Writing Success: How to Match Your Tone to Your Brand

Successful brands are created through cohesion across all touchpoints. Crafting an engaging look and feel to catch consumers’ attention must be complemented with a tone of voice that resonates with your audience. From key callouts and brand stories on packaging to longer-form writing opportunities like emails and websites, all copy across your brand should present a harmonious message.

1. Use strategic insights to position your brand’s look, feel, and tone.

All successful brands start with a brand strategy that informs your design, positioning, and messaging. Strategy research and decisions should result in a strong understanding of your brand’s key messaging . A brand strategy will help define your brand’s point of difference and primary benefits – everything that sets your brand apart. Use this to better understand your brand and to help guide design and copywriting.

2. Define your brand personality.

Once you’ve established an overarching strategy for your brand, it’s time to hone in on your brand personality. This entails defining adjectives that describe the personality of your brand. A children’s brand might be accessible, fun, happy, wholesome, and trusted. A luxury skincare brand might define their personality as scientific, aspirational, upscale, and modern. Deciding on these words will help you cement your brand’s personality and set you up to develop copy that’s appropriate for your audience.

3. Define how your brand identity influences your tone of voice.

Having defined your brand personality, you are now in the perfect position to understand how it will influence your tone of voice. You should consider your target audience and what they will respond to. In the previous example of a children’s brand, a casual but trusted tone in which familiar words and phrases are used will help to inspire trust and comfort in a consumer buying for their child. For the luxury skincare brand, upscale values might translate to messages about treating yourself while the scientific focus might result in using statistics to back up claims.

4. Choose content that highlights your brand’s pillars.

What you say is just as important as how you say it. That’s why when choosing your messaging, it’s imperative that you focus on your brand’s pillars – the key points of difference and benefits defined in your initial strategy. This focus will promote your brand’s unique positioning, aligning your product with key features that will be associated with the brand. Centering your message on what best characterizes your brand allows you to broadcast your brand’s value to consumers. They will be attracted to what you have to say just as much as the tone of voice in which you say it.

5. Consider the platform you’re writing for.

Finally, it’s important to tailor your content to the platform where it will be read. While your tone of voice should remain consistent across all materials, slight variations in length or formality may be appropriate. For example, due to the space constraints of a package, your message might be shorter on the shelf than on your website or in email communications (link to Packaging: From Shelf to Screen). Messaging on social media is often slightly more casual than elsewhere because of the way in which it’s consumed. Together, all content should align to create a cohesive, thoughtful tone that amplifies your overall brand.

Bonus: Design and copy go hand in hand.

Nothing should be created in isolation. When it comes to copy, you can make sure it’s amazing, but it won’t truly sing without a design that helps to elevate it. Font choices and colors should underscore and flatter the message, fitting seamlessly together. Words and phrases can be emphasized by bolding them, changing their size, or highlighting them with a color change. The decision to write in sentence case might lend itself to a formal style, while bold can come across as edgy, and all lowercase may be perfect for a casual brand. Designers and copywriters must work hand in hand to develop a brand with a cohesive look, feel, and tone of voice. A successful brand can’t be built without collaboration across teams.