Defining Your Tone of Voice: Full Step-by-step Guide & Exercise Templates

98 Shares

“If you ever dreamed of playing for millions around the world, now is your chance. Play inside, play for the world.”

“Many of us start our day with coffee at home, so why not make it a little special? Here are a few ways to spice up your morning cup using pantry staples!”

“Staying in has always been our favorite hobby. Now it’s our responsibility. Stay in bed. Stay home.”

Did you guess which brands these quotes came from? If you guessed Nike, Starbucks, and Casper, you guessed right.

This is a brand’s tone of voice in action. It’s the unmistakable distinction that sets one brand from all the others. It’s the feeling that you’re talking to someone you know.

Tone of voice can easily be explained with examples. But how do you create your own brand’s distinct tone? And how do you communicate it to your team?

This post will give you my favorite exercises that will help you create your brand’s tone.

Brand tone, brand voice, brand personality – what are they?

There’s a lot of confusion around tone, voice, and personality. It can be rivaled only by the confusion around mission and vision (which are both largely pointless). But here you go:

Personality is the basis of a brand and the distinct character it has compared to competitors. It’s a prerequisite that defines how the brand communicates.
Voice is the consistent representation of your brand’s personality. It shows the world what you believe in – in an indirect way.
Tone adapts to the current situation and the target audience you’re talking to. If voice defines how you see the world, tone defines how you communicate that perception to everyone around you.

This is the theoretical distinction between the three concepts. Frankly, they are all so strongly intertwined that I don’t find it that helpful to even keep this distinction in mind. So from here on out, I’ll be using “personality” as the characteristics of the brand and “tone of voice” as the representation of said characteristics in the communication practice.

Why is tone of voice important?

I believe you shouldn’t be doing any form of marketing work without knowing what it brings back. So why should you care about tone of voice anyway?

Differentiation

Our world is moving fast. Any form of differentiation you have secured today will be gone in the span of a few breaths.

If you rely on price, you’re dead in the water. If you rely on features, you’re still susceptible to getting killed by an aggressive competitor. But if you rely on identification, you’re golden.

Identification is the process of creating a connection between the customer and the brand whose root is solely a “that’s me!” gut reaction.

Think about Old Spice. It doesn’t have a specific feature that’s unique to the brand or differentiation in comparison to all other deodorants. But it’s a true gem for people who like or identify with the quirky style first introduced by Isaiah Mustafa and then continued by Terry Cruz.

Building trust

We trust those we like. And we like people who are similar to us. It’s a simple process that shows how building a brand with character can actually help us generate trust. Creating a strong brand personality moves the brand away from the commercial plain and closer to the “people like me” type of influencers we are now so used to meeting.

Creating relationships

No one wants to be a friend with a logo. But when the brand expresses values and beliefs similar to ours, this is a surefire way to create a stronger bond. Your tone says “we’re not here just to promote values in order to sell. We actually believe in them.” And this is a strong basis for true friendship.

The step-by-step of tone of voice research

There’s a lot you need to take into account before you even start defining your tone. Like anything brand-related, it doesn’t live in a vacuum – it’s created by people and it sits in a real-world environment where other brands reside. So here are the steps you need to take first:

Content audit

Your brand already has a voice – no matter if it’s the right one. But you need to be aware about it in order to change and evolve.

The first step is to evaluate the content that your company has been putting out there. What is the tone of it? What are the phrases you’ve been using again and again?

Internal company research

You can look at your public-facing content, but you can go even deeper – because tone is a matter of culture and culture is going around in your internal communication.

Take a look at your internal emails, your Slack channels, your managers’ announcements… How do your teammates and your leaders speak? And what do they value?

Competitor audit

Tone of voice is a powerful differentiation tool. But to use it as such, you need to know where your competitors stand. So take a look at their content and the information they put out.

Make up a list of notes and phrases that will serve as raw materials for your analysis. Keep these handy when you start the exercises mentioned further down.

Audience research

Imagine you’re at your grandmother’s 80th birthday party and you’re giving a toast in front of her university friends and work colleagues. This will sound different compared to a toast at your best friend’s wedding, right?

You’re still the same person and you still have the same communication goal – to express love for a close one. But your tone changes according to the audience.

