Voice Archives - Emotive Brand

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Voice Technology Is Older Than You Think

Voice is the newest technology platform on the block. And like all seemingly new things, it’s actually much older than you think. In the early 1960s, IBM introduced the Shoebox, an early effort at mastering voice recognition. This bulky little machine could recognize 16 words spoken into its microphone and convert those sounds into electrical impulses. Basically, it was a voice-operated calculator. Dressed in a tuxedo at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, developer William C. Dersch performed the miracle of turning your voice into a search engine.

Since those formative days, voice technology has advanced exponentially – and so has demand. By 2019, the voice recognition market will be worth $601 million. And by the end of 2022, voice commerce will be a $40 billion industry, while 55% of American homes will own at least one smart speaker.

Finding Our Voice

And while there is an undeniable demand for voice technology, it still feels like people and businesses are discovering the best way to tackle the vocal landscape. On this blog, we’ve written about how voice will alter the future of SEO, and it’s a great place to start if you’re new to the technology.

But beyond the nitty-gritty of formatting for mobile, creating rich snippets, and writing long-tail keywords that mirror natural speech, we’re interested in something bigger. How do you make your brand stick out in the world of voice? How do you provide unique experiences that fit the medium? And is there a role for voice in the world of B2B?

How to Stand Out in the Chorus

Something to consider right off the bat is how much more emotive a voice is than a block of text. As outlined in their article “To Read Emotions, Listen,” Psychology Today explains how an isolated voice may be the truest signal of a person’s inner experience. As opposed to visual cues, “the most reliable way to read someone may simply be to listen to their voice.” And it makes sense. How many arguments have you been in that started not because of what you said, but how you said it?

This same space of heightened emotion can be leveraged to create a stronger connection between brands and people. When crafting text for voice, brands should aim for something conversational, human, and warm. If you have a technical or lengthy offering, consider making an alternate script for voice that is more succinct and approachable.

As Ilker Koksal writes, “Voice shouldn’t just be about making a sale. It’s about being useful to your customers and being ready to help when they need you. Brands using Alexa and other voice-first experiences both create opportunities for customers to engage – and then help those customers become used to engaging on a regular basis, perhaps in a daily routine.”

Usefulness is where voice currently excels. Things like directions and recipes are thriving with voice search because it’s the perfect combination of needing an answer in a hands-free environment. The challenge for other brands is figuring out exactly how you can be useful.

Start with a persona and a question. In this customer journey, what search queries are your customers using early and late in the purchase process?
What content is helping them answer these queries or informing their opinion?
In a conversational way, what would these questions sound like through voice?
How could short-form audio content answer these questions succinctly?
Consider creating an “audio logo” or noise that’s instantly recognizable by ear, so customers have an aural way to know they are interacting with you.

How Can B2B Companies Sing Along?

When it comes to voice, the path for B2C companies is much clearer. In the U.S., Domino’s has already seen promising results since making its one-click Easy Orders option available through Alexa. Two months after launching, 20% of customers signed up for the service. I mean, what’s easier than saying, “Alexa, I want a pizza” and it magically arriving at your door?

Similarly, PayPal now supports transactions via Siri, allowing users to send and request money in 30 countries around the world with voice. As easy as saying, “Send $30 to my brother,” Siri pulls up a custom sheet with details of your transaction for authorization. Identifying opportunities for “one-click” interactions in your sales cycle is key, as voice search is all about immediacy.

Perhaps a more interesting use-case for B2B companies is that of Saint Louis University. Earlier this year, they announced they would be the first college or university in the country to put Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, prepped with university-specific information, in every student living space. So, all the questions a student might have – What’s happening on campus tonight? Where is the student center? When does the library open? – are easily accessed and organized in an interactive way.

Voice Lends Itself to Employer Brands

Think of how this technology could be used for an employer brand, or even onboarding a new employee. In one device or app, a business could have an interactive way to educate their staff on upcoming events, benefits, meetings, opportunities, or even storytelling from team members. Missed the last all-hands? Listen to a recording of the meeting. Curious about the vision of the company? Listen to the CEO explain the upcoming acquisition strategy. Looking to engage with the mental health benefits? Listen to stories from people who have taken advantage of the free therapy program.

The role of voice in brand is still being defined, but that’s the most exciting part. The immediacy and emotion of voice is yet another tool in our arsenal to transform the way people reach out to brands and the way brands respond back. To learn more about voice or our partnership with Voicify, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].