People can sense in an instant whether you are talking to them, or communicating to someone else. For instance, your own voice is an instant signal that helps people recognize you; it engages not only the eardrum, but your other four senses. The same goes for creating a brand voice for social, digital and real-life communities.

But let’s mention one thing right away. If you’re lucky, your social community is constantly co-creating your brand. They will come up with their own words — “Googlers,” “Googleplex,” “Deadheads,” “TEDsters,” “Tar-Jhaay” (for Target store shoppers). Think of your own examples. This creative iterating by your own community members reveals the potent energy and life force within your community. This is valuable not only because it resonates outward, but because it also attracts others in.

I’m speaking to you, because you speak to me: about my reality, my life, my aspirations, my wonder.

Your brand voice spontaneously responds to questions: Will I feel respected in this place? Will I feel liked and appreciated? Will I feel wanted? Will this community welcome me? Will I feel like I’m a part of this? Will this be time well spent?

Look at Twitter (if you don’t mind). Elon Musk’s tweets — when thousands were fired from Twitter and thousands fired themselves, divided the world into the “wants” — people who wanted to stay at Twitter — and the “want nots”, tweeters and advertisers who chose to cancel out.

Thousands realized (via email) that they were not respected, appreciated or wanted.

But notice Elon’s tonality after he had removed perceived nonbelievers from his Twitter ranks — and asked that any remaining pagans voluntarily remove themselves. Elon’s proclamation was harsh, but his message was clear: If you want to devote your life to evolving Twitter, welcome to my galaxy. If you just want a job, good luck elsewhere.

The act eliminated months of HR trimming and pruning. Elon Musk does not dawdle.

Elon’s current tweets — as of November 30, are more collaborative, as if speaking with likeminded people.

Tonality has intention and impact.

Another thing. Just as the sound of your voice is an identifier that identifies you as a person—the same is true of your brand and your fan community. Sound differentiates.

Steve Keller is Sonic Strategy Director at Studio Resonate SXM Media’s in-house audio agency, which touches audio-first advertising across Sirius, Pandora, SoundCloud, and others.

Keller describes his work as a blend of sound science and sound art to help make sound decisions. Quote unquote.

Sonic identity and ‘voice’ is as much an experience as it the use of distinctive sonic identity, sonic experience and other sonic assets that serve to clarify or reinforce brand purpose. “Each one is important,” says Keller, “but they are part of an ecosystem — a voice, functional sounds, it’s how all these pieces are managed around consumer touch points.”

Sound design crosses categories. Sound can prime our brains for taste, impact obesity, stress, and even can help you eat more healthy food.

There is also sonic diversity. “We usually think about color when we consider diversity,” says Keller. “But we also ‘hear’ race. When we market to mass sonically, we default to white voices. If the only time that voices of color are heard are in advertising to particular market segments — that’s not market segmentation, it’s market segregation.”

Sound it out.

Write in the tone of voice where your audience lives. Remember (writer George Orwell reminds us) that the way we write is different from the way we speak. The written word is often more ornate and complicated, the spoken word is plain and simple. Many companies use brandspeak that complicates and builds a multisyllabic barrier.

Don’t do that.

Successful companies also have a visual grammar that differentiates them. This is particularly evident in fashion where the “look” is a visual smash grab. But it is also true in other categories. We all recognize the visual simplicity of Apple stores. The sophistication of Chanel. The urbanity of Range Rover versus folksy Subaru.

Retail fashion store Abercrombie & Fitch started the scent mania decades ago when they introduced Fierce for Men in 2002. They not only released the new men’s fragrance in-store, but the fashion-forward floral bouquet of jasmine, rose and lily of the valley was vented onto Fifth Avenue, where it could be smelled from a block away. Shopping malls, corporate lobbies, even hospitals spent the next decade imitated this heretofore undeveloped sense of differentiation.

Beauty boutiques shifted from the chemical odor of getting a perm to Aveda-inspired aromatherapy. Every hotel these days has a signature scent to welcome weary travelers and help them feel at ease. Even Lalapalooza wafts with fragrance. Right?