So make sure you know who you’re talking to before you define what your tone should be. I’ve always advocated starting off with robust audience research and persona development. This is no exception.

Go to the places where your ideal customers hang out and listen to them. How do they talk among themselves? Are they formal or not, do they use specific professional jargon or slang?

It will be easier to mirror that same communication style – but that’s not always an option. Sometimes it can feel forced or artificial. So take your audience’s preferred style into account and adapt it through your perspective.

Surveys with existing users

It’s sometimes difficult to analyze yourself – so why not ask your users? It’s difficult to talk about intangible things like tone of voice, but you can be more specific:

What 3 adjectives come to mind first when you’re thinking about our brand?
How do you imagine our brand would look if it was a human?
What mascot do you think would best suit us?

All of these bring style and tone on a more tangible level – and would be quick and fun for your regular clients to answer.

Channel research

The appropriateness of your tone depends largely on your audience, but also on where you’re situated. So make sure you take into account what channels you’ll be using in your communication strategy and plan your tone accordingly. After all, even cutesy brands don’t necessarily post kitten GIFs on LinkedIn.

Let’s take Nike as an example. Their customer communication has a very distinct style, but on LinkedIn, they take that to a tamer level – still talking about leadership qualities and sports performance but in a way that would be appealing to ambitious professionals. They even go and showcase employees, not just athletes.

Localization differences

If you’re working on an international scale, you will need to take into account cultural differences and adapt your tone accordingly. Even if you’re only talking in English, your style will be perceived differently by different people. Here’s my favorite graph that presents this issue visually:

Even though this is an exaggeration, I’ve been told that my copy sounds “more European” to an American reader. It’s a very subtle thing to perceive yourself, but it’s important if you want to sound native to a different culture.

Creating your tone of voice: my go-to exercises

You’ve done your research, you’ve collected the info, but how do you actually create your tone of voice?

The main issue I’ve experienced is that we’re not equipped with the right language to talk about tone of voice. We can use different adjectives, but they often mean different things to different people. And how do you even start a discussion about something so fickle?

The best way to go about it is to talk about tone through structured exercises. And thank God there are quite a few you can use! I’ve experimented a lot and have a few favorites I use with clients when we define tone of voice.

Brand personality sliders

The first one is quick and easy and it comes from GV, Google’s venture fund. They have created a Three-hour brand sprint that helps startups codify their brand – and a 30-minute exercise is dedicated to brand personality.

Here’s what you need to do:

Give everyone a printout of the diagram with the personality sliders.
Each person marks their printout to indicate where they think the company sits on each range. Optional: you can ask participants to also mark where your competitors stand on each scale. This will help you understand if your personality helps with differentiation.
Every person shows their printout or transfers their markings to a common whiteboard with the same sliders. This happens quickly, without extensive commentary.
Some sliders will show clusters of markings where everyone has similar opinions. The discussion focuses on the sliders where there’s a lot of difference in the markings. Let each team member say why they put their marking at a specific point and talk it through for 5 minutes.
At the end of the discussion, the Decider makes the call. They should plot the final choices on the whiteboard.
Transfer the results to your brand guideline.

I’ve actually adapted the original brands at the ends of some sliders with brands that are better known by my clients. You can adapt if needed, but keep the slider’s “dimensions” the same.

Tone of voice dimensions and characteristics

This second exercise is similar to the personality sliders, but it gives some additional depth to the process. It uses as a basis the four dimensions of tone of voice, developed by user experience experts Nielsen Norman Group. The cool thing is that they go one step further and add 37 tone of voice words, that give additional substance to the concept.

Here’s what you need to do:

Draw the four tone of voice dimensions on a whiteboard and give a printout to everyone with the 37 tone of voice words.
Ask each team member to circle the tone of voice words that fit the brand and to think where the brand sits for each dimension. To ease things up, don’t think of them as sliders but as a set choice – you either pick one side, the other side, or stay neutral.
Every person says which words they chose and puts them as separate sticky notes on the board. They also mark their choice for each dimension.
First review the dimensions. Discuss if there are different opinions for some of them.
Then cluster the sticky notes with the same words. Spend a bit of time to discuss if there are some words that were chosen by just 1-2 people.
At the end of the discussion, the Decider makes the call. They should mark the final choices for the dimensions on the whiteboard. They can also remove any words that they don’t want to apply to the brand.
Transfer the results to your brand guideline.

