Nov. 14, 2021
The Power of Language to Build Your Brand’s Identity with Chris West
In episode 105, host Eric Dickmann interviews Chris West. Chris leads the world's leading strategic brand consultancy focusing on brand language. Verbal Identity has created distinctive and engaging brand voices for global and national brands, relaunches, and startups, from B2B, B2C, and everything in between. Chris founded Verbal Identity in 2010 to advise clients on the power of brand language. His 30 years' experience allowed him to help brands and companies use their language to en...
In episode 105, host Eric Dickmann interviews Chris West. Chris leads the world's leading strategic brand consultancy focusing on brand language. Verbal Identity has created distinctive and engaging brand voices for global and national brands, relaunches, and startups, from B2B, B2C, and everything in between.
Chris founded Verbal Identity in 2010 to advise clients on the power of brand language. His 30 years' experience allowed him to help brands and companies use their language to engage customers, deepen loyalty, and de-position rivals.
Chris’ book all about his practice is titled “Strong Language” – the fastest, smartest, cheapest marketing tool you’re not using. It is a practical, how-to guide for creating a distinctive brand language, as well as winning support for change and defining the budget and ROI for doing it.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/power-language-build-brand-identity-s7ep5/
Send us your questions or comments
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WEBVTT
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
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In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business.
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Chris welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm so glad you could join us.
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Hey, Eric, it's lovely to see you and congratulations on the show.
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Oh, hey, thank you so much, I really appreciate that.
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You know, we have so much fun doing this show and it's great to have guests on like yourself that can truly add value to our audience.
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You know, we're always trying to help businesses figure out ways to improve their marketing strategy, to get more effectiveness from the marketing tactics that they're running.
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And I know today we're going to get a chance to talk with you all about you know, brand voice and really creating that voice for your company.
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And I was wondering, you know first of all, if we could just start with a little bit of background on yourself, tell us how you got into this branding and how you've been helping companies develop that brand voice.
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Sure.
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So I suppose the origins of what I'm doing as a business with Verbal Identity, I suppose you go back 30 years.
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So 30 years is a long time in what's happened in the marketing world.
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In those days, I was a copywriter in an ad agency in London, working on big accounts, like British Airways.
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And if you are writer, then it was a really wonderful world because I was considered a high producer because I produced maybe five ads in a year, right?
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Crazy.
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Like you know, a hundred words.
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That's, that's what made my living in a year.
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I set up a boutique agency in 2000, right?
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Working with lots of wonderful B2B, B2C clients, different sizes.
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And over time as the number of brand channels exploded.
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What I found was each time I left a meeting, a client would kind of grab me by the sleeve and say, Hey Chris, you're a good writer.
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We've now got 4,000 words to write before breakfast tomorrow.
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Help us.
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And that was their CRM, that was their website, that was social media.
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That was you know the high rate of turnover in packaging, the high rate of communications and customer service, all of that.
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So about 10 years ago, I realized that if I was being asked this all the time, I should really look at how brands can position themselves with language.
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I reckon everyone that listens to you has got a great visual identity.
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They would know what their logo is and they would know when it's wrong.
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They would know what their font is, their color palette is.
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But if you said to them, how well defined is your verbal brand, is your verbal identity as strong as your visual identity?
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I'm not sure how many people would say hand on heart.
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Yes, it is.
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So that's how the business started.
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That's really interesting because I would agree.
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I don't think a lot of people think about that.
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You know, you're right.
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There are style guides that created the talk all about how the logo needs to be presented and what colors to use and the fonts and whatever, but not necessarily what to say other than maybe a tagline or, you know, a brand marker, or something like that.
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So how would you describe verbal identity or the voice of a brand?
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How do you sort of get to a place where you can start to solidify what that really means?
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I think the first stop is understanding where language is working for your business, and the short answer is everywhere all the time, but you need to be able to define the voice because often it's in the founder, in the founder's head or the marketing department.
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Someone in their department is a really great writer.
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And if you want something written, go and ask Eric.
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Eric's got the voice.
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Eric knows, Eric will do it.
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Dah, dah, dah.
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And of course, Eric needs to take a hold of it.
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Eric, may occasionally get sick, get married, or have other personal commitments.
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So Eric can't do it all the time.
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So often what you're doing is you're extracting it from the head of the people in the business to know what the voice is intuitively, even if they haven't defined it rigorously.
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So this is more than brand values, what our brand stands for.
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This is really how they're communicating those values, how they're presenting themselves to the marketplace.
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Yeah.
