Exploring Verbal Identity in Branding

What's up brand builder Stephen Horahan here on the Brandmaster podcast and in this episode I'm speaking with verbal identity specialist and best-selling author of a book called Strong Language, the fastest, smartest and cheapest marketing tool you're not using. Now Chris has a vast bank of experience as a highly awarded writer and a verbal identity specialist working with brands such as Adidas, British Airways and The Guardian to name just a few. Now verbal identity is a topic that's grossly overlooked. and it's an area of branding and brand strategy that really gets me going as a tool of brand influence. And in our chat today, Chris shares his wisdom about what verbal identity is, why its importance and influence is growing, and how to develop an effective verbal identity for your brand or your client's brand. So if you want to learn how to enhance the brands that you build to better serve and influence your target audience from a professional verbal identity specialist, then don't miss this episode. of the Brandmaster Podcast. Welcome to the Brandmaster Podcast, a show specialized in helping branding professionals and entrepreneurs to build brands using strategy, psychology, and creative thinking. Hello everyone and welcome to the Brandmaster Podcast and I'm delighted today to have on the show with us Chris West from verbalidentity.com. Chris, thank you for taking the time out. to join us today and I'm really excited to get stuck into your area of expertise. Thank you very much, Stephen. I'm delighted to be here. Now, look, verbal identity is relatively new when we talk about household words that we all know and recognize about branding and marketing. So tell us how you got into verbal identity and really exactly what it is from your perspective. Well, I sometimes think the whole of... my career has been a few inadvertent decisions that have taken me off in the right direction so 10 years 10 12 years ago I was running a advertising business and we had clients as diverse as Sky and Christie's and that was all wonderful but each time I left a meeting and my background is as a copywriter in ad agencies but each time I left a meeting in that previous business client about 10 12 years ago client would grab me by the sleeve and say hey Chris Chris um you're a writer can you help us write 2000 words before breakfast tomorrow morning and I was like yeah okay I know I know what you're asking what you really need though is a way of controlling and conjuring your verbal brand just as much as you control and conjure your visual brand or your experience brand or anything so really you know 10 12 years ago that was it I could see that I loved brand I love brand strategy And I loved brand language as well. And if I could wind those two together, I thought, well, that would be amazing. And so I thought, yeah, OK, the name is probably for this is probably verbal identity. And I was like, OK, that's great. That's it. And then someone said, well, you know, that was invented 10 years ago. That term verbal identity was invented 10 years ago. And I said, well, no, I didn't know that. OK. But I think, you know, it recognizes that there's been a resurgence in interest in the identity, in the verbal identity of a brand. Beautiful. So you actually thought that you were coining a new term and somebody had blazed the trail 10 years before you. Yeah, absolutely. So why do you think now verbal identity is becoming more prominent today? And, you know, we're starting to talk about it a bit more. Why do you think that is? I think it's moving from being interesting to being useful and from moving from being important to being critical. And by that, I mean, I. I suppose you and I and everyone else would agree that it's obvious, really. You know, there are more channels today that a brand needs to be in than there's ever been before. And a lot of those channels are heavy or dominated by language. So, sure, you want to turn up in those different channels, you know, with an identity in language that's as strong as your visual identity. I think we would all agree that. But I think there's a couple of other things going on as well. The first is. When you think about it, we know that customers, consumers, clients, they want to be in a dialogue with brands they love. We're in this kind of crazy world where if you like this brand of oat milk, then you kind of want to be talking to them because they've managed to move away from this big corporate entity conceptualization of themselves to people like you, people like us. They're offering a conversation. They're offering an opening. for us as a consumer to get into a conversation. And that's wonderful if you're a brand owner, you know, people want to be in a conversation with you. So I think that's the other thing, I think more channels than ever before, but more consumers that want to be. in a conversation with brands they love. But there's probably something else going on. And I think that's that society has changed so much in the last three years, or there have been so many societal shocks in the last three years, that consumers now are saying to brands, what's your view on this matter? What's your view on Black Lives Matter? What's your view on this climate crisis? What's your view on this? And I think suddenly if a brand can't answer, if it doesn't have a voice, it's being called out for it. So I think it's always there's always been a need for it. But I think the need to give a brand an identifiable, differentiated, coherent voice is now critical rather than kind of useful. Yeah, I definitely hear what you're saying about the the environment today that brands live in. We're finding that consumers and this really happened with the digital transformation, with social media. All of a sudden, you know, you had these groups of people getting together online where they couldn't have done that before. You know, social media allowed them to do that. And that gave them the collective voice and that gave them the power over brands. And that was the power shift. And then, you know. brands all of a sudden found themselves having to respond to this collective voice where they didn't really have that challenge before and a lot of them were caught unaware uh there were there were uh there were a lot of examples back in you know i would say 2004 uh you know where you had the the palm oil incident um Who was that with? Again, I can't remember what brand that was, but there were a few brands back then who really dropped the ball. They fumbled in their response. And now we're seeing brands a lot more seasoned in their response today, whether it's Pepsi responding to the Kendall Jenner ad that kind of leaned on the Black Lives Matter. So do you see verbal identity as... being the guidepost for where the brand stands on these matters? Or is it more of a language and a tone, or does it encompass both? Well, I think it encompasses both. I wouldn't believe that the voice of the brand alone should be the direction which the whole brand coalesces around. I mean, it can be, right? And we've seen a couple of examples where it is. But I think it's this re-understanding of a brand, just as you said, that a brand has to work in society. It has to work with consumers. And if you are like that, then you have to have a voice that works in society. And echoing what you just said, one of the first brands I worked on back in the 90s when I was a copywriter in an ad agency, and it was wonderful, was Bridge Airways. And at that time, really, if you were based in the UK and you wanted to fly anywhere, almost the only choice you had, if you want to fly somewhere for the UK, was fly British Airways. So to a certain extent, not completely, but to a certain extent, British Airways conceptualisation of itself, and that emerged out of its brand voice, was we're British Airways. We're great if you want to fly somewhere. You've got to fly with us. You know, it was we're up here. You're there. Yeah. And I remember that reading Richard Branson's book when he came in with Virgin. That's exactly what he came up against. Exactly. And so I moved agencies and having got people to switch from whatever airline to BA, I now got, I was now working on the Virgin Atlantic account. And I had to get people to switch from flying on BA to flying on Virgin Atlantic as, you know, as the 90s have progressed. And what was great about Virgin Atlantic was this real sense of instead of. we're up here, we're the brand, you've just got to kind of suck it up, was this idea that, hey, you're cool, we're cool, let's