Hitting the right tone (of voice)

Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts recently. The keen eyed among you may have noticed that I have moved Twelfth Day from a personal blog into a fully-fledged business. The good news is that it's taken off better than I could have imagined. The bad news is that I'm working all hours of the day. I think they call this a 'high quality problem'.

Anyway, one of the projects I have on the go at the moment is developing a new tone of voice for a major grocery brand. (I know, somewhat outside my B2B and tech specialty but it was just too interesting to pass up.) It's got me thinking about how tone of voice development is so badly done so much of the time.

The TOV issue

While everyone tends to talk a good game about tone of voice (check any set of brand guidelines) few do it well. For every Innocent or Pret A Manger there are countless, faceless companies touting almost identical tones of voice which are broadly ignored by their writers.

In some ways it's not so surprising. Specifying a tone of voice is tricky. No one can create a set of binding rules that will inevitably lead to exactly the right tone. Language is too malleable. Writers too individualistic.

The problem is that all too often brands take the approach of simply listing some characteristics and expecting that to work. They would, however, be better off remembering one of the first rules of fiction writing: show don't tell.

A couple of years back, I developed the new tone of voice for Ernst & Young. Part of the job was writing their new style guide. In it I of course introduced their values and the characteristics of their new tone. But I spent just as much (if not more) time showing the effects of applying the new tone to various examples of writing from across the business. I also had the luxury of training the writers who would become the standard bearers for the new tone.

Improving your tone of voice guidelines

While there's a whole book to be written on this subject, I have just few recommendations for starters:

• Get the foundations right – me-too values will lead to a me-too tone of voice. Keep working to create a more distinctive set of values (not just open, honest, full of integrity and the other usual suspects)
• Show examples of the right tone – short ones, long ones, ones that span many different applications
• Find a model – look for a character or writer that exemplifies the right tone. It'll give you instant access to a body of examples that you simply won't find anywhere else
• Avoid clones – the ultimate aim is to have a distinctive authorial voice not to write by numbers (eg every Steven King book sounds like Steven King yet each is distinctive in its own way) – if your tone of voice becomes a tick box exercise, you've got it wrong