no idea what to teach. But obviously, at age 15, those were non-issues. I picked up a book, and started to reverse engineer what I was seeing.
So, when it comes to understanding tone, you probably want to be more like 15-year-old me. (Especially since she was rocking the sneaker + maxi skirt combo before it was cool.)
If you want to learn how to communicate tone, pick up literally any work of fiction.
Halfway through the first page, you’ll realize that “tone of voice” is just word choice and grammar wearing a fancy cape. Observe.
“No way.” she deadpanned.
“No! Way!” she gasped.
“No way,” she whispered.
Between punctuation and word choice, a fictional character’s tone comes through loud and clear.
So choosing your brand’s tone of voice is really just a question of deciding what type of words to use and how they should be written down.
When I design a voice for a customer, I use a sliding scale of adjectives and rate where the client falls between each one.
But here’s the cool part: I give them nuance.
The more detailed the tone, the more realistic the brand.
LEXICON COPY CO. TRADE SECRET #1
To shamelessly quote my own home page
Humans are nuanced, and brands can be too.
In a Brand Character Synopsis (my cheekily branded name for a messaging guide), you’ll find where a brand falls on the scale of:
“quirky >> straightforward”
“aspirational >> pragmatic”
“playful >> professional”
“accessible >> jargony”
…plus 10-12 others. 😏
Mind you, I don’t expect anyone other than me to intuitively understand the difference between “aspirational and pragmatic” 🤓.
So each pair of adjectives comes with hand-crafted definitions. For instance:
An aspirational brand will use broad, sweeping language with lots of absolutes and superlatives.
A pragmatic brand sets realistic expectations and will couch and hedge their language when appropriate.
Tone is flexible. You don’t use the same tone and inflection in every conversation, and I wouldn’t expect your brand to either.
However, I tell my clients to keep their tone within one point in either direction of their sliding scale at all times. If it wanders too far afield, you can kiss your consistent CX goodbye.
“But Zoie, what about ‘cadence’!?”
— at least one of you nerds reading this blog.
“Cadence” is the specific grammar, punctuation, and sentence length a brand uses. Some messaging strategists include a section on cadence in their messaging guides. I think that’s valid.
I don’t.
Realistically, I don’t know many copywriters who are counting the number of words in a sentence, and sweating over whether or not they’re allowed to use the oxford comma.
In fiction, word choice + grammar work together seamlessly. That’s just a part of writing. So my Brand Character Synopses treat them as one and the same.
So, that’s brand tone. And, as cool as it is, it’s not enough.
A voice isn’t just tone. It’s also content.
So it’s not enough to outline your brand’s grammatical conventions. You also need to learn how to structure its conversation.
Communication Guidelines
WHAT IT IS
The principles that dictate how your brand delivers information
WHAT IT’S NOT
Your brand’s values. Those are far more important, and you can learn how about to write them here.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
Brand tone determines your brand’s word choice and formatting, but it doesn’t keep it consistent on how it chooses to communicate.
The glorious combination of tone and conversation is a major component in how you differentiate the heck out of your brand.
When it comes to writing communication guidelines
the adjective world is your oyster.
This is the one time you can fire up powerthesaurus.com and go nuts.
Because they’re more subjective, they need to come with a lot of context to be effective.
I write them with both upper and lower boundaries, and a deeper definition.
Here’s the format:
“[this] NOT [this]”
Definition
Communication guidelines exponentially expand the possibilities
of your brand’s voice.
By pushing and pulling on tone and communication guidelines, you can use your brand’s voice to evoke entirely different feelings from an audience and (as a result) have a wildly different relationship with them.
Since we’re officially in the wilds of Lexicon’s methodology, let me show you some examples.
Brand Tone
Concise, Warm, Pragmatic, Accessible.
Communication Guideline
Educational not Scholarly
DEFINITION
“We don’t make assumptions about how much our audience knows about our industry, and we educate them whenever possible.
However, we are careful to make sure our education is practical to their needs, and not hypothetical or navel-gaze-y.”
But now, let me tinker with that a little.
Brand Tone
Concise, Warm, Pragmatic, Accessible.
Communication Guideline
Inspirational not Educational
DEFINITION
“We assume that our target audience has a solid grasp of our industry, and we don’t bore them with fundamentals.
Instead, we push the envelope, introducing new concepts and big ideas in a practical, easy-to-understand format.”
Reader, I could go on. And on. And on.
We hear day in and day out that brands need to be “authentic.”
And since we’ve chewed that word until there’s no more flavor in it, let me rephrase.
We want brands that feel human.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a very human approach to constructing a brand’s voice.
But the differentiation train doesn’t stop here.
If you really want your brand to leap off the page and capture your audience’s attention?
It has to be genre-defying.