be cool together. It was really very much like a peer-to-peer relationship. And that was, as a brand voice, as a brand conceptualization, emerged strongly in the 2000s. But I think the other thing that happened very interestingly, dot-com boom, early 2000s, was some brands realized... I... A brand isn't that interesting to a lot of people. It's not the kind of Godhead thing that it used to be. So what we saw was a lot of brands. in their conceptualization themselves and in their voice and a lot of their other activities were almost taking a step back so you want to do this and you want to do that you two people just get together and we'll just help it we'll just help it out we'll take you know it won't be like we're great look at us we're wonderful we have to do something with us it was much more about you've got stuff to do you want to do it with those people we'll just help you connect yeah and i think uh what you mentioned there about virgin and ba We could go back to Avis and Hertz back in the late 60s, where Avis took the position of the number two and kind of aligned themselves with the everyday person. Whereas Hertz were doing the whole BA thing. We're sitting up here and, you know, you've got to come and impress us. With the verbal identity components within your process, can you break down what components you believe sit? under the umbrella of verbal identity. I definitely can. Before I do that, can I rewind you 30 seconds? Because you touched on something which is really brilliant, which is I think the other reason why brands are having to pay much more attention to language these days is because there are more challenges around. Whatever sector you're in, and whether you're 150 years old or five years old, I guarantee you are being challenged by some cheeky upstart. coming into your sector. And the thing about the cheeky upstarts is they don't have a lot of money. So they can't outspend you. So they've got to outthink you. And if they've got to outthink you, then a way that they're going to do this, the way they're going to show off their outthinking is with language. So a reason why a lot of the big banks and even a lot of the fintech challengers are all thinking about language these days is they know they're all susceptible to the challenger brands moving in. And those challenger brands will try and outwit them and outpace them and take a disproportionate share of mine using language. And that's exactly the Avis and Hertz situation. I'm a big admirer of Adam Morgan's book and Adam Morgan's thinking. He wrote he literally wrote the book on challenger brands. His book is called Eat Big Fish. And it has that. It has that. When you're in number two, you try harder. He has that or used to have that on his cover or certainly prominent in the book. I think it's a key piece of thinking that we're all susceptible now to being challenged by these brands. And if we're not careful, they're going to outsmart us with language. So that's exactly what happened with Dollar Shave Club and Gillette as well. There's so many examples of it where the challenger brand uses verbals on a level that the bigger brands can't compete with because they've built their equity in a certain way. And, you know, they're kind of tied to the way that they deliver that. Old Spice is another example of where they built the equity in a certain way, but then they shifted. They shifted their verbal identity. They shifted their personality. And they tried to connect with people through humor as opposed to the, you know, the old man's brand the way it used to be. There's two critical things going on there. So the second one, using humor, kind of broke the rules of the category. It broke the rules of how you operate in the category. The rules were you have to be quite self-serious. You have to be quite masculine, quite butch, almost a toxic masculinity. And it used humor to debase that. Fantastic. And that is a that is one of the best uses of language. In the first example you mentioned, Dollar Shave Club and Gillette, I think there was something else going on there with language. And it's this language without us realizing it. Language kind of sets a. boundary and the rules for a category. It says, look, if you step outside of this boundary, you're not really in this sector. And the center of gravity, therefore, is there. It's just here. And language continually reinforces that. And actually, what Dollar Shave Club did was they broke the rules. They broke the framework, the whole conceptualization of what it was to buy and use a razor. And the whole framework was razors are really expensive razors are carefully crafted and you could i don't know cut down a tree with a razor if you need you know all this and so therefore it's really expensive and therefore you can only buy it in these places and therefore right and that was all constructed with language and and visual identity but language was really working hard to set the boundaries to set the rules in place in our mind and what dollar shave club did of course they did it with humor like but really what they were doing was they were breaking some of the rules in place and that's what a lot of politicians over the last 10 years have managed to do. They'll talk in politics and that world of the Overton window. what is the acceptable thing we can talk about? And then when you use language to shift the Overton window, you shift the Overton window into an area in which you can talk about best. And that's what language is so brilliant. And actually within politics, that's what George Bush did with the relief. What was it? I can't remember. It was in that book. ah i'm losing my words here at the moment um there's a book on framing yes um yeah yeah uh it's it's called um don't think of uh don't think of it don't think of an elephant yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah it was uh it was it was uh job reliever some kind of relief i can't remember what it was but that that is the idea of the power of language uh by anchoring to uh you know something positive and then shaping that into your own uh your own identity and aligning with that and trump trump did it again you know whether you love him or you hate him you had to have an opinion about him and he'd shifted the window again brilliantly so yeah so so let's go back to those elements those components of verbal identity what are the components of verbal identity to you over the 10 years we've been running this business i think that what we've i know that what we've seen is It's a radical reimagining of what the components of a brand voice are. So when I started out, I keep on feeling like I'm so old when I say this, but when I started out in the 90s, you never saw brief that nailed or even described the brand tone of voice. And you kind of didn't need to, because if you were the marketing director back in those days, you would have a good writer over at your ad agency, or you'd have a good writer at your... direct you know below as they were called then you're below the line agency whichever one was good you would just tell the other agency look write more like them they've got it they understand it right more like them that was early 90s late 90s as more channels more media channels developed you might get the tone of voice defined and in that case the tone of voice was defined usually as four adjectives and those adjectives you know in early 2000 were almost always human friendly warm and approachable can you write our copy so we're really differentiated from every other one of the 115 million companies on this earth it's like it's like the brand values that uh that talk about integrity and honesty and respect yeah and if you take the antonym if you take the opposite of that and it's clearly nonsense yeah then the value in the value in the first place Must be self-evident. It must be. It's apple pie and mum, right? Who doesn't want that? Wasn't that from good strategy, bad strategy? If you take the opposite of a strategy and it's nonsense, then your strategy is not a strategy. Yeah, I would think so. And it was Paul Arden, who is creative director back at Saatchi's in my early days, who also mentioned it. So it's a great idea. And it probably has its... I've got a friend who's a professor of philosophy. And I keep on meaning to ask him. Isn't there a kind of philosophical model or philosophical rationale for taking the opposite to prove? But anyway, I mean, you know, who would want to write for a brand in a way that creates an identity so that people think the brand is inhuman, cold, hostile and distant, right? Yeah. So