This is a great solution if while doing the personality sliders exercise you are thinking “well, there are things we want to include in our tone that sit at the opposite sides of this slider here”.

To make things easier, I found a way to link specific words to each dimension, as explained in this cool article from SEMrush. My final handout groups words according to dimension. I’ve seen this helps people focus on fewer words at a time and doesn’t bias their choice.

Card sorting

I am frankly not a huge fan of this one, but you can try it out and see if it works for your team. I first stumbled upon it sited in an article I’ve since lost the track of. It originated in Content Strategy at Work by Margot Bloomstein.

It goes like this:

Create about 150 index cards (or simple paper notes) labeled with adjectives most applicable to your industry. There’s a sample list you can use, but feel free to adapt.
Split the cards at random between the participants. Then ask them to categorize these cards into three categories: Who we are; Who we’d like to be; Who we’re not.
While splitting the cards, the participants can engage in a discussion. For example, why seemingly similar words don’t work well together (e.g. we want to be “traditional”, but not “conservative”) or why seemingly opposite ones are put in the same column (“traditional” and “modern”)
Ask participants to move words from the “we are” column to the “we’d like to be” if they want to keep these brand qualities in the future.
Keep only the “we’d like to be” column. Participants need to group the qualities there into themes and prioritize the most important brand characteristics. This discussion can go on for 10-15 minutes.
At the end of the discussion, the Decider makes the call. They should set the final priority list of brand characteristics.
Transfer the results to your brand guideline.

It’s a simple exercise, but one that has too little structure for my taste. It relies a lot on team discussions which can be difficult to manage, especially if this is your first time facilitating such an exercise. You’re running the risk of venturing into a 3-hour discussion with no end in sight. This is why I added the Decider role here, too – it creates a natural endpoint if you arrive at a standstill with many different opinions.

The five brand personality dimensions

Dimensions again, huh? That does seem to be the favorite approach of many researchers and Stanford researcher Jennifer Aaker is no exception.

This approach is quite similar to NNG’s in the sense that it makes you communicate your personality through a list of adjectives. The original structured approach goes as far as evaluating each trait on a scale from 1 to 5, but I feel this is a tedious process and wouldn’t recommend it in a real company environment.

Instead, here’s how you can set the exercise:

Provide each participant with a list of the possible traits. To make the exercise more vivid, add additional explanatory adjectives to each trait.
Each participant marks the traits they believe the brand should express. Set a limit here, so that people are made to prioritize. I prefer to put the cap at five to seven.
Each participant lists the traits they chose on separate sticky notes. Then one by one, participants put the sticky notes on the whiteboard.
Group together the traits that are repeated and put each trait group under the respective dimension. Discuss the ones that were only mentioned by 1-2 participants.
At the end of the discussion, the Decider makes the call. They can remove any words that they don’t want to apply to the brand. Then they choose the top traits and dimensions the brand should express.
Transfer the results to your brand guideline.

I’m personally a fan of NNG’s dimensions, so I’ve only used this exercise a couple of times. Still, it’s mostly due to personal preference, so try it out and decide for yourself.

Brand archetypes

I left the most complex and most revealing exercise for last. It is definitely my favorite because it doesn’t just rely on adjectives or keywords but it helps you create a full-blooded portrait of your brand.

Archetypes were first introduced by Karl Jung in a completely different context, but they can be very handy to marketers. The reason is we all naturally understand what these archetypes mean, no matter the cultural or personal background.

There are 12 brand archetypes grouped into four categories. There are a ton of articles out there that go into great detail about different brand archetypes, so I will only give you a short walkthrough here.