No matter: Smell says something about you. It is another part of that instantaneous signature called voice.

Other executional options to establish your personality and attitude, include your use of typography, photography, illustrations, colors, models, propping and backgrounds (a studio backdrop versus a Hawaiian beach).

Nobody these days has a visual language quite as gobsmacking as director Gibson Hazard.

Hazard’s videos for Drake, Diddy, Billie Eilish, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Nas X, Metro Boomin, Nike Football and Call Of Duty have hundreds of millions of views and his techniques are so extraordinary that there are explanatory videos and tutorials on how he pulls it off. If zoom blur, time ramps, hyperlapse, light stutters, and clip in clip transitions are your thing, find out more here.

Most recently, Hazard and partner Oliver Cannon plus their production crew, tore up the streets in Manhattan during a shoot for Lil Uzi. That’s not strictly brand voice, but yes it is.

Sure everything has been done before, but it must be done again. The challenge is to keep your voice alive and relevant over the bandwidth of social, digital and traditional media and stretch yourself along the never ending timeline. Staying relevant and meaningful is what being real, being authentic,  is all about.

Your brand voice is the combined wave force of sights, sounds, images, smells, tastes, actions and feelings you mumble, shout, whisper and scream across the multiverse. If you talk to me in a voice that I can understand, that means something to me, I will listen harder next time.

The voice of the community celebrates what we want most on this earth: to belong somewhere, with people who not only seem to like us.

They seem to be like us.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, Author of Primal Branding

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Brand voice is where we not only state our beliefs, but what we say and where we say it reveals our personality: clever, serious, funny, witty, grave, academic, smartass, deadpan, corporate, et al. We are all the colors of the sea.

We are all well-acquainted with how Nike, Samsung, Apple, Coke and other Big Brands voice their global ideas. But here are others, including some newcomers, who might be re-inventing the ways we read, listen and hear things in the future.

Beauty company Glossier translates their hair, skin care and other products into an articulate vision for the modern woman. This is competitive turf, but Glossier has discovered their own place in the universe.

The core of Glossier’s success is their brand voice (they just received their second round of funding), which speaks from an insight gleaned by Glossier founder Emily Weiss–that all women have a beauty routine, but they just don’t like to talk about it. Uncovering that truth in the age of transparency has made all the difference for Glossier, whose blog features real women exposing their down-to- the-details routines for skin care, acne, hair styles, exfoliating, you get the picture.

Glossier’s unique brand voice matches its unique product selection. Speaking openly about their personal rites, makes outer beauty an experience that reveals each individual’s inner beauty. This transforms Glossier into an intensely personal experience, rather than just a transaction.

Think With Google, an online offering from Google to help people break down just how Google works and understand how their brands might participate, looks like a high-end Stanford tutorial. The voice is friendly, erudite, academic. Thoughtful.

Google reminds us that Brand voice can be expressed without words. The simple illustrations for Think With Google are as clean and friendly as a software app. The Think With Google design language communicates purpose, values, and personality.

Here’s another way to look at brand voice.

Direct marketing mailhouses have traditionally been staid B2B empires, but MailChimp, an email marketing platform that serves 15 million customers, has embraced its reason for being by hiring award-winning advertising agency Droga5 to help them underscore their existence.

MailChimp believes that creativity drives business, so they were inspired to play with their brand voice by creating a series of jolting cultural interventions that included creating a new brand of potato chips (FailChips), starting a fashion trend (NailChamp) and making short films about singing sandwiches.

These social activations served up names like MaleCrimp, MailShrimp, KaleLimp, VeilHymn, SnailPrimp, JailBlimp, and WhaleSynth. And the only thing they all have in common, is that they all sound like “MailChimp.”

Smartbox retailer Birchbox breaks the fourth wall with a subtle message to their User. Rather than using a conventional address line, the online fashion retailer that fulfills via mail helps make their customer and themselves just a little more special by adding adjectives next to the customer’s name. Not just “Jane,” but “The Tranquil Jane,” “Pretty Amazing Jane” and other BFF descriptors designed to make someone’s day when their order arrives.

