Your brand voice is your superpower.
It should be authentic.
It should be consistent.
(Oh, and fabulous. It should always, always be fabulous.)
NatWest
I was with NatWest Group for almost four years as their tone of voice lead/ copy chief. My remit was to create a new tov strategy for their core brands: NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank, Premier, Coutts - as well as internal comms and our product naming strategy.
With the design team I helped create beautifully user-friendly brand guidelines on Corebook and Frontify. Huge fan of both.
I also led on the brand roll-out. Training the bank’s writers, ad agencies and partners (including Deloitte and MasterCard) on how to write to our new voice - over 1,800 people are now fluent. And I created bespoke Consumer Duty, fraud, and remediation training.
For confidentiality reasons I can’t show content from the guidelines. But I can share top-line thinking and a few snippets from some of my workshops.
Too many tone of voice guidelines just hit people adjectives.
One writer’s idea of warm, engaging, expert...whatever…could be completely different to another’s.
I articulate guidelines in a way that’s easy for writers to get their heads round. And stakeholders to follow. This makes approvals and brand governance so much easier.
The strategy I created for NatWest’s guidelines centres on three core principles. Talk like a person, not like a bank was the key message.
The tov guidelines covered everything - being inclusive, being climate-aware, being customer-focused. But I didn’t just hit people with a bunch of rules. I went through each of the key product areas to create a raft of examples so people could see how it worked. Like these mortgage socials.
My mission was to get writers away from clichéd bank marketing. The ‘we’ve got a mortgage/ bank account/credit card to suit you’ school of copywriting.
Tone of Voice workshops
All our in-house writers, ad and design agencies were taken thorough brand immersions. I followed these up with workshops so that writing in our new style would become second nature. Sessions were tailored to skill-level. It meant that marketing folk who had to write comms, but weren’t necessarily copywriters, would learn writing craft too.
Speaking of active v passive…
Sitting back listening to a presentation isn’t the best way to learn. Doing is. So I give them cool exercises to flex their writing muscles. And more detailed ones like the one below. Now if you’re looking at this thinking what a boring example, you’d be absolutely right. But once people see that even the driest messaging can be treated with a light touch, they get out of the corporate-speak habit. It’s like magic.
I also use live examples. Go through what needs to be fixed step by step. Sometimes that means going back to basics,
In this SMS example we talked about the purpose of a text message. That it’s not doing the same job as an email - it’s usually more of a heads-up. What does the customer need to know now?
We looked at the customer journey. For example, we say that our number might come up as withheld. Yet we’re sending them a text without mentioning who it’s from.
Then it’s a deep dive into structure, grammar, repetition.
The result was a message in our new tone that was less than half the length. But, more importantly, they left with the skills - and confidence - to be able to update all their comms.
Customers liked our new way of talking…
This conversational tone was a big departure for NatWest, so we added a feedback mechanic to the first email that went out. Over a third of people who opened it responded. 96% of comments were positive. (The ones that weren’t had an issue with app banking rather than our new tone.)
There’s a bigger image of the email on the Financial page if you’d like to read it.
UNCLE
These folk have taken the lord out of landlord. High-spec apartments aimed at young professionals - gyms, bars, super-speedy repairs. They gave me free rein to create a tone of voice. So I worked from the name - Uncle. Your trusted go-to who knows stuff, but is also cool. I created a personality which lent itself really well to their OoH advertising, but also to their literature - a key touchpoint for the brand.
(The exclamation marks were added by the designer.)
IRN-BRU
This iconic Scottish brand had a long history of doing brilliant telly and poster ads, but they’d never done any long copy. I got the dream job of taking the brand digital.
Web
Products
Brand storytelling
IRN-BRU wanted a timeline of their history. I peppered it with some other big events. When you’re Glaswegian, nothing is as iconic as our national ginger.
Social
As part of the Leith Agency’s IRN-BRU Gets You Through campaign, I got to play agony aunt on Facebook. Replying in real time to the problems that came in. Popped some of my answers below.