Order-motivated brands: these brands want to provide structure to the world. They are social and outward-facing.
- Ruler – motivated by control. They want to earn and exercise power. A natural leader, the Ruler is responsible and organized. “Power isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
- Caregiver – wanting to be of service, protect and care for others. They are maternal, nurturing, selfless, compassionate. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
- Creator – driven by innovation. Creators want to create things of enduring value. They are creative, imaginative, inventive, non-conformist. “If you can imagine it, it can be done”
Freedom-motivated brands: these brands are driven by the will to surmount any boundaries. They are inward-facing and individualistic.
- Innocent – focused on creating safety. Innocents are somewhat naive, they seek happiness. They are optimistic, romantic, loyal. “Free to be you and me.”
- Sage – using knowledge as a way to freedom. Sages are focused on amassing a lot of information and seeking wisdom. They are thoughtful and analytical. “The truth will set you free.”
- Explorer – looking to go beyond boundaries. Explorers are seeking out new things, new places, and new experiences. They are restless, adventurous, ambitious, pioneering. “Don’t fence me in.”
Ego-motivated brands: these brands want to leave a mark on the world. They are individualistic and proactive.
- Outlaw – challenging the status quo. Outlaws are ready to disrupt and shock, they are rebellious and wild. “Rules are made to be broken.”
- Magician – driven by power. Magicians understand the laws of the universe better than anyone and they can make the impossible possible. “I make things happen.”
- Hero – looking to achieve mastery and improve the world. Heroes are competent, courageous, bold, confident, inspirational. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Social-motivated brands: these brands are looking to connect to others. They are social and caring.
- Lover – focused on creating intimacy. They are looking to create a relationship and connect through sensual pleasure. They are passionate, intimate, warm. “You’re the only one.”
- Jester – driven by the search for pleasure. Jesters live in the moment, looking to have a good time, they are mischievous, hedonistic, light-hearted. “You only live once.”
- Everyman – creating a sense of belonging. They want to build solid virtues. They are supportive and faithful. “All are created equal.”

If you want to go deeper into brand archetypes here are a few great articles for further reading: Sol Marketing, Just Creative, The Hartford.

To use the brand archetypes as a tone of voice tool, you can use the following steps:

Provide each participant with a handout that explains the different archetypes.
Each team member should choose a primary archetype and up to two secondary archetypes that fit the desired brand personality. This reflects the fact that every brand (and for that matter, every person) is a mix of different qualities.
Every participant puts their choices on separate sticky notes and then puts them on a whiteboard with a short description.
Any archetypes that are mentioned more than once get grouped together. First, the primary archetype options are discussed. The Decider makes the final decision. The other primary archetype contenders get moved to the secondary archetype column.
The secondary archetypes are grouped and discussed. The Decider needs to choose up to two secondary archetypes after hearing all opinions.
Transfer the results to your brand guideline.

I would usually do one or two of the other exercises as a warmup and finish off the tone of voice discussion with the brand archetypes. I find that they click in the minds of my clients in a stronger way compared to just listing adjectives. Although the archetype discussion requires more preliminary preparation and an in-depth explanation about the archetypes, it’s a great tool that works wonders.

Putting your tone of voice to work

Once you’re done with the exercises, your work is actually just beginning. You’ve already seen that each exercise ends with the step “Transfer the results to your brand guideline.” Every decision needs to be documented.

Even if currently there’s only one person that creates content, having your tone of voice in writing will ensure consistency. More often than I care to admit, this blog sounds like another person wrote a post even if all content is created by me. Mood swings, tiredness, anything can influence the sound of your content. So you want to have a written description that you compare against.

The simplest format is to create a brand voice chart. In short, this is a file that presents each voice characteristic, together with a description and some detailed examples of do’s and don’ts.

The most complex version would be to create a detailed brand style guide that also covers tone of voice. Describing what you need to include in a style guide deserves a separate post. But you can go through some great examples to get a feeling of how to describe your tone of voice:

Any document, be it a simple or a detailed one, is largely useless unless you put it to practice. So my final piece of advice is to appoint a “Chief Voice Officer” who can edit for voice and tone. In the beginning, this person will work with any content writer to ensure consistency. Further down the line, adhering to your brand’s tone of voice will become easier for your writers. At that point, your Chief Voice Officer will only work on key content elements and help new writers get to know their way around.

Say it your way

There’s a lot to tone of voice and finding yours is a complex endeavor. But as long as you approach this fuzzy topic in a structured way, you will start seeing some tangible results in a short while.

Do your research, pick your exercises, get the right people in a room and work on it!

Pocket