2 Sound like your values

2

SOUND LIKE YOUR VALUES

When a brand fi rst comes into being, it’s often the result of much hard thinking, planning and creativity by its founder, inventor or the small team behind it. The people working close to creative centre pick up their creators’ enthusiasm and passion, and everyone involved talks about the brand in the same way. They can speak the brand language.

Years go by, the company grows, the brand name is still there and people are doing their jobs. But the links to the brand’s beating heart, the connections to the creative team, have weakened or faded away.

The idea Part of business writing for brands is to work with organisations to help them articulate their brand personalities, to put their brands into words. Odd things happen to people when they start to write for a business. They believe that they’ve to use all the longest words they know, and jam in all the facts they’ve ever picked up. Sometimes, the people at the very top are often the worst culprits. They’ve learned the habit of writing to sound important instead of interesting.

They completely forget that someone has to read what they’ve written, and act on it.

This often happens within organisations whose brands have been in existence for decades, maybe centuries, and their people

fall into the habit of using the same phrases that have been repeated without question for years.

Each brand’s values are different. Here are some examples: • reliable, traditional, family-run, polite • international, technological, cutting-edge, powerful • challenging, innovative, urban, modern • cheap, cheerful, no-frills, friendly

You’d hope that a letter, a blog, a web copy or an internal memo would pick up on their values and sound as if it has the brand’s stamp on it. Often they don’t.

Telling your people what your brand values are and asking them suddenly to write in a campaigning, dedicated, purposeful and focused way is expecting the impossible. Ask a copywriter to do it and he or she probably could. Training your people to write in a style that suits your brand is the best way to go about it.

When Aviva went through the biggest rebrand in UK history (changing from Norwich Union) they ran a huge writing training programme as part of a whole became clearer and more purposeful, and sounded as if it came from individual writers, not a faceless corporation.

In practice • First, be clear. If there is any possibility of misunderstanding what you’ve written, explain or rewrite. • Always remember that there’s a person at the end of your writing. Put yourself in their shoes and ask if what you’re writing sounds like the brand you represent.

•Assume that people will not understand the industrial jargon that you use with your colleagues, and use everyday words wherever you can. The BBC and The Economist recommend this too in their writing style guides..