7 Steps to an Authentic Brand Voice

Voice, writers say, is like a shirt: you choose the one in your closet that's best matched to the occasion.

If you're a brand marketer, that occasion is a "eureka moment" for your customer: either her first inquiry, first request, first purchase, first problem, first return, or first exposure to your ads.

"Writing is branding," says Matthew Stibbe, CEO of Articulate Marketing, by which he means voice is everything.

Voice, for a brand, lets you connect with customers like an actual person. Whole Foods is a professor of healthy living. Apple is a smug techie. Mailchimp is a stand-up comic. T. Rowe Price is a wise uncle.

If you haven't yet donned your brand's voice―haven't chosen the right shirt from your closet―you're not branding.

To do so, Stibbe recommends seven steps:

Conduct interviews. Speak face to face with leaders and learn their views on your organization and its values, employees, products and customers.

Analyze competitors. Learn what not to do by studying your competition.

Review your content. Look for an "accidental style guide" that might suggest precedents. Figure out, tone-wise, what the organization wants and tolerates.

Create a branding guide. Write a guide that makes clear your aspirations, and include examples of typical uses cases (the more mundane, the better). List examples of other voices you want to emulate (The Economist or Rolling Stone, for example.) and words that are required or forbidden.

Deploy. Put your style guide on an intranet site and promote it internally.

Train. Develop and deliver a training course in house. Train any outside writers, as well.

Proofread. Edit and proof everything.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I was eight when I decided to distrust government. 

Since I was not particularly precocious, distrust of government must have been something adults bred in kids in those days, the same way they bred healthy teeth in us.

Maybe my distrust came from an additive in the water. Or maybe it came from watching Duck and Cover in the school gymnasium.

There were troubles at the time with the Russians in Cuba, and our principal decided we should assemble each morning in the gym for an air-raid drill.

My elementary school was less than 10 miles from the Empire State Building, well-known from TV news as a target for the Russians' missiles.

As we watched Duck and Cover for maybe the tenth time one morning, my pal Mookie—a walking encyclopedia of esoterica—leaned over and said, "The movie's really stupid. It acts like you can hide, but when the bomb goes off, in six seconds we all turn into jelly."

I knew Mookie's data was always indisputable, and thus I learned to stop worrying, love the bomb, and distrust government.

Still do. 

And you? What's your story?

Hope for the Reluctant Writer

Reluctance haunts writers.

Blogging proponents—celebrating only the competitive advantages you gain through this form of content marketing—rarely admit blogging is torturous.

It's much easier to sift though emails, sit in a meeting, or make a third cup of coffee.

Unless you're the president, self-doubt is inescapable.

What's the answer?

In What is Literature?, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre asks the reluctant writer to imagine, "what would happen if everybody read what I wrote."

Stuff would happen. Stuff would happen even for the mediocre writer, if he aims for a target audience, Sartre says.

"The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it’s all about."

And in one of his most-quoted lines, Sartre says, "Words are loaded pistols."

If you're a reluctant writer, begin to think of your task differently.

Think of your blog less like a magazine and more like a bulletin board.

Think of your target audience.

Think of your words as loaded pistols, and writing as putting the "bullet" in bulletin.

Ready.

Aim.

Fire.

Never. Never. Never.

The Bowling Green Massacre never took place.

And neither did the five-second commencement speech by Winston Churchill, who allegedely rose before his alma mater in 1941 and said, “Never give up, never give up, never give up,” and sat down.

The Internet nourishes "alternative facts."

Churchill in reality spoke 740 words to the students of the Harrow School, including these:

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our school history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never.

Opinions are my own.

List versus Story

Tell me, I'll forget. Show me, I'll remember. Involve me, I'll understand.

― Chinese Proverb

In The Hook, Richard Krevolin asks us to imagine two prehistoric tribes, the "List" and the "Story."

The leader of the List provides tribe members a list of "10 things to do when you see a lion."

Two miles away, the leader of the Story sits down and tells tribe members about his boyhood encounter with a hungry lion.

Later, members of each tribe bump into a lion.

The Story Tribe members know just what to do (namely, mimic their leader).

The List Tribe debate what to do first, are eaten, and thus removed from the gene pool.

"Today I think it's fair to say that we are all the genetic offspring of the Story Tribe," Krevolin says.