human friendly, warm and approachable worked in the sense that some people were just writing corporate, distant and quite formal. But actually with more channels than ever before, that produces one big challenge. And I think the big challenge these days is how can you be consistent across all of your channels? But how can you flex the voice for different channels in different moments? So you and I and everyone here with us on the show, we will probably speak differently on Twitter, if we're on Twitter, to how we might speak. to the in-laws or how we might speak to a lawyer if there's something going on yeah in that way so we know instinctively that we are still the same person but we're flexing our voice in real you know in our daily lives and actually that's what a brand needs to do when it's got so many it doesn't want to turn up on social media using the same kind of feeling creating the same kind of thing they might do in a customer service complaint letter yeah you want them to be coming from the same place. So we looked early on in the days of verbal identity in my business, we looked at how language worked. And what we saw was that kind of almost whether... the brand owners and the brand designers and the brand strategists, whether they realized it or not, all brand voice is working on three levels. It's not that kind of tone of voice generality. What we found was that behind every great differentiated brand voice, there's a very strong sense of a worldview, a world that they're trying to create. You know, it's almost like they never say it explicitly. Sometimes they do, but they usually don't need to. Everything they say comes from this place of we are trying to create a world where this is happening better. And therefore we stand for this and therefore we're going to call out and stand against that. So we realised that was going on and we imagined that as almost a 10,000 foot overarching level. Gives you a sense of the territory and what is going on in the territory, even though that's never explicitly. or rarely is that explicitly mentioned. You come down to a thousand feet, imagine zooming down from ten thousand feet to a thousand feet over an area and now you're getting a strong sense of the personality. I'm talking to you from Oxford right, it's a medieval city which is struggling with the demands of 21st century life. So you can see that narrative playing out at ten thousand feet, you know, 200 yards that way there's a medieval building, 100 yards that way. there's a shopping car park. That's an attitude. If you come down to a thousand feet where I am now, you can see exactly that playing out in the total values. You know, these kind of buildings, there's no Manhattan-esque 180-story skyscrapers, right? Of course there aren't. You know, it just doesn't fit in with the narrative. So for every brand differentiated, clear brand voice, there's this thousand-foot level where the personality is coming out, those strong tonal values. And then if you come down to the ground level, every great brand voice is very conscious of those things which you can actually put your finger on, on the page. Things like grammar choices, things like the words and phrases we use and don't use, things like how much jargon we use. So one of our earliest clients was Fred Perry and wonderful CEO. He said, Chris, we've got to stop calling them stores because stores is an Americanism. I'm aware of where. a British brand. And so we sell in shops, you know, so resolving those ground level details, the words and phrases we use and don't use, whether we're going to be really modern in our grammar, very street in our grammar, very formal in our grammar, how much jargon we use, deciding all of that stuff is really important, because it reinforces the tonal values of the thousand foot, which reinforces or is, you know, is informed by the overarching narrative at 10,000 feet. So I think that most brands and most brand owners and most kind of designers and strategists, when they're working with language, they'll often, or a lot of them, they'll often have a really strong sense of, no, this is right for us. And the client will look at them and go, no, it's just not. Right. The truth is they're both right, but they're only both partially right. So the client might be seeing that this is our 10,000 foot worldview. this is what our brand is put on earth to do this is the world we're trying to create and and so this needs to inform the choices of everything we write about and the angle on the things we that we take that we that we write about now the designer might be sitting there designers brilliant right hugely empathetic very nuanced in their feelings very precise in what is what isn't now they could be focused on the tonal values And something they've said has thrown the client because the client's heard that that's a different 10,000 foot level. But actually, the designer's got it right at this 1,000 foot level, this personality, these tones. What we need to do in these discussions is recognize these three levels, recognize which level we're talking about, and then make sure that these three levels all reinforce each other. Because once you get it right at the 10,000 foot level, it's suddenly a lot easier to know. what you should write about and the angle you should take on it. When you get it right at the thousand foot level and that thousand foot level, that tonal personality is a good realization of that 10,000 foot overarching narrative. When you get it right at the thousand foot level, the copy, the language is just lovely. I mean, it's so true to you as a business. It's so personality driven. It's really differentiated. And when you get it right at the ground level, when you've had agreement in advance on this is the start of... grammar we use these are the words and phrases we do don't use then you avoid getting that 7 p.m on a friday night call from a client or from a design team saying hey why have i just seen this on social media we don't talk like that well we've had the discussion right you know we flex our grammar like this in these places And we use jargon here, but not there. So the three key components are really identifying this 10,000 foot level, the overarching narrative, 1,000 foot level, tonal values, personality, and ground level details of jargon, grammar, a couple of other things. And then making sure that they're all reinforcing each other. So I really, really like that because the way I visualize everything, that's how I operate. I create visual frameworks for everything. So the way I see it is the higher up the levels you go, the more strategic they are. The lower down we go, the more tactical they are. So at the top level, we're talking about what we're for and what we're against. In the middle level, we're talking about personality and attributes and the way we want to talk. And on the ground level, then we're talking about the tactical. approach of the language, the words we use and the environments or the platforms within which we use them. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you said they're more strategic, higher up and lower down, I thought we're going to say more mechanical, to a certain extent, tactical and mechanical overlapping here. You don't want to be in long, I've been in meetings in New York with the New York office of a global firm that started in Britain. And they had a long, expensive meeting about whether they should use IZE or ISE, ISE or IZE, at the end of those kind of words, in America, in their communications, because they're a British brand. And should they, you know, nationalize, nationalize? Wow, what an expensive conversation to have, right? But fix it because it's mechanical. Well, and what was the outcome, just out of curiosity? Can you remember? I think the outcome was that you stayed with the. British dictionary because the rep not for any I mean not for kind of random or or kind of nationalistic reasons but just because the rest of the brand had leveraged a sense of Britishness you get this kind of service and that had had echoes of what people in Britain will think is great British service and you know you'll be treated we'll do things in this particular way so there was Britishness throughout so it kind of made sense that the like you know so that was 10,000 foot world view right it was just that's it And their personality, well, we're not going to turn up and be brash, you know, hard-driven, loud-mouthed. No, we're going to turn up in real life and in language with these kind of whatever their tonal values were. So therefore, the