Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.
Not sure why, maybe it’s an age thing, but I’m going through a stage at the moment where I’m quite enjoying challenging some of the ideas and beliefs that I’ve held most strongly over the length of my career – and deciding that more than a few of them don’t stand up very well to scrutiny.
In this blog, I thought I’d have a look at an idea that it would be fair to say I’ve held passionately – and droned on about incessantly – for as long as I can remember: the idea that tone of voice, or as it might be better described verbal identity, is potentially just as important as visual identity in creating distinctive and engaging brands.
Note the use of the word “potentially.” In advancing this argument, I have to start by admitting that in real life, it’s very, very rarely the case. Hardly any brands – least of all in financial services – actually own a distinctive and recognisable tone of voice which they use consistently across their communications. Doesn’t that destroy my theory at the outset?
Well, no. I can explain that, although admittedly only by having a bit of a pop at my comrades-in-arms in the copywriting profession.
Unlike designers, who pretty much always do their best to come up with something distinctive, copywriters just want to get the job done and go down the pub. They have excuses – if they write anything distinctive or different then the client’s marketing or compliance people will probably change it – but the truth is that they don’t really aspire to do anything different.
A long time ago, they looked at an awards annual that featured some of Bill Bernbach’s brilliant stuff from New York in the 60s, or David Abbott’s equally-brilliant stuff from London in the 70s and 80s, and decided that doing something half as good as that should be the summit of their ambition. To make the verbal identity thing happen, I’ve always said the first challenge is to get the copywriters out of the pub.
OK, well, accepting that, is there an achievable goal here? On the positive side, there’s no doubt that verbal identity exists and makes a difference – not hard, for example, to distinguish between Shakespeare, Raymond Chandler and Beatrix Potter. But in advertising and marketing communication? Really?
I’ve always thought so. I’ve made brave attempts, if I say so myself, to put the theory into practice. On one occasion I pitched for an asset manager whose brand was supposed to stand for clarity and simplicity, with a proposal that the copy should never use words of more than two syllables (I had to make exceptions of the word “investment” and the name of the firm in question, both of which had three). On another occasion I pitched for the UK arm of a big US-based firm who were keen to emphasise their North American firepower, and made the simple suggestion that they should emphasise their origins by using American words and spellings – color, flavor, sidewalk. On a third occasion, I suggested that volunteers from the company’s customers should write the copy – a truly customer-centric approach.
But you’ve guessed the punchline – we lost all of those pitches. Whereas generally we won most of the pitches where the copy stuck to that sub-Bill Bernbach approach.
If this was the kind of blog where I actually did homework and research, I would speak to my old friend Graham Pugh about this. Graham runs something called the Brand Voice Agency, which is as far as I know the only creative agency which specialises in the subject.
The fact that there is only one such agency – while there are hundreds of thousands specialising in visual identity – is, of course, a message in itself. But still, at least there is one. Surely that must at least represent a starting-point?
As I say, Graham is an old friend, and there are some excellent case studies on his website. But if I’m honest, I don’t see any brands expressing themselves exclusively in words of one and two syllables, or choosing to use American spellings. But I do see quite a lot of copy that sounds a bit like Bill Bernbach, though.