It’s all in the voice.

Probably no executive expressed ‘brand voice’ as literally as former T-Mobile CEO John Legere. The selfie-described “magenta-wearing, customer-loving” executive claims over 6.1 million followers on Twitter and sports his own emoji.

Mostly, Legere snarked at rival Verizon on Twitter. But he also hosted a cooking spot on Facebook each week. Since taking the lead spot at T-Mobile in 2012, Legere filled his closet racks with magenta-colored shirts, shoes, scarves, pants and jackets.

He was literally an embodiment of the T-Mobile brand. What other CEOs live their brand?

Brand voice can also be communicated via images, architecture, sound, smell and other sensory executions. The New York Times, Vogue, even AirBnb differentiate themselves with imagery that can be dramatic, playful, killer.

In a snap, we know it’s National Geographic, not Buzzfeed.

Since its founding by Yves Chouinard, Patagonia has been the voice of Planet Earth. So it’s no surprise and totally purpose-driven to find a request to help save US wilderness areas on the company’s home page. And pleas to help save honeybees in company emails.

On the other side of the spectrum, Athleta is built to sell sell sell. (Athleta and Old Navy are the sales engines behind Gap these days.) So it’s no surprise to find an explanation of the functional qualities of Athleta brand fitwear on their pages.

More corporate-speak and ‘big campaign’ than brands mentioned elsewhere, the voice sounds less like any woman we know.

How’s your robot?

Today, the brand tonality of emojis and AI personalities like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Bixby can even be personalized (somewhat) with British accents, skin tones, etcetera, to fit your human type. What if, in the future, thanks to AI personalization, brand copywriting and voicing is “sized” to speak your own vernacular? Hey, Bro!

Hmm.

Can a city have a brand voice? Yes, and thanks for asking.

Urban communities are little different than the communities that surround products, services or companies. Cities deliberately want to attract visitors, neighbors and citizens, just as voraciously as products want to attract Users.

The official guide for Amsterdam mouths what a city built precariously at sea level should say, “Welcome.”

Each of us is trying to become our own true best self. It’s no difference for brands.

The voice of the community helps us to gain intention, aspires, and propels our forward vision–and ultimately celebrates that which we want most on this earth: to belong somewhere, with people like us.

Each of the companies, products and services mentioned above articulate distinct, differentiated messages in videographers, web designers, design language, bloggers, graphic design, art and photography, colors, tone of voice or in the images used.

Their content developers may be various, but each has a single-minded focus that keeps them sending out their own distinct beacon to attract fans, followers and influencers, and surround themselves with a thriving, engaged, passionate community.

It’s when the person out there listening knows that it’s you sending the signal.

That’s brand voice.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, Author of Primal Branding

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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I still think it’s interesting that we live in this whole networked age where we can speak to anyone we want across a multitude of platforms.

Most of that communication is via text, but soon it will be via real time open video messaging and augmented reality. Just this past week I was tweeting back and forth with Shira Ovide from Bloomberg and Abigail Posner from Google. We had wonderful conversations about the AT&T and Time Warner merger and a discussion about an upcoming podcast that Abigail and I are discussing doing. Yet when I tweeted to a few brands I heard nothing from them. Deafening silence. Unless they had to tell me something they could care less about what I had to say to them. I probably won’t hear anything from those companies. Maybe they didn’t pay their social media team this week or that team is overwhelmed because most companies still underfund this area.

Whatever the case may be, brands are boring on social media. They stick to social media like PR with canned messages and amplified spam.

While brands are boring on social media, the people who work at those brands are not.

I’ve always been at odds with any brand I’ve consulted in the past (Coca-Cola, Kraft, American Express, IBM) or currently work for (Microsoft) on how they should speak on social media. It’s impossible for brands to truly have a personality. In the pre-social media era, that personality came through in various communications like commercials, sponsorships and press releases. But that read only communication seems old and boring in our hyper-connected day and age. Yet brands still follow this stodgy rule of brand voice, brand temperament and brand logic. I guess the people who work behind the scenes really do believe brands are human even though we know they’re not.