ground level details would have been wrong if they'd Americanized. Yeah. And by exactly how you've laid that out, if you have your top level, if you have your top level clear, then a simple question at the top level can fix anything. confusion at the bottom level really really quickly yeah and here's the interesting thing some people naturally intuitively I think have a focus on one of those levels so if I'm in a conversation with people who've come through come through journalism or PR their tendency is to think that they're going to define the voice from ground level details because if you sit in the Guardian newspaper if you sit in the New York Times one of the things you're given is the style guide And the style guide is really those mechanical ground level details. We treat abbreviations this way. We spell out numbers up to the number, you know, we write up to number 12. Yeah, whatever it is. You know, if you are a wonderful, intuitive designer coming from the graphic design, visual design world, you've played so much with nuances of personality. You almost locate almost inevitably located around the thousand foot personality level. Yeah. If as a business owner, you've had to grow as a designer, you've grown your own business, you're now leading a business. And the conversations you're having with clients are much more around business and strategy. Then your thinking has gone up to that 10,000 foot level. But you can never throw away any of the other levels. That's why I think it's a really useful framework. Yeah, I absolutely love that because it just gives you and that's the thing. I believe systems or frameworks are the cornerstone of any business. And I certainly believe that within branding too, because brands are so, can be so creative and expressive. And, you know, if you're given a sandbox to play in, it allows you to go wherever you want to go. If you understand the rules of the game. Now, do you recommend, because obviously you're a copywriter by trade. So verbal identity is something that, you know, you've brought a, you know, a gun to a knife fight if you're going toe to toe with somebody who is not from a copywriting background. Do you recommend working with copywriters as a strategist if you do not have that copywriting background? I would like to think if I twist your analogy, I think I've brought a buffet to a knife fight, right? It's not it's not zero sum game, you know, particularly with designers. Right. I mean, I remember talking to the creative director of the brand over in Ireland and he said, yeah, but the thing is, Chris, right. I get all that around the language, but it's visuals. Visuals attract. I said, that's it. Exactly. Visuals attract. Verbals engage. You can see it. You go to a gallery, like the Clore Gallery in London, and there's Turner's shipwreck, this huge painting, beautiful, dramatic. People step into the gallery and they're momentarily stunned. And you can see them. They walk over. They walk right up to it. And what do they do? They bend to the right away from the frame of the picture because they want to read that little plaque on the side that the curator's written. You know, the visuals attract, the verbals engage. So with copywriters, with designers, with strategists, with business owners, I don't want to think that I've brought the heavy armory. I think what I've brought is the buffet, right? It's to say, look, you've got this. We've got this. Let's pick what we want that's going to make this work together. And so I would say to a business owner or to a designer. If you've found a copywriter that intuitively gets what this brand is about, throw your arms around them and hold on to them. Yeah. Yeah. And let's hope they don't go on holiday. Because. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love what you said before about visuals attract and verbals engage. And one of my rules of thumb within branding. If there's any doubt, bring it back to the human situation. And the whole idea about visuals attract, verbals engage, we can all relate to the attraction of another person, no matter who you are. And how many times have you met somebody where you look at them and you could look at them all day and then you talk to them and they just bore the life out of you? Yeah. You know, there's a misalignment there because the visuals attract it. but the verbals failed to engage. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we can all kind of relate to that in some kind of way. What do you think the correlation is between a brand's personality and the verbal identity? Because from my perspective, I believe that personality is something that, you know, is a main course in and of itself. From your perspective, do you see a correlation between personality being created as its own part of the puzzle? Or do you see that as part of the verbal identity? Yeah, it's a smart question, because it makes me think personality is a thing which, when defined properly, has its own value, is valuable in itself. It's a valuable... asset entity that you've created for the business. However, the value can't be realized until the personality causes something to happen in a particularly personality driven way. So you could be very pure and say personality is distinct from verbal identity, just as personality is distinct from visual identity. And largely, you're true, you're right. But I think that the point of the personality is to drive how you turn up in the visual. It's how you turn up in the customer experience. It's how you turn up in the brand language. And I think probably what we've had working with businesses as varied as Alphabet's moonshot factory in Silicon Valley, to a kind of billionaire jeweler in India, to a kind of two person startup. in skincare business in London. What we've often seen is that when we develop the verbal identity, there's this wonderful moment in the middle of a project when the client team or the agency team will say to us, ah, that's helped us understand something that we hadn't quite got focused properly in the brand personality. It's helped us understand a bit more about who we are. and I'm sure that whether you're a visual designer or customer experience designer you've had that same wonderful moment in a project where as far as you're hired what you're hired for is let's create this visual identity. But actually through that, I mean, that's kind of wonderful, but boring ultimately. But through that, you're helping the brand team understand more about the personality of their own brand. And I think that's a wonderful moment. So I think, going back to your question, they are distinct, but they inform each other in a really interesting way. Yeah, and I think we could even throw visual identity in there as a trifecta. Because the personality, you know, seasons the visual identity and the verbal identity. But, you know, they all feed back into each other. And without one, you can't have the other. Now, in terms, let's bring it down to the ground level for a second. And let's get into the client situation. Because... We deal with clients on a daily basis and maybe the term verbal identity might be a bit overwhelming. Talk to us about your process of bringing clients in to this framework or this process and what does that look like? So we're in a lucky-ish position, which is people are connecting with us and saying, give us a brand voice. And. partly because of a kind of supply-demand issue, but partly also from an honesty and ethics point of view. The first thing we'll say is, why do you want one? Right? If you think this is going to answer all of your... Someone contacted us recently from a startup, and they said, oh, you know, we've been doing this three years. We're not getting traction. We've come to the conclusion it's around our verbal identity. My first question is not, you know, how much can you afford to pay? How long have you got? But it's, why do you think that? So being really clear on what role you think the brand voice has for your business is important. I don't know. Is that kind of self? Is that is that really obvious? Does everyone do that? I don't know. I mean, no, look, I think this is I think this is all relatively new, you know, and we're kind of breaking new ground with. with the various aspects of brand today because for me brand has been evolving for 40 years if you think about how brand was taught uh you know within you know a marketing uh degree 40 years ago brand was this subset of of marketing now it's grown into this overarching discipline that governs everything within a business from you know the the uh