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Tag: Brand Voice

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor

Posted on by Chris Ames

Battle of the Brands

Even for people who spend most of their time online, there are still those moments that remind you just how surreal our current technological moment is. Earlier this month, while mindlessly browsing, I suddenly realized I was six comments deep into a Twitter argument between the social media managers of Wendy’s and Steak-umm. Participating in #NationalRoastDay – an annual tradition of lightly making fun of people and brands – the playful hashtag game quickly turned aggressive when the two companies started vehemently attacking each other’s brand voice and products. Just think how little sense that sentence would make to someone in the olden times of 2006.

How did we get here? Traditionally, creating a strong brand identity online meant ensuring consistency across your various assets – logo, typeface, taglines – and developing a brand voice. As we’ve spoken about before, your brand voice is the purest expression of your brand’s personality. When used consistently, your voice reinforces the emotional impact you’re trying to create with the people most important to you. Just like a human voice, it sets you apart from others and creates a sense of familiarity that people need in order to form a long-lasting connection.

IRL vs. URL

For years, the dissonance between a brand’s voice online and in the real world was pretty slim. And that makes sense because one of the core tenets of brand building is consistency. Yet as time has passed, more and more companies are viewing their online voice as an absurdist off-shoot from their main brand. Denny’s, Wendy’s, Netflix, Chipotle, and MoonPie are classic examples of brands that have fully embraced the surrealism and nihilism of millennial humor.

Though often misunderstood, millennial humor is not so different from the Neo-Dada movement of the 1950s and 60s. The use of collage, assemblage, and found materials is in the same spirit as brutalist meme culture. Dada was formed in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the first world war, so it’s not too difficult to imagine why young people today are responding to a violent and nonsensical world with more nonsense.

Brands are People, Too

The fact that companies are tapping into this vein of humor signals our changing expectations of what a brand is, how it speaks, and what we demand of it. It’s not enough for a product to simply work. The market is way too crowded for that. No, even a flawless product has to be attached to a brand that is whip-smart, well-designed, socially-conscious, purpose-driven, and fluent in the ever-changing language of the now.

When it works, you get something like this:

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - Netflix

Using the structure of a meme where people share the most common misconceptions about their careers, Netflix treats their product like a profession and lists the biggest stereotypes about the platform. It’s self-deprecating, funny, and most importantly, 100% related to their offering. In the comments, the dating app Tinder replies with, “Honestly your Tinder bio looks amazing.” Again, clever, playful, related to their offering.

If you’re still freaked out by the spectacle of corporations pretending to be people for imaginary points on the internet, you’re not alone. But at the end of the day, whether you’re B2B or B2C, every business is human to human. At least until the robots take over, the end result will always be people. If you can find a way to win hearts through humor, they’ll pay you back by voting with their wallets.

Comedy and Marketing: The Best Idea No One Asked For

So, if every brand is human to human, does that mean traditional B2B brands can join in on the surrealist fun? That one’s a bit more complicated. The other day, I enjoyed reading Craig Beadle’s blog post, “Four reasons to avoid comedy in B2B marketing (and how to use it anyway). Beadle is a copywriter at Velocity, a content marketing and strategy firm that clearly doesn’t mind embracing humor. They describe themselves as “an odd bunch of international misfits, huddling together for warmth in a cold, indifferent world,” so it’s clear they can take a joke.

In brief, the post talks about how comedy and marketing are antithetical at the core. Comedy tends to be singular, divisive, and puts the punchline last. Marketing tends to be consensus-driven, direct, and tells you everything upfront. Yet they share a common goal of communicating information in a human, delightful way. There is a sugar-hit of recognition when you “get” a clever ad, in the same way that jokes and riddles are entertaining. As famed ad-man David Ogilvy said, “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” So, let’s look at some funny-thinking B2B brands.

Zendesk

Zendesk makes cloud-based customer service software and support ticketing systems. Are you laughing yet? Nothing about what they do should be inherently funny, but they were able to drill down to one value proposition with real comedic potential: relationships are complicated, and Zendesk improves the relationships between customers and companies. Represented by an astronaut and a deep-sea diver, they created a series of 16-second videos exploring relationship tensions.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - Zendesk

MailChimp

Like many businesses in Silicon Valley, MailChimp is a great company with an awful name. That’s not a value judgment, it’s something they know and have actively leveraged into a massive, self-referential campaign. The “Did you mean MailChimp?” campaign centered around nine ways you could possibly mess up their name, each with its own faux product. The results were brilliant and bizarre creations like FailChips, KaleLimp, and MailShrimp. If humor is about following through on a joke, you’ve got to hand it to them. The FailChip leg of the campaign featured a web page, product packaging, and a distribution strategy for the pre-crushed chips.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - MailChimp

Slack

Slack’s mission is to change the ways teams communicate. There is a lot of comedy in the minutia of office life and working on projects – just look at “The Office.” So, it only makes sense that they went super meta, producing a video about the process of making a video for Slack. Throughout the spot, we see all the points of friction their product solves. The end result is a clever case study, showing a reluctant client slowly falling in love with Slack.