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And I think many brands do it inadvertently, which is often you know, a route to disaster because you're just kind of saying, well, we'll just put some stuff out on social media and we're just kind of, let's just write the customer service letter as quickly as we can and let's do this with the CRM.
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But you would never do that with your visual identity.
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You would be really careful, just as you said, to have this comprehensive deck that says, this is what we do on this occasion, this is how we vary it by this moment or by this channel.
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And so once you have the voice defined and once you learn how to flex it for different channels, then I think what you see is that you have a voice that suddenly becomes as strong as the other elements in your brand.
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Can you maybe walk us through that a little bit?
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Maybe with a current client or a past client in how you sort of defined what that voice was going to be.
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And some examples of what you put in that verbal style guide to help guide other people in how they would write in that voice?
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Sure, sure..
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I think the heart of what we do is a really simple framework that.
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we've used and reused, and proven over the last 10 years.
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Do you mind if I talk about that?
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Couple of minutes and then, oh, thanks.
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So a lot of people think that brand voice is just tone of voice and often if that's the def.
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If that's what you think the brand voice is, then you come up with four adjectives, human friendly, warm and approachable, which doesn't really help the writer.
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I always say, think about the writer, ten past seven at night.
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She or he, they've got to write something.
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Everyone else has gone home.
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Needs to be on the boss's desk tomorrow morning.
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What are they going to do in that situation?
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They're going to kind of revert back to how they've always written or they're going to look at those four adjectives- human friendly, warm, and approachable.
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And they're going to say, Hey, that doesn't mean anything.
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Yeah.
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So actually when you look at brand language, we see that it always works on three levels.
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If you look at a great piece of copy from a brand that you really like, you can often just put your hand over the logo at the bottom, show it to someone, hide all the other elements.
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Show someone and say, oh yeah, I know who that is.
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That's such and such a brand.
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So what's happening there?
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When we look at it, that kind of 10,000 foot level, there's an overarching narrative.
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What's coming out is not explicit, but what's coming out of the copy, the brand languages.
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This is the world we believe in.
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This is how we want the world to be.
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And that's as strong in B2B businesses as it is in B2C businesses.
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We want to do this, we want to make the world like this.
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So therefore we stand for this and we stand against that.
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Now in a really strong voice, that sense of their world view comes out really clearly.
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That's a 10,000 foot and at a thousand feet.
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Then you have the personality.
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So you almost imagine what kind of people wrote this.
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So if I walked into their building, what kind of people would they be?
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Would they be really formal?
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You and I wearing white shirts today.
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Would they be really formal white shirt kind of, but not too tightly done up kind of people or would they be more relaxed t-shirt jeans kind of whatever kind of attitude to life, and what's in between all of those spaces.
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So a thousand foot you've you've got the total values, the personality defined.
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And at the ground level, a really good brand voice, you'll have what we call the ground level details.
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So they're the things like, what are the phrase, words, and phrases you use and don't use in this business on a regular basis?
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I give you an example from the consumer world.
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You know the mini.
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Eric?
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Yeah.
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So it's a great brand, hugely successful brand.
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All the time when they're writing, and I think it's probably on their social media channels, in CRM, everywhere I've seen it, there's this phrase that comes up again and again, which is go-kart handling.
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Yeah.
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So minis picked this phrase cause it perfectly captures their personality, that thousand foot level and their overarching view of the world.
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But as a phrase in itself is pretty good for representing who they are.
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And so they'll use it again and again.
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And so the words and phrases you use at ground level are important along with things like sentence length and grammar.
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So you know, I was taught grammar in a really formalized way.
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But that's not how I speak and that's not how I write.
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And if you listen to people on the street, their grammar is totally different.
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It's not wrong.
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It's different.
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So I think what we're trying to get people to understand is even things like grammar choices really matter.
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So you've got these three levels and in a really great brand voice, they all work together and they'll all reinforce each other.
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And once you've defined them like that, what you find is that it's a lot easier to talk to your team, talk to writers and non-writers about what they're doing with the language.
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And don't forget, you know that's not just what, you know, brand language or comms language, it can be investor relations, It can be as I say, customer service, can be even signage in a building.
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It's a lot easier to talk to them about that.
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Once you've got those three levels agreed and defined.
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And it helps shape things.
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So you asked me a question about five minutes ago and I didn't answer it, Eric.
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I'm really sorry.
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No, no you did.
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And I appreciate you setting up that framework because I think it helps give some context to what we're talking about because sometimes, you know, in my mind, what comes to mind is you know, when you listen to a CEO speak, maybe at an investor conference in and you know, all of a sudden the word synergy pops into the conversation, you're like this guy is going to be saying a whole lot of nothing for the next half an hour because they're trying to avoid specifics and talk in generalities and things like that.
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But it doesn't really communicate much of anything.
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And then I think of politicians as well, who oftentimes, you know, walk around at question with a lot of verbose language, but never actually answer the question that was asked.
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And what you're really talking about is not that you're really talking about trying to create something that communicates what a brand stands for in the tonality, in the language that uses, not what they don't stand for, what they don't want to talk
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And you are.
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Yeah, exactly, exactly right.
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And of course the other expression we have, everyone is talking about.
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at the moment is pivot.
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know Eric, have you pivoted this week?
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Because you know it's been 72 hours since I pivoted, so I feel like I'm behind,
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You are behind, yeah, I've done it twice today, already.
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Yeah.
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So, yeah.
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And a good example of a company using this kind of language is Alphabet has this wonderful place over in mountain view, Silicon Valley called X, which is their moonshot factory.
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Okay.
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And their moonshot factory is doing all of these things, which I would say, you'd be crazy to think you can do that in technology, which they're proving you can.
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So they're hosting these ideas.
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technology-based ways of changing the world, changing significant problems.
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So Waymo that driver's car is coming out of there.
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So people will know that.
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But there's other projects that they've nurtured quietly, secretly for years and years and years, until they're ready, like a contact lens which will constantly monitor your blood glucose level.
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So what a wonderful place.
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And their challenge when they talked to us was look, these are top-secret projects.
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We're not hiding anything, but just because the nature of the project, what it is, we don't talk about it until we're actually successful with it.
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Hmm.
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So their communication challenge was really we need to be able to express exactly who we are, communicate all of our values, but in a really narrow bandwidth.
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Because really the only times that we'll communicate to the outside world are through recruitment.
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Okay.
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Because.
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Eric comes to X, he's got this great idea for this piece of technology that will solve the world's problem, one of the world's problems.
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And you're going to be in there for eight years and slowly, you're going to be acquiring the world's best minds onto your team.
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And that's the only thing you can communicate.
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So it's almost like the ultimate test in a B2B environment because it's so narrow, but you have to be so precise.
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And what they said to us, what they were X, the leaders X said to us once.
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What we're trying to do is attract the best minds in the world to come and work with us, literally with such a narrow bandwidth of communication.
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And we're trying to persuade those people that they don't go to NASA, they don't go to MIT, that they don't go to these big, cash rich VC-backed places, but they come and work for us.
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So really when we understood a lot more about X and their view of the world, we were able to create a voice.
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We were able to say, you know, this is the world they want to create, so these are the things they stand for.
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What they stand against, often you can make it explicit.
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You didn't need to make it explicit for X.
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But you know, they, weren't interested in kind of a quick investment, quick return.
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You know, they're interested in changing the world for the better.
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In terms of then what their personality is, that kind of patience and intelligence that comes down from that worldview that became the values for their brand voice.
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So without going into the kind of confidential details of how their brand voice was defined, what we saw at the 10,000 foot level, we could bring down into a personality at a thousand foot, and then we could say- Okay, what are the words and phrases you want to use on a regular basis?
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How do you want to be with your grammar?
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How much jargon do you want to use?
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Things like that.
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So we were able to find a voice and suddenly what we find is it unleashes creativity.
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So even in a narrow bandwidth like that, where you're really talking mostly in communication, mostly recruitment.
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But of course, you know, social media as well.
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Sure
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But what you find is that suddenly writers go, oh, okay, right.
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So if we stand for this, if this is our worldview, we can talk a little bit about this.
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Yeah, absolutely we can.
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Everyone is talking about climate change, but knowing what we stand for, what we stand against, we can take this angle on climate change, which is our informed angle and suddenly knowing what to talk about, what angle to take on it, what personality to convey through it.
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And also getting away from some of the things that slow you down.
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Like what word or phrase do you use?
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Having all of that unleashes a huge amount of creativity.
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And I think we were able, I mean, they're a super team.
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I mean like the best thing you ever want to work with and they were able, once we'd help them define their brand voice to suddenly step change the amount of communication and how fast things can be turned around inside the business.
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You know as you gave that example, something comes to mind.
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You know, we're recording this episode in mid September, and I just got done watching earlier this week, an Apple event where they launched their new iPhone.
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And you know, we always tend to use Apple as marketing examples because they're just so good at what they do.
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And this was another killer presentation that they put together.
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But what's interesting in the context of brand voice is that there was a time when Steve Jobs got up on stage and he was kind of the brand, right?
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He was the voice of that brand.
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But now over the years, they've made a very conscious effort to have lots of different people standing up and explaining the new products and services, but yet they all have to communicate with that same brand voice.
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And of course, there's a very heavy hand in that I'm sure.
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They're not just winging this off cuff, but as they go from product to product or, or new announcement to new announcement, there's a very consistent theme.
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You know, they talk about privacy, they talk about the environment, they talk about the recycled materials that they use and how they're reducing packaging and all this.
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But it's consistent from one announcement to the next.
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And that to me is another great example of how that brand voice, that brand identity is filtering through everything that they do.
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What's your thought on that
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I think you're absolutely right.
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And of course the joy that, the great thing about having your brand voice defined properly is you've got it defined everywhere.
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So if you go into an Apple store, well, you know, guess what, if you go into an Apple store near you or an Apple store near me, they kind of sound like the same business and that's immensely reassuring.
00:17:33.090 --> 00:17:38.309
You know if my phone is busted and I'm near you and I go into an Apple store, Wow, they sound the same.
00:17:38.339 --> 00:17:40.740
So they probably know as much as my local store do.
00:17:40.740 --> 00:17:41.910
All of that sounds great.
00:17:42.420 --> 00:17:46.859
And that's one of the most amazing things about Apple.
00:17:47.250 --> 00:17:49.809
They have a really clear sense in their voice.
00:17:50.109 --> 00:17:54.309
But from that, then, that voice flows out through all of their business.
00:17:54.400 --> 00:17:59.819
It's the same kind of clear voice on their website, same kind of clear voice on social.
00:18:00.220 --> 00:18:01.230
It's pretty impressive.
00:18:01.680 --> 00:18:10.035
I know sometimess when listeners, especially if there are smaller businesses, they listen to discussions like this and they say, okay, you're talking about Google.
00:18:10.035 --> 00:18:11.865
You're talking about Apple, you're talking aboutMini.
00:18:12.615 --> 00:18:18.129
These are big companies with big marketing departments, a lot of resource to be able to throw at a problem like this.
00:18:18.460 --> 00:18:22.329
I'm a smaller company, I've got a three or four person marketing team.
00:18:24.009 --> 00:18:25.839
How should I define my brand voice?
00:18:25.839 --> 00:18:26.829
Does it even matter?
00:18:26.829 --> 00:18:29.470
Am I big enough for that even to matter for me?
00:18:29.470 --> 00:18:31.900
Or should I be worried about other problems?
00:18:32.139 --> 00:18:38.470
How do you look at this when it comes to businesses of all sizes and shapes and flavors?
00:18:39.900 --> 00:18:49.389
Well, yeah, I mean I think once the brand voice is defined, you're good with the brand voice for five years, three years, five years, ten years is one.
00:18:49.480 --> 00:18:51.450
Same really with your visual identity.
00:18:51.490 --> 00:19:05.609
I mean I don't know many businesses that would say, we're too small to make our logo consistent or we're too small, ready to produce our brochure in the same way, or it doesn't really matter What our website looks like from day one to day five.
00:19:07.250 --> 00:19:14.200
All of this stuff matters and it's the consistency of communication, not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it.
00:19:14.710 --> 00:19:16.930
That consistency builds confidence.
00:19:17.259 --> 00:19:21.549
So I think whatever size you are, it should be on your agenda.
00:19:21.639 --> 00:19:22.930
And then how do you go about it?
00:19:22.930 --> 00:19:33.700
Well you know, scale your ambition, if you gonna scale your resources, but I would say what you know, thank you for kind of giving me a lead to talk about a bit more about the book's strong language.
00:19:33.910 --> 00:19:37.559
What I would say is you can read strong language in a weekend.
00:19:38.775 --> 00:19:42.884
And you can take something into the office on Monday morning and say, look, we're not going to change everything.
00:19:43.305 --> 00:19:46.514
But look, can we just look at this, look at that, and look at that.
00:19:46.514 --> 00:19:47.654
And there are some exercises in the book.
00:19:47.684 --> 00:19:49.875
It's a really practical how to book.
00:19:50.504 --> 00:20:04.345
And I reckon within if you did that on Monday, if you read it over the weekend, and you came in on Monday by Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, your brand voice would have changed a lot and everyone would be aligning with that one voice.
00:20:06.397 --> 00:20:09.248
Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast.
00:20:09.248 --> 00:20:14.107
But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level?
00:20:14.317 --> 00:20:20.677
If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you.
00:20:20.948 --> 00:20:26.857
We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step.
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