the internal environment within the business you know the types of people they take on the business decisions the supply chains to the the visual and the verbal identity and the the brand has been growing yeah just as this human entity and that's how i see it the uh you know the verbal identity now is is an area that like like an artist we're kind of refining the fine details and we're we're getting into the to the nuances of how brands connect with humans. So in our process, there are three or four steps, and it reflects a lot of what you're saying. I heard this wonderful expression, and I think it was probably coined by Wally Owens back in the 80s or 90s. He said, a brand is the organizing thought for a business. That's fantastic, right? That's what I'm, yeah, it is. You've got so many decisions to make. A brand is a set of... values around guiding those decisions. So that's why we will say right at the beginning, look, what role do you think Brand Voice is going to have? Now, the next step, and there may be three, four, five steps in the process. The next step is, I think it's really important to get the client team to focus, if you can, on some metrics. And I know metrics are really boring, but... Snap! some changes what is it you want to see what is it that you're hoping this to change and they can be really human factors they don't have to be kind of classic business metrics so we work with one large tech business and they said our marketing team are working three weekends out of four writing and rewriting and rewriting and we said okay that's a great metric to aim to change because there's a huge human cost there and if you know and if you want to put a financial basis to it we can equate that i mean they're not being paid over time but you could kind of calculate what that is as an overtime payment and effectively those people are paying the company that to work there you know as well as you know as well as the human cost or you can look at um well you know how long do you expect those people to continue being able to work three weekends out of four a year okay so you're gonna have to rehire someone in a year that's gonna cost money so or you can say some of the more conventional business metrics let's get an idea of those like we're engaging people to this extent in these channels or in these areas or even internal costs like For some reason, it takes us eight weeks to write a blog post, right? And then there's a surprising amount of businesses that are in that situation. That's, you know, what would happen to your business if you shrunk that to four weeks or two weeks without any extra hours, without any extra people? Once you've got some of those in place, what you find is that there are more people that want to change the brand voice rather than just the brand owner or the external agency or whatever it is. You suddenly got a lot more people engaged. And at that point, then you can do a kind of survey if you want. You can do a little email survey. You can do a kind of series structured interviews around the client business, the brand business, just to get a sense of how people perceive their own brand, how aware of their brand voice they are. Now, we take a slightly different, in the next couple of steps, we take a slightly different view to other people. We believe that the best way to... to identify the true brand voices kind of from the inside out. Understand the business, understand that quiet, nuanced personality of the business, and then work out how that turns up in a voice. Sometimes if you come from, say, a classic, reductive management consultancy background, what you'll say to a client team is, there's this size gap in the market. Be like everyone else, but just be different, right? Okay, so that's an outside in, but we see it as working really inside out. So we do structured interviews, we do some email surveys for bigger companies, and we get then a bunch of different people in a room for one or two workshops. And the key thing in these workshops is whoever you bring in, most of them will think, yeah, I'm not a language person. You know, I have no language sensibility or I can write. And actually, we can turn that around. in five minutes we will get everyone in five minutes to understand that they intuit they are intuitive forensic linguists and that they can identify this piece copies from that person that piece copies from that brand and when you ask them how do they know it their answers will fit neatly into the three levels and at that moment you've kind of switched everyone on to oh yes language works really well so and then we'll tease out we'll work with them you know you different workshop exercises we've developed over the last 10-12 years and we will develop two or three different territories where the brand voice can work and we'll take that away. Final couple of steps are really to make those territories work as almost like a piece of clockwork, talk to the client team, guide them, let us be guided by the client team on which one of those territories is right and then start building them out into proper guidelines brand voice guidelines not four adjectives on a page our guidelines tend to be around about 20 pages lots of examples unpacking the three different levels lots of little tips for writers in there as well and I would then say that's 40 all of what I described is 49% of the job because the 51% of the job you know what it is it's training writers it's training the non-writers it's getting everyone in the business to start using this beautiful beautiful Now, I spoke a little earlier in the introduction about where you've come from and the fact that you've written a bestselling book on verbal identity. Look, there is strong language. Now, obviously, verbalidentity.com is where you live as a business. Is that the best place to go to find out a bit more? about you or where where can people go if they want to grab that book yeah if they want to grab that book amazon of course if you're in the states barnes and noble uh usual places yeah and you still have physical copies available we have physical copies available old style physical copies where you can uh you know draw on the pages and or put it under the nose of someone else in your business and lovely big fat uh post-it note saying I think this works. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I am terribly embarrassed about our website, verbalidentity.com. You know what? You can tell. that I'm a writer, not a designer. You can tell that our business are a bunch of writers, not a bunch of designers. It's shocking. It's shocking, really, Stephen. I mean, it's but, you know, if we can be forgiven for that, then you can look at verbalidentity.com. But the things that we see happening in language every day, I write a lot about on LinkedIn. So, you know, Chris West, there's probably only 10 million Chris West in this world. So if you... If you look on LinkedIn for Chris West Verbal Identity, there's more going on there. Yeah, well, look, I'll be definitely leaving links, whether you like it or not, to your website and to the book as well. So if you're listening to this or at the moment, you can jump on BrandMasterAcademy.com and find the episode of the podcast and the show notes there. Chris, it's been very enlightening into this new world of verbal identity. I really like. uh your your philosophy and your thought process of of how to break down and develop that verbal identity and uh yeah it's been it's been very enjoyable so thank you so much for taking the time to to come on the show my pleasure thank you thank you everyone for listening thank you for hosting me and uh yeah let us know what you've got going on in the future i'll definitely uh check out your website if it's really bad i'll let you know um and no doubt i'll uh i'll see you in the socials See you in the sections. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Chris. We really hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to learn more brand strategy techniques to level up your skills, make sure you check out brandmasteracademy.com. There's plenty of free resources and premium content for you to download and get you going. like to join our Facebook group full of like-minded brand strategists all learning from each other then find us by searching for the brand strategy community where you can find exclusive content from members as well if you enjoyed this content please be sure to give us an honest review on iTunes Stitcher or wherever you listened and make sure you tune in for the next episode of the Brandmaster Podcast