The Surreal World of Brands, Social Media, and Millennial Humor - Slack

What a Time to be Alive!

In conclusion, it’s a super strange time for brands, technology, comedy, and honestly just being alive in general. We know there will always be stakeholders to appease, risks to be assessed, and reputations to manage. But if you find something genuine and funny about your core offering, don’t be afraid to inject your brand voice with a little life. People will forgive a lame joke, but they’ll never forgive a boring brand.

To learn more about how to improve your brand voice, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Enabler Brands Are Inspiring, Too!

Posted on by Chris Ames

Disruptor vs. Enabler Brands

These days, disruptor brands get all the attention. Companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber have each skyrocketed into popularity by rattling the industries they came from. We get it. There’s something inherently inciting, even American, about the idea of taking down the big guys with your off-kilter vision of the future. It’s easy to root for.

But here’s the thing about trailblazers — if everyone blazes their own unique trail, customers are faced with a dizzying network of singular (and often incompatible) solutions. In the course of one day, a person might bounce back and forth between ten different technologies, all of which claim to take the hassle and complexity out of life. I want to find a photo, but I’m not sure if it’s on my phone, my external hard drive, or one of my various clouds. Have you seen that popular new show? It’s exclusively on one of the streaming networks — but not the one you have. 

Don’t Downplay the Power of Unification

More and more, we believe there’s a strong case to be made for the power of enabler brands. The ability to bring everything together in a way that’s secure, contextual, and delightful is nothing short of a magic trick in this ever-shifting technological landscape.

In our work in the B2B sector, too often we see enabler brands limit the inspirational nature of their work. Whether it’s customer case studies, presentation decks, or collateral design, enabler brands can sing with the same sparkling brilliance as B2C disruptors.

While every company has its own unique challenges, here are some general thoughts on how enabler brands can elevate their impact.

Hone in on the results of the technology, not the technology itself.

Granted, your technology needs to be world-class and should always have a technical click-through for the nitty-gritty. But at the highest level, people are more interested in what new worlds you’re opening for them. That’s your role: to engineer what’s possible. Think of Dropbox’s recent redesign. They went from just a place to store your files to a living workspace that brings teams and ideas together.

How does this look in practice? Look at the imagery in your decks. What are people seeing? Is it moments of authentic human connection that wouldn’t be possible without your radiant technology? Or is it computer generated graphics and stock photography? During the next big conference, which one do you think will unite your team more?

Productivity is its own kind of delight.

Most enterprise tools aim to improve productivity. That might mean managing information, storing data, tracking issues, sharing updates, whatever you need to get the job done. But just because something is functional, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. Look at Slack. They have taken something often regarded as a chore — communicating with your co-workers — and made it, dare I say, fun? On their design blog, they discuss the importance of bringing humanity into the product. By putting people (not features) first, they have built a brand people love to experience.

Building a community is more rewarding than growing users.

As Scott Cooper writes in his blog, “The Changing Role of Brands,” enabler brands have the unique opportunity to empower the communities behind the technology. “Look at your audience with new eyes, in terms of community,” says Cooper. “Listen for the ideas that they believe in deeply or identify with. Let go of any preconceptions about your roles as a marketer and the relationship your brand has with people. Now ask yourself: how you can contribute meaningfully?”

When building your customer success stories, ask yourself what communities are truly benefiting from your technology? How can you champion their voices? There’s nothing inherently emotive about a 3-D printer, but whether it’s creating prosthetic limbs or affordable housing, people are using them in inspirational and innovative ways every day.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking these efforts are somehow separate from the real work of your technology. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: people make decisions with their hearts. Investing in the human aspects of your brand is not fluff: it’s a holistic way to equip your sales team with better tools, attract and retain top talent, and foster a healthier, more productive culture. Instead of giving your team something to work on, you give them something to work toward.

So, enablers, remember this. Disruptors will always hog the spotlight, but sometimes nothing is more exciting than being given the right environment to thrive.

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Too often marketers and product developers don’t see the connection between product design and brand strategy. We’ve noticed this trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and absorbs their point of view into the planning process, they can design more meaningful, more successful products.

Brand Promise

Brand strategy synthesizes a company’s business strategy, purpose, and product positioning into a distinctive promise that informs everything the brand stands for. Who the brand serves, what the brand brings to the table, and why it matters to people. Over the long months it takes to build a product, it’s tough to stay true to the emotional impact you hope your product will deliver. The promise at the core of your brand strategy is the beacon you can follow, with constant guidance to help you build a brand-appropriate product experience.

