How writers, not just designers, build brands
Brands are how a company looks, thinks, and speaks. But in my experience, the focus is more on design and less on words. Here's why I disagree.
As individuals, we speak in a certain way. Our mannerisms, sense of style, beliefs, and even the way we walk convey a unique signature — our personal brand.
There are plenty of materials online designed to help you build this elusive personal brand, but in reality you are already doing it. All you need to do to be unique is to exist. Companies are the same to a degree. The reasons for founding it, the combined personalities of people building it, and the office vibe are, no matter how hard People & Culture teams try to tell you otherwise, often just the way they are.
Sure, you can hide or exaggerate certain parts, but the core is pretty constant. It’s not so much about building a brand, it’s about knowing how to articulate it and present it to the world — whether it’s yours or an organization’s.
Like many other fields, vague articles written to rank on Google and LinkedIn posts that reduce an entire profession to three tips make finding a definition for branding tricky. In short, branding is the practice of simulating those same patterns for a company — and the “body” and “voice” of a company are its product and the content surrounding it. That’s how I would describe it at least, but I’m sure you can find thousands of other perspectives online if you’re dissatisfied.
Brands are how a company looks, thinks, and speaks. But in my experience, the focus is more on design and less on words.
Where do writers fit into the branding process?
An individual piece of content or visual does not build a brand, the same way a single phrase or outfit doesn’t define who you are. It’s consistency that creates a signature, a personality. And achieving consistency in writing is a pain in the ass.
In most of my copywriter roles, I was a one-woman team. Wherever there were words, my help was required. This meant switching from UI copy to ads to investor materials to search-optimized blogs — often on the same day. I have written style guides from scratch on multiple occasions just for myself, to bring some form of clarity to the chaos that was my day-to-day. It’s easy to lose track of who you are writing for and why when there’s no compass — or map.
Many copywriter job descriptions promise ownership over tone of voice. And they are often, for lack of a better term, fake news. Why? Because most of them are written by people who don’t understand what that means. Tone of voice is a brand element that isn’t as sexy as a logo or color palette. While a picture speaks a thousand words and all that, there’s an underlying story behind colors, fonts, and illustrations. The thread that pulls it all together.
And as the maintainer of the thread in written form, color palettes and a vision statement aren’t enough input to tell a meaningful story.
The org structures and perspectives that make or break a brand
Writers are found in marketing teams, and play a critical role in enabling other functions that rely on content to perform. Compared to SEO and PPC, the ROI on carefully designed messaging and an on-brand content strategy is near-impossible to quantify.
So down it goes on the priority list, underneath the pile of quick-win initiatives that needed content yesterday.
The perception of writers today is akin to that of designers about a decade ago. You’re good with artsy stuff? Go ahead and design our product, website, and make some animations and illustrations. While design has come a long way and the solo designer is a rare in-house breed, the norm for copywriters is still to be a jack of all trades. And they are, but are also set up to be masters of none.
“Digital blurred the lines because it amplified exactly what copy was. It was no longer something finite for print or broadcast — it was an unfillable void. The rise of digital and social caused clients to start ordering words, for the sake of words, in overwhelming quantities — and agencies had no idea what to do except throw their copywriters at it and hope they didn’t sink.
The problem is, there’s a stark difference between writing the concept for an entire brand campaign and writing “Top 10 Tips for SEO Marketing” clickbait articles. Yet often, they are written by the same person.”
— Clare Barry, “The Vague Role of ‘Copywriter’”
Businesses are willing to invest time and money in design, as poor usability and lack of visual consistency is acknowledged as a risk despite being difficult to quantify. Nobody wants to use a confusing product or engage with a boring website. And yet we bore readers with repetitive and irrelevant content, confuse them with mismatched terminology and phrasing, and put minimal effort into shifting from a sales pitch to a story that resonates.
When you’re vastly outnumbered by people who are planners rather than executors, you’re too busy being a doer to even consider being a thinker — much less a storytelling on a grand scale.
A company asked why it was so hard to hire a good writer. I told them it was because good writing is an illusion: what people call good writing is actually good thinking, and of course good thinkers are rare.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) July 31, 2022
Where written content should fit in the brand system
Getting more into the nitty gritty of how to facilitate brand building in both words and visuals — here’s a little flow diagram that outlines the process I’ve seen work best.
As you can see, the feedback loop needs to expand beyond the content itself. I have attended many campaign retros where we fail to discuss the concepts and messaging that are used. Instead, the discussion tends to be on phrasing, image colors, and targeting.
The shaky foundations that content strategy relies on, more often than not, is usually the root of the problem. And it is often absent entirely or incomplete. The following are three, for lack of a better word, pieces of documentation that enables brand building and, consequently, the production of quality, effective content.
It is also important to clarify that your in-house writers should be involved in the creation of all of them.
1. Brand Playbook
Creating a brand playbook is best described as the excavation that comes before you lay a foundation. It is not a matter of throwing in bits and pieces and making a collage of pretty pictures and sentences. It involves interviewing founders, workshops to identify the emotions you want to evoke, and identifying that special touch that makes you distinct in the competitive space you’re in. Designers, writers, executives, and your entire company should, to varying degrees, be involved in this process if you want to build an authentic brand that actually represents you — and people are good at sniffing out a phony.
The output of all this is a set of high-level guidelines that cover tone of voice, values, vision, and visual elements that tell that story in the right way.
One of the best examples I’ve seen is Slack’s brand guidelines. It walks you through the entire story starting from purpose, mission, and tone of voice, then visual elements that complement them. Slack has an undeniably strong brand, and the foundations shown here really speak for themself.
2. Positioning & Messaging
While essentially part of the brand book creative process, competitive landscapes and products and go-to-markets are forever changing.
The practice of positioning and messaging development need to be regularly reviewed and researched — usually by research, brand, and product marketing teams — and aim to answer important questions. What are our strengths, our value propositions, who are the personas we are targeting, and what value can and will be able to offer them? And ultimately, how do we create content that is exciting, distinct, and interesting.
Using outdated positioning research sets content up for failure, as it won’t resonate. People won’t read it, and if they will, they probably won’t find it useful. And in cases where they read it and find it useful, they may not be the right fit for what you’re trying to market to them.
It’s tricky to share examples I’ve worked on without breaching NDAs or contracts, so here is an interesting set of messaging and positioning guidelines by Girl Scouts of America. Not the best in terms of design or flow, but what it demonstrates is how research driven and thorough messaging and positioning should be in order to build a strong brand.
3. Editorial Style Guide
I’ve talked a lot about tone of voice, this abstract enigma of a brand element. As a term, tone of voice or just “tone” is how a brand or individual feels about the message they communicate. Brand books and positioning already cover the what, this is about the how.
I’ve shared a couple of examples below where you can see a pretty comprehensive and standard list of what to include — it would be way too much to write and a lot less interesting. From punctuation and sentence structure to formatting and glossaries. Depending on how many writers you have on the team, it’s also ideal to split style guides into channel-specific categories. For example, writing for user interfaces is an entirely different ball game than a long-form piece of content.
Ultimately, editorial or content style guides are the bible writers use to ensure their work sounds like the brand they’re representing — and not themselves. Consistency, baby.
Here is an excellent and extensive style guide from Intuit where you can see how they break down overarching brand elements into practical writing rules and patterns. For good measure, here is another example from Mailchimp.
Not happy with your brand?
Ask a writer for help and give them the scope, trust, and time to do it. Plain and simple.