What is human? The people who work at brands and companies. Yet many times they’re told to not talk about business, to not show an opinion, to not have a point of view. This goes against the nature of our social world. Social long before social media in that people are social animals and yearn to be connected and talk with others.

Smarter companies have seen that people don’t care too much about the company voice or brand identity. But they love the inside view of who works at those companies. They love profiles, interviews and subject matter expert conversations. In our cognitive era of product development, it’s people who make brands come alive. So why not showcase more of the people talent that makes up that company?

I find it hilarious in the year 2016 all the time from management no matter where I go that “People are the most important part of our organization, that comes first” and yet when those people yearn to breathe free and showcase who they are as representatives of the brand the brand PR police go nuts. “You can’t do that, you’re breaking brand guidelines. We need the brand to speak to the voice of what our brand is and what it believes, not you.”

A few smarter companies have rebelled from these pompous guidelines unleashing social employee advocacy programs to help their employees not only become agents of the brand, but let them share news around the brand in their voice.

No more robot speak is the new rallying cry.

Death to brand journalism is another one.

Platforms and software now exist to scale these types of programs but what’s more important from all this loosening of the rules is what many of us have known for years since the first early community forums: the brand is no longer the defining voice for the brand. The people who work for your brand and your customers are the defining voice of your brand.

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.

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In the clutter of the modern marketplace there are three essential hurdles all brands, large and small, must overcome with their audiences to enjoy competitive advantage:

Your brand must be heard.

Your brand must be recognized.

Your brand must be remembered.

The Blake Project, the brand consultancy behind Branding Strategy Insider, offers a one-day creative development workshop for corporate communication and marketing executives to develop the foundation of their unique brand voice to help everyone in the organization tell the brand’s story in a consistent and compelling manner.

More importantly, the brand must tell the right story. A story based in purpose and the shared values that shape the organization delivering on the brand’s promise. Aligned with the brand’s identity (who the brand is), brand voice establishes the distinctive personality of your brand that builds deep emotional connections with customers, employees, strategic partners and stakeholders. Brand voice is what you say and how you say it that will differentiate and resonate.

Through highly facilitated, interactive discussion and team exercises, participants will gain clarity, confidence and consensus in the strategic and creative decisions they will make in building the foundation of their brand voice.

In The Brand Voice Workshop participants will make strategic decisions in these important areas:

Defining the brand’s archetype.
The “familiar” characteristics and themes therein that enables your brand storytelling to be mythic and memorable. Within the context of the brand’s archetype, participants will map archetypical associations to the brand’s identity, brand purpose, and brand expression.

Defining the brand’s personality.
The shared values that bond your brand to its audiences. This is an expression of the values that shape your organization and the perception of audiences – not only through brand messaging and content (what you say), but also by emotional and empathetic expression (how you say it).

Defining the range of your brand voice.
This is about the dynamic range of your brand voice. How far your brand voice can extend and still remain relevant and adaptable to different marketplace conditions. What mood, tone and manner are required to say the right things, the right way, at the right time?

Defining the language used in brand communications.
This is more than simply selecting words. The language your brand speaks in must be language your audience speaks in as well. Clear and effective communication begins with understanding and comprehension. Are your messages clearly heard, quickly recognized and easily remembered? The Brand Voice Workshop is commonly delivered in conjunction with The Brand Positioning Workshop and The Brand Storytelling Workshop.

Who should participate in The Brand Voice Workshop?
The nature of this workshop requires strategic decision making that is usually in the domain of the executive and senior leadership of the organization most responsible for corporate communications, investor or public relations, marketing and brand management and marketing communications.

An executive summary will be provided following the workshop, outlining the core decisions and activities of the workshop. This comprehensive document will serve as a tool for effective internal brand engagement and maintaining the consistency of your brand voice across the organization,  delivering on your brand promise from the inside out.

Please email me, Derrick Daye for more about how the strategic and educational versions of The Brand Voice Workshop can benefit your brand.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds.

The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”

– A rephrasing of Aristotle’s Rhetoric

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers