Strong Language: The Fastest, Smartest, Cheapest Marketing Tool You're Not Using

By Chris West

A great brand voice grabs attention, persuades your audience, and builds loyalty. But as the number of brand channels explodes, organisations are finding it harder than ever to create a consistent, differentiated brand voice and express exactly what they stand for.

In Strong Language, international tone of voice expert Chris West walks you through the process of creating a compelling brand voice – and getting everyone to use it from day one.

Discover the three levels that every brand voice operates on, and learn step-by-step how to create practical tone of voice guidelines, flex your brand voice for different situations, and get organisational support to create the change you want.

Drawing on his experience working with hundreds of brands – including Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, Harry Winston, the world's biggest carmaker, and startups in fintech, edtech, and skincare – Chris West's Strong Language framework will guide you to the breakthrough voice you need to outsmart and outperform your competitors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781544523576

Chris West

Chris West is an author, ghostwriter, and marketer. His books include Journey to the Middle Kingdom, The Beermat Entrepreneur, and First Class: a History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps. He lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and daughter.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Writing a book is easy. All you have to do is excuse yourself from family commitments for a year or two. So first, I’d like to say there wouldn’t be a word on a page here without the continued love, encouragement, and support of Charlotte, and the trust of Caspar and Clemmie. Thank you.

Before I’d ever thought about writing a book, some people inspired me to think about writing. My first Creative Director, Simon Dicketts, was also my first editor: he’d carefully look at a headline I’d written, then put a thumb over a word and say, ‘Do we really need that, do we, hmmm?’ He was always right.

To him, my other Creative Directors, and my Editors, thank you.

I wouldn’t have even been in that room (and a few other good places) if it weren’t for the encouragement of one of the world’s most talented art directors and nicest people, John Messum. Thank you, mate.

My thinking has been inspired so often by one of the world’s other most decent, brilliant people, Adam Morgan. He literally wrote the book on Challenger Brands, and he’s never stopped giving me advice. I almost wish you’d go and read his book Eating the Big Fish instead of reading this one. Almost.

Adam, thank you so much.

Other writers I’ve been lucky enough to meet and be inspired by include Sean Doyle, Tim Riley, and Matt Rudd. Thank you for encouraging me so often, even when you didn’t realise you were.

When this book was half an idea, some people were generous with their time and advice. Thank you for everything, Susy Korb, Anthony Finbow, Fred Burt, Cedric Krummes, Liz McGrath, Simon Spilsbury, David Clark, and Giles Spackman. I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone here, so to you – thank you and my apologies.

When this book was almost a book, everything was made a lot easier by having a great photographer – thank you, Mocho – and a great publishing team: thank you, Rose, Brian, and the team at Scribe.

I am lucky.

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Introduction

It could be a fright dream.

You find yourself in a big office, sitting behind a big desk with piles of papers scattered across it. It feels familiar but somehow not. There are 20 people in there, sitting, standing, younger, older, all staring at you. It takes a moment to work out what’s hand-painted onto the other side of your office door:

Editor

You look down at the piles of papers on your desk: each of them is an article, and all the people in the room are watching you and waiting for you to approve or improve their story. They need you to edit all those words, no time to waste, the presses are waiting. Fifty thousand words in the voice of this newspaper you’ve somehow found yourself in charge of.

You flick through the papers – some writing is great; some is just terrible. But why’s the great great and the terrible terrible? It’ll be all right if you can just work fast enough. Then a feeling of nausea surges through you: this is just today’s newspaper. Tomorrow there’ll be another 50,000 words to edit. A bell starts ringing, the red light in the corner of your office starts flashing: the presses are turning, giant rolls of newssheet are now running through them. They’re coming out totally blank. The bell keeps ringing. And ringing.

You wake up. The bell is your alarm clock. It’s just a dream.

You get into the office with the sound of the alarm still echoing round your head. And there are already 20 people queueing up outside, and each of them has a piece of paper in their hand: the new web copy, the new social media campaign, the new contact centre scripts, the CEO’s speech, the Head of Investor Relations’ quarterly report, the packaging copy, the internal comms campaign, the new employee’s pack. Everyone is looking at you expectantly. And then the phone on your desk starts ringing, clashing with the alarm that’s still sounding in your head. It’s the CEO’s line. Why’s she calling? What does she want? Your arm reaches out; why are you wearing pyjamas in front of these people? You pick up the phone, but it doesn’t stop ringing.

And now you wake up for real.

And as you lie there, you work it out in your head: every day, you’re responsible for more words coming out of your company than the Editor of the Guardian newspaper had to put into today’s printed edition. But unlike the Editor of the Guardian, you’ve never been told how to edit, guide, or inspire writers. And unlike newspapers, no one’s choosing to hear what you want to say.

If you want your brand to grow, if you don’t want to have to squander budget just to win attention, if you want to engage your customers, if you want to build loyalty, if you want to shine in Customer Experience, if you want to motivate your company, if you want your packaging to tell your story, you have to find a way to say everything your brand wants to say, and say it in a voice that grabs everyone’s attention.

In the last ten years, the number of channels has exploded: web, social, CRM, loyalty comms, Customer Service, internal comms, and there’s still advertising, packaging, brochures, investor relations, legal, and all the rest.

But these aren’t one-way channels. Today, consumers expect to be in a dialogue with brands they like. And who hangs around for a response in a real dialogue? You now have to be able to trust your writers to send out brand comms through multiple channels, at greater volumes than ever before, and without you ever seeing it. Are they staying on-brand? Are they interesting? Are they flexing the writing to suit the channel’s environment so you’re not showing up like Dad at a school disco?

When budgets are being cut, expectations are rising, and there’s less time than ever before to do anything, you have to learn a fast and effective way to define your brand voice and guide all your writers in using it.

But everyone can write, can’t they?

The truth is, everyone can’t write. Not well. Not in a way that makes your brand stand out. But everyone can be taught how to do it.

Everyone can be taught to write in a strong brand voice. A voice that does sound different and engages people, painting pictures in their minds. A voice which can be consistently on-brand but also flexes to suit the moment and the channel. It is possible for you to critique your writers so they stay on track and march out of your office inspired. It’s possible to walk through your contact centre and not cringe at how someone’s describing your brand. You can be regularly signing off Version 2 instead of Version 22. You can field a call from a member of the Board and describe objectively why your team’s written something in a certain way. You can direct your writers to use language to reposition your product into a new category. And you never ever need to look at something your brand’s written and say, ‘It’s not right, it’s not us, but I just don’t know what’s wrong with it.’

This book is how you do all that. It’ll show you how your brand language always works on three levels – and how you can make those three levels reinforce each other. It’ll show how you can achieve Quick Wins to get the program moving, how you can align all your writers – internal and agency – with that voice, how you manage and inspire your writers, and how you can build the processes (and the budget) for permanent change.

Best of all, you can have a brand voice that establishes your brand as world-class.

We humans are language animals. We invented language to share ideas and deepen relationships. We invented brands for the same reasons. And so, an authentic, differentiated brand voice is uniquely suited to building understanding, building relationships, and building your businesses.

All you have to know is how to build your brand voice.

Here’s how you can do it.

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SECTION 1

SECTION 1: WHAT A WORLD-CLASS BRAND LANGUAGE CAN DO FOR A BUSINESS

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Chapter 1

1. Language moves people

Do you remember how much we all hated supermarkets’ self-service checkouts when they were introduced?

As much as anything, that hate was the result of a failure of language.

(And not just the robotic voice which passive-aggressively accused you of putting an ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’.)

The self-service checkouts were introduced without the supermarkets telling us why. And, in the absence of a narrative, people made one up.

More machines? That’ll be the capitalist supermarket owners saving costs by further dehumanising the experience.

But what would you have done to get those checkouts quickly accepted so you could start seeing the savings you’d panned?

Perhaps you’d have done what the supermarkets did: invest even more – this time in arcane behaviour science – and rearrange your floorplan so that all the self-service checkouts are bunched around the exit, subtly suggesting that self-serve will help you get out of the store faster.

That took about three years and millions of pounds.

Or you could’ve used language to persuade people to like the machines more: you’d have introduced variations in the pitch and cadence of each machine’s voice, making it sound more human and avoiding that reverb when five machines all spoke in synch.

That’d only have taken a year and about a tenth as much.

But think what else language could have done for you.

By its nature, language is designed to be quick (‘TIGER!’). It’s designed to build relationships (‘I love you’). And it’s designed to convey complicated new ideas (‘The quality of mercy is not strained’? Try drawing that!).

And it can also, when someone uses their imagination, be the cheapest marketing tool you have. Because it’s language which creates ideas in people’s minds, and if you can change the language, you can create new ideas.

Imagine that on the morning the self-serve checkouts were introduced, you’d grabbed a big, fat marker pen, a piece of white card, and some string and hung a sign over the self-checkout lane which said: ‘Express Checkout’.

In just two minutes, at the cost of a pen, and with all the infrastructure of a step ladder and two pins, you’d have used language to help people understand exactly what was in it for them if they used a self-service checkout.

And in a way, that’s what language does all the time: it explains, it labels, it signposts and helps us navigate the world.

When you understand how a category is subtly kept in check by unspoken rules of what you can and can’t say in that category, then you can tilt the category in your favour just by breaking a rule and saying something different. Think what Oatly’s done.

When you want to make people think about your brand every day instead of once a week, you can integrate your brand into culture by updating its language. Just be like ‘Netflix and chill’.

Or, when your brand’s category can no longer give you the growth you want, you can swap categories just by swapping language. Remember when Lucozade was only used for recovering from illness?

When you want to show how your product outperforms expectations, then it’s time to make your language outperform. You don’t have to talk like Elon Musk, but we can all learn from how he positioned electric cars as fast by calling Tesla’s sports