When a brand wants to stand out, the first step is to try to look different to everyone else. Monzo’s coral card, Apple’s white packaging, IKEA’s blue and yellow.
A few brands focus on how they sound too – their tone of voice.
Oatly is the current poster child for tone of voice. Their eccentric language has helped them go from niche choice for the lactose intolerant to market share dominator across Sweden, the UK and the US.
Then there’s Innocent, Virgin, First Direct, Paddy Power, Monzo (again)… brands that make tone of voice part of their fabric tend to see transformational results.
But beyond the six I’ve mentioned so far, it’s a struggle to name many more. Because establishing a truly distinctive tone of voice, and then using it consistently, is really, really hard. Or, at least, it was. More on that in a bit.
The pro is that’s also a con
People often think of tone of voice and a brand’s ‘visual system’ (colours, logos, typefaces, etc) as related opposites. But the reality isn’t quite so neat: a handful of designers hold the key to the way your brand looks, so you can make sweeping visual changes relatively quickly and easily.
But your tone of voice is in everybody’s hands, because everybody writes, every single day. You can produce a few perfectly written examples of your tone of voice in action, but they’ll quickly be drowned in the torrent of boring, bloated comms spewing forth from all the people who either haven’t realised there’s a tone of voice, or who have, but aren’t good enough writers to adopt it.
You can fight back, of course. Run tone of voice training programmes, get the CEO’s endorsement, have good writing rewarded come appraisal season. And that’s all still useful, but muscling in alongside it all is GenAI.
Introducing the Potato Principle
One of the reasons so few brands have really nailed their tone of voice is that distinctive tones are hard to write to.
But GenAI can handle any level of complexity. You can make your tone of voice as nuanced and distinctive as you like. You can have every 27th word be ‘potato’. You can have everything in iambic pentameter. You can mimic the rhythm of a Stormzy song.
And not only is a complex, distinctive tone of voice a breeze, so is rewriting all those dusty, bloated comms. (It’s at least twice as fast as a human, according to a study we did with a big Australian pensions organisation.)
Loosen your waistbands everyone, because this is the realm of having our cake and eating it.
So is this the end for human writers?
Well, I’m one of them, so I’m biased, but I think the role of writers is only getting more crucial.
“The hottest new programming language is English”, said Andrej Karpathy. So if you’re a writer, the world is only going to need your skills more and more.
Up to now we’ve had to hold back from unleashing the full force of our creativity, reigning in our tones of voice to cater to humans who either lack the skill or the motivation to change the way they write. Thanks to GenAI, the shackles are off.
Up to now all those old bloated comms have just been left untouched. Thanks to GenAI companies are dusting them off and looking for good writers to oversee the AI’s output.
Many writers have a sense of doom about them. I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be the person in the room who really understands how language works.
So what next?
If you want to make your brand more distinctive, think about using your tone of voice to do it. Here are five tips to make the most of all the opportunities AI has to offer.
1. Use a tone of voice specialist!
Everyone can cook. But Alain Ducasse can cook better.
Same goes for your tone of voice. Anyone in your brand team and your agencies can write a few adjectives down. But a tone of voice specialist will do it better. And since this tone of voice is the foundry for every word your business produces from now on, it’s best not to skimp.
(Oh, and better still: use a tone of voice specialist who’s AI savvy.)
2. Generate lots of examples
Have your very best writers produce some killer examples of your tone in action. Then turn those, plus your tone of voice guide, into a tone of voice prompt.
Even better, get the writers to produce hundreds of examples and use them to fine tune a model so that everything it spits out is bang on tone, with no prompts needed.
3. Train your humans
You’re still going to need your people to understand and use the tone of voice themselves. So run tone of voice training and prompt engineering training to cover all bases.
And for your core team of writing guardians, in-house or at the agency, make sure they’re fully up to date on all things AI. Their role is going to shift from writing and editing to overseeing and maintaining the AI, which takes a whole different set of knowledge and skills.
4. Get a private AI environment
You need free rein to build a more nuanced prompt than a custom GPT (or similar) can handle, and a character limit of 8,000 ain’t going to cut it.
Right now, you also need Anthropic’s models: we did a big blind test and found their writing usually came out on top. Plus the incoming Claude 3.7 Sonnet can produce 20,000 words in one go and write to an exact word count.
5. Have a written amnesty
Get every Head-of in your company to send you all the comms they’ve never got round to updating. Use your AI (plus human writers) to produce new drafts that are on tone and up to date. Measure the impact of some of those rewritten comms, and use the results to convince any skeptics that tone matters.
It took Oatly a good 15 years to become an overnight success. Follow these tips and you’ll be able to do it about 15 times quicker.