and it's an area of branding and brand strategy that really gets me going as a tool of brand influence. And in our chat today, Chris shares his wisdom about what verbal identity is, why its importance and influence is growing, and how to develop an effective verbal identity for your brand or your client's brand. So if you want to learn how to enhance the brands that you build to better serve and influence your target audience from a professional verbal identity specialist, then don't miss this episode.

of the Brandmaster Podcast. Welcome to the Brandmaster Podcast, a show specialized in helping branding professionals and entrepreneurs to build brands using strategy, psychology, and creative thinking. Hello everyone and welcome to the Brandmaster Podcast and I'm delighted today to have on the show with us Chris West from verbalidentity.com. Chris, thank you for taking the time out.

to join us today and I'm really excited to get stuck into your area of expertise. Thank you very much, Stephen. I'm delighted to be here. Now, look, verbal identity is relatively new when we talk about household words that we all know and recognize about branding and marketing.

So tell us how you got into verbal identity and really exactly what it is from your perspective. Well, I sometimes think the whole of... my career has been a few inadvertent decisions that have taken me off in the right direction so 10 years 10 12 years ago I was running a advertising business and we had clients as diverse as Sky and Christie's and that was all wonderful but each time I left a meeting and my background is as a copywriter in ad agencies but each time I left a meeting in that previous business client about 10 12 years ago client would grab me by the sleeve and say hey Chris Chris um you're a writer can you help us write 2000 words before breakfast tomorrow morning and I was like yeah okay I know I know what you're asking what you really need though is a way of controlling and conjuring your verbal brand just as much as you control and conjure your visual brand or your experience brand or anything so really you know 10 12 years ago that was it I could see that I loved brand I love brand strategy And I loved brand language as well. And if I could wind those two together, I thought, well, that would be amazing.

