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title: "Finding Your Brand Voice – Character – Experts on Brand Character and Story"
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							![](https://characterweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/blog_img_thinker-177x300.png)								](https://characterweb.com/blog/)














### Finding Your Brand Voice







								-
						[

							by
										Jim Hardison
									](https://ipa1ewmwkdvx8gk.onstatic.studio/author/jhardison/)


				-

										August 26, 2020

















By brand voice, we mean the tone and character in which a brand
communicates—the qualities that convey its distinct and, ideally,
engaging personality. Many brand teams, when tasked with defining the
voice/tone/character of their brand, find themselves defining one that
is essentially flawless, above reproach and universally
unobjectionable—the kind of character that seems like it will reflect
well on the brand and make everyone on the management team comfortable.
This generally results in a statement like:

*X-Brand is your optimistic and helpful best friend, confident,
thoughtful, fun-loving, encouraging, informative and always there for
you.*

Unfortunately, this description defines a secondary character that no
actor would aspire to play, no audience would find compelling or
realistic—a character whose voice people will easily ignore in the scrum
of brand communications. You might as well say your brand is “nice”.

If you are struggling to identify and articulate a voice for your brand,
here are three story-based approaches that can help point you toward a
voice that is compelling, emotionally engaging and true to people’s
experience of your brand when it is at its best.

- Think of your brand voice as if it belongs to a character

What makes a character engaging? For the voice of your brand to be
interesting and engaging, it has to meet the same standards any
character would be judged against. Most people won’t pay enough
attention to your brand to hear what it is saying if its voice sounds
like all the other voices they’ve been avoiding or ignoring for years in
mainstream marketing communications. So, what does your brand voice
need? The same thing every engaging character needs—a flaw,
vulnerability, quirk, or struggle to make it interesting. Think of any
character you like from any story in any form—book, theater, TV show,
movie, musical. It’s not the perfection of the character that makes them
interesting. On the contrary, it is the problem they are wrestling with
that makes them engaging. Of course, we are not used to thinking of our
brands as flawed, so it may help to focus on a specific character…

- Ask yourself if there’s any character who reminds you of your brand

If you can summon a clear picture in your mind of who your brand is and
what that character sounds like, you will have a big leg up on both
generating and assessing brand communications. For example, saying that
a brand speaks and sounds like Abraham Lincoln would inspire a wildly
different set of creative executions than saying that it speaks and
sounds like Cardi B. Saying that the brand’s personality and outlook are
like those of Captain Jack Sparrow from *Pirates of the Caribbean* would
drive far different results than saying they are like those of Elsa from
*Frozen*. The point is, if you can identify a personality model, you’ll
have access to an excellent source of inspiration and a basis for
discussion and decision making about the kinds of things your brand
would say and how it would say them. If it is difficult to settle on a
character that really suits your brand, try something simpler…

- Start with one word that authentically describes a central quality of
your brand

Figuring out your brand voice doesn’t have to be hard. Start by trying
to think of a single word that most people would use when describing
your brand. It doesn’t have to be the only word. I know your brand is
more complex than a single descriptor. But try to find one that most
people would agree captures something important about your brand. Is
your brand smart? Innovative? Expert? Sexy? Wholesome? The key thing
here is that you choose a word you think the vast bulk of your audience
would agree is true about your brand.

Got a word? Great. That word is *not* your brand voice. On its own, a
single word like that—even if everyone agrees it’s true—is going to be
too flat to stay interesting over time. But you can use that word to get
to your brand voice. Begin by making a list of principle characters who
you might also describe with that word. When I say principle characters,
I mean the protagonist from any movie, TV show, book, or graphic novel,
or even a real person like an historical or public figure.

Let’s take *smart*, for example. Who is a smart character—one for whom
smartness is a defining quality? Well, there are a ton of characters
that might be described that way. Albert Einstein was smart. Hermione
Granger from the *Harry Potter* series is smart. Sheldon Cooper from *Big
Bang Theory* is smart. Tony Stark from *Iron Man* is smart. Leslie Knope
from *Parks and Rec* is smart.

Once you have a list, take a look at the names and see if any of the
characters feels like they’re smart in the same way your brand is smart.
The characters I’ve listed were all smart, but they were smart in
distinctly different ways. Einstein was smart in a profound but
playfully rebellious, disheveled way. Hermione is smart in a righteous,
know-it-all way. Sheldon Cooper is smart in an obsessive-compulsive,
logical but childish kind of way. Tony Stark is smart in an arrogant,
devil-may-care way. Leslie Knope is smart in a naively uncompromising
and idealistic way.

And that is the point of thinking of the descriptor in terms of a main
character. If the character is interesting and engaging, it’s because
they are smart in a way that is entertainingly flawed and problematic.

Flawed and problematic? What?

Brand teams generally are not comfortable thinking about their brands as
flawed and problematic. Most brands see themselves as a source of easy,
friction-free solutions. But smooth and friction free does not create an
engaging brand character or an interesting brand voice. It does the
opposite. Focusing on a familiar personality as a model for your brand
can help you overcome this tendency. In our experience, starting with a
specific character in mind, and then working out the ways in which your
brand is similar to that character or different from it, will make it
much easier to name the traits and qualities of your brand voice.

Identifying a personality model in the form of an existing character is
just one way of finding your brand’s voice, but having that shared
clarity about who your brand is can make a huge difference in expressing
its unique story and capturing the attention of your audience.






















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