Brand Voice

How your product meaningfully connects with people matters more than you might suspect. You want the product to inspire meaningful feelings like excitement, amazement, or delight. Brand strategy sets the tone by establishing a voice that’s consistent with your promise. Brand voice is a delicate thing, which can include words, sound effects, and music. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It’s developed through a rigorous brand strategy process. It’s explored. It’s discovered. It’s developed. It rarely comes from QA engineers writing error messages.

Dialog

Ever make a mistake using an app? How can it be a mistake if you happen to press the wrong button in a confusing UI? Ninety percent of the time, when a user gets derailed in an app, it’s because the app itself is too complicated or the navigation is deranged. In other words, it’s not your fault, Citizen User.

So is it ever appropriate for a sensible brand to write the word ERROR in a dialog box? The clue is the term “dialog.” A product is a dialog with a user. A human being. A person. A person like you does not need a product to waggle a finger and issue a stern warning. If the product needs to help the user make a better decision, it’s called coaching. Encouraging. Extending a helping hand. Dialog. Not an error warning. Not lecturing. Not accusing. Not criticizing. Brand strategy provides guardrails for voice and behavior so your product doesn’t veer off track.

Once you’ve built a product with your brand strategy firmly in mind, you’ll wonder how you ever built anything without it. And whether you’re building an app, an online service, a mobile device, a piece of electronic hardware, a wearable gizmo, or any product that a human being touches, you’ll never build anything without a brand strategy again.

Emotive Brand teams up with clients to ensure that the brand strategy finds its way into the product experience to make a meaningful impact on users. To experience brand strategy the Emotive Brand way, give us a call.

To read more on this subject: Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Building a Brand Voice: An Interview with Emotive Brand’s Account Strategist

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Building a Brand Voice: An Interview with Emotive Brand’s Account Strategist

As an Account Strategist at Emotive Brand, Paige has helped many brands come to life. In addition to her role, Paige is also our go-to expert when it comes to crafting and developing a brand’s voice. She understands and deeply believes in the value of a well-articulated, emotionally impactful brand voice, and there’s nothing more rewarding for her than seeing a brand embrace their new voice and see the positive impact it has on the business.

In this post, Paige shares her thoughts on the importance of a cohesive brand voice, what a successful voice can do for business, and offers advice and guidelines on how to approach building a brand voice.

Why does voice matter in a brand strategy?

The brand voice is how the brand expresses its personality. When used consistently, the brand voice reinforces the emotional impact that the brand is trying to create with people most important to the brand’s success. The voice helps set the company apart from its competitors and creates a sense of familiarity that people need in order to become connected to the brand.

What can a well-executed brand voice do for a business?

The brand voice should be used in all external communications – from your website to sales materials to marketing collateral. Everything the brand touches should maintain a consistent voice. When people come to know and feel connected to the way the brand communicates and sounds, they’ll respond by being more engaged with the brand.

What do you feel is most important to consider when defining a brand’s voice?

I always approach the brand voice by considering the way it makes its target audiences feel and laddering up the characteristics of the voice to pay off the brand’s promise. If the brand makes people feel confident, the voice should be authoritative and precise. But you also need some guidelines to ensure that the voice doesn’t get carried away. A voice that’s overly authoritative may sound arrogant. And if it’s really precise, it may come across as inflexible. Knowing where and when to emphasize certain tones helps the voice flex and adapt to all brand touch-points. However, this kind of flexibility only works if the overarching voice has a solid foundation from which all communications derive.

 What advice would you give to someone new who is trying to follow brand voice guidelines?

Imagine the brand as a character in a movie. How would that person say something? Would he be bold and boastful or cheerful and bubbly? Would he shout or sing? Would he be warm and welcoming? Is he laid-back or buttoned-up? By personifying the brand, you can write in a voice that pays off the brand’s emotional impact. If the voice guidelines are done well, they’ll clearly identity the tenants of the brand personality for anyone writing for the brand.

 What should be included in guidelines for a brand voice deliverable?

A list of adjectives describing the brand voice is helpful but often leaves writers interpreting the voice on their own. Ideally, brand voice guidelines should include examples of what the voice is and isn’t. These parameters ensure that no matter who uses the guidelines, they interpret the voice’s characteristics the same way. A checklist also helps writers review a brand voice with a quick way to make sure the tone and language match the brand’s image. And finally, including actual copy examples in the guidelines with a range of contexts (such as a letter from the CEO and/or a social media post) shows the brand voice comes to life in a clear way that anyone writing for the brand can carry forward.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

We’ve noticed a product trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and Continue reading “How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design”