And so I thought, yeah, OK, the name is probably for this is probably verbal identity. And I was like, OK, that's great. That's it. And then someone said, well, you know, that was invented 10 years ago. That term verbal identity was invented 10 years ago.

And I said, well, no, I didn't know that. OK. But I think, you know, it recognizes that there's been a resurgence in interest in the identity, in the verbal identity of a brand.

Beautiful. So you actually thought that you were coining a new term and somebody had blazed the trail 10 years before you. Yeah, absolutely.

So why do you think now verbal identity is becoming more prominent today? And, you know, we're starting to talk about it a bit more. Why do you think that is? I think it's moving from being interesting to being useful and from moving from being important to being critical. And by that, I mean, I.

I suppose you and I and everyone else would agree that it's obvious, really. You know, there are more channels today that a brand needs to be in than there's ever been before. And a lot of those channels are heavy or dominated by language.

So, sure, you want to turn up in those different channels, you know, with an identity in language that's as strong as your visual identity. I think we would all agree that. But I think there's a couple of other things going on as well. The first is. When you think about it, we know that customers, consumers, clients, they want to be in a dialogue with brands they love.

We're in this kind of crazy world where if you like this brand of oat milk, then you kind of want to be talking to them because they've managed to move away from this big corporate entity conceptualization of themselves to people like you, people like us. They're offering a conversation. They're offering an opening. for us as a consumer to get into a conversation.

And that's wonderful if you're a brand owner, you know, people want to be in a conversation with you. So I think that's the other thing, I think more channels than ever before, but more consumers that want to be. in a conversation with brands they love.

But there's probably something else going on. And I think that's that society has changed so much in the last three years, or there have been so many societal shocks in the last three years, that consumers now are saying to brands, what's your view on this matter? What's your view on Black Lives Matter?

What's your view on this climate crisis? What's your view on this? And I think suddenly if a brand can't answer, if it doesn't have a voice, it's being called out for it. So I think it's always there's always been a need for it. But I think the need to give a brand an identifiable, differentiated, coherent voice is now critical rather than kind of useful.

Yeah, I definitely hear what you're saying about the the environment today that brands live in. We're finding that consumers and this really happened with the digital transformation, with social media. All of a sudden, you know, you had these groups of people getting together online where they couldn't have done that before. You know, social media allowed them to do that. And that gave them the collective voice and that gave them the power over brands.

And that was the power shift. And then, you know. brands all of a sudden found themselves having to respond to this collective voice where they didn't really have that challenge before and a lot of them were caught unaware uh there were there were uh there were a lot of examples back in you know i would say 2004 uh you know where you had the the palm oil incident um Who was that with?

Again, I can't remember what brand that was, but there were a few brands back then who really dropped the ball. They fumbled in their response. And now we're seeing brands a lot more seasoned in their response today, whether it's Pepsi responding to the Kendall Jenner ad that kind of leaned on the Black Lives Matter. So do you see verbal identity as...

being the guidepost for where the brand stands on these matters? Or is it more of a language and a tone, or does it encompass both? Well, I think it encompasses both.

I wouldn't believe that the voice of the brand alone should be the direction which the whole brand coalesces around. I mean, it can be, right? And we've seen a couple of examples where it is. But I think it's this re-understanding of a brand, just as you said, that a brand has to work in society.

It has to work with consumers. And if you are like that, then you have to have a voice that works in society. And echoing what you just said, one of the first brands I worked on back in the 90s when I was a copywriter in an ad agency, and it was wonderful, was Bridge Airways.

And at that time, really, if you were based in the UK and you wanted to fly anywhere, almost the only choice you had, if you want to fly somewhere for the UK, was fly British Airways. So to a certain extent, not completely, but to a certain extent, British Airways conceptualisation of itself, and that emerged out of its brand voice, was we're British Airways. We're great if you want to fly somewhere. You've got to fly with us.

You know, it was we're up here. You're there. Yeah. And I remember that reading Richard Branson's book when he came in with Virgin. That's exactly what he came up against.

Exactly. And so I moved agencies and having got people to switch from whatever airline to BA, I now got, I was now working on the Virgin Atlantic account. And I had to get people to switch from flying on BA to flying on Virgin Atlantic as, you know, as the 90s have progressed. And what was great about Virgin Atlantic was this real sense of instead of. we're up here, we're the brand, you've just got to kind of suck it up, was this idea that, hey, you're cool, we're cool, let's be cool together.

It was really very much like a peer-to-peer relationship. And that was, as a brand voice, as a brand conceptualization, emerged strongly in the 2000s. But I think the other thing that happened very interestingly, dot-com boom, early 2000s, was some brands realized... I... A brand isn't that interesting to a lot of people.

It's not the kind of Godhead thing that it used to be. So what we saw was a lot of brands. in their conceptualization themselves and in their voice and a lot of their other activities were almost taking a step back so you want to do this and you want to do that you two people just get together and we'll just help it we'll just help it out we'll take you know it won't be like we're great look at us we're wonderful we have to do something with us it was much more about you've got stuff to do you want to do it with those people we'll just help you connect yeah and i think uh what you mentioned there about virgin and ba We could go back to Avis and Hertz back in the late 60s, where Avis took the position of the number two and kind of aligned themselves with the everyday person. Whereas Hertz were doing the whole BA thing.

We're sitting up here and, you know, you've got to come and impress us. With the verbal identity components within your process, can you break down what components you believe sit? under the umbrella of verbal identity.

I definitely can. Before I do that, can I rewind you 30 seconds? Because you touched on something which is really brilliant, which is I think the other reason why brands are having to pay much more attention to language these days is because there are more challenges around. Whatever sector you're in, and whether you're 150 years old or five years old, I guarantee you are being challenged by some cheeky upstart. coming into your sector.

And the thing about the cheeky upstarts is they don't have a lot of money. So they can't outspend you. So they've got to outthink you.

And if they've got to outthink you, then a way that they're going to do this, the way they're going to show off their outthinking is with language. So a reason why a lot of the big banks and even a lot of the fintech challengers are all thinking about language these days is they know they're all susceptible to the challenger brands moving in. And those challenger brands will try and outwit them and outpace them and take a disproportionate share of mine using language. And that's exactly the Avis and Hertz situation.

I'm a big admirer of Adam Morgan's book and Adam Morgan's thinking. He wrote he literally wrote the book on challenger brands. His book is called Eat Big Fish. And it has that. It has that.

When you're in number two, you try harder. He has that or used to have that on his cover or certainly prominent in the book. I think it's a key piece of thinking that we're all susceptible now to being challenged by these brands. And if we're not careful, they're going to outsmart us with language.

So that's exactly what happened with Dollar Shave Club and Gillette as well. There's so many examples of it where the challenger brand uses verbals on a level that the bigger brands can't compete with because they've built their equity in a certain way. And, you know, they're kind of tied to the way that they deliver that.

Old Spice is another example of where they built the equity in a certain way, but then they shifted. They shifted their verbal identity. They shifted their personality. And they tried to connect with people through humor as opposed to the, you know, the old man's brand the way it used to be.

There's two critical things going on there. So the second one, using humor, kind of broke the rules of the category. It broke the rules of how you operate in the category.

The rules were you have to be quite self-serious. You have to be quite masculine, quite butch, almost a toxic masculinity. And it used humor to debase that. Fantastic.

And that is a that is one of the best uses of language. In the first example you mentioned, Dollar Shave Club and Gillette, I think there was something else going on there with language. And it's this language without us realizing it.

Language kind of sets a. boundary and the rules for a category. It says, look, if you step outside of this boundary, you're not really in this sector.

And the center of gravity, therefore, is there. It's just here. And language continually reinforces that.

And actually, what Dollar Shave Club did was they broke the rules. They broke the framework, the whole conceptualization of what it was to buy and use a razor. And the whole framework was razors are really expensive razors are carefully crafted and you could i don't know cut down a tree with a razor if you need you know all this and so therefore it's really expensive and therefore you can only buy it in these places and therefore right and that was all constructed with language and and visual identity but language was really working hard to set the boundaries to set the rules in place in our mind and what dollar shave club did of course they did it with humor like but really what they were doing was they were breaking some of the rules in place and that's what a lot of politicians over the last 10 years have managed to do.

They'll talk in politics and that world of the Overton window. what is the acceptable thing we can talk about? And then when you use language to shift the Overton window, you shift the Overton window into an area in which you can talk about best.

And that's what language is so brilliant. And actually within politics, that's what George Bush did with the relief. What was it?

I can't remember. It was in that book. ah i'm losing my words here at the moment um there's a book on framing yes um yeah yeah uh it's it's called um don't think of uh don't think of it don't think of an elephant yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah it was uh it was it was uh job reliever some kind of relief i can't remember what it was but that that is the idea of the power of language uh by anchoring to uh you know something positive and then shaping that into your own uh your own identity and aligning with that and trump trump did it again you know whether you love him or you hate him you had to have an opinion about him and he'd shifted the window again brilliantly so yeah so so let's go back to those elements those components of verbal identity what are the components of verbal identity to you over the 10 years we've been running this business i think that what we've i know that what we've seen is It's a radical reimagining of what the components of a brand voice are. So when I started out, I keep on feeling like I'm so old when I say this, but when I started out in the 90s, you never saw brief that nailed or even described the brand tone of voice. And you kind of didn't need to, because if you were the marketing director back in those days, you would have a good writer over at your ad agency, or you'd have a good writer at your...

direct you know below as they were called then you're below the line agency whichever one was good you would just tell the other agency look write more like them they've got it they understand it right more like them that was early 90s late 90s as more channels more media channels developed you might get the tone of voice defined and in that case the tone of voice was defined usually as four adjectives and those adjectives you know in early 2000 were almost always human friendly warm and approachable can you write our copy so we're really differentiated from every other one of the 115 million companies on this earth it's like it's like the brand values that uh that talk about integrity and honesty and respect yeah and if you take the antonym if you take the opposite of that and it's clearly nonsense yeah then the value in the value in the first place Must be self-evident. It must be. It's apple pie and mum, right?

Who doesn't want that? Wasn't that from good strategy, bad strategy? If you take the opposite of a strategy and it's nonsense, then your strategy is not a strategy. Yeah, I would think so. And it was Paul Arden, who is creative director back at Saatchi's in my early days, who also mentioned it.

So it's a great idea. And it probably has its... I've got a friend who's a professor of philosophy.

And I keep on meaning to ask him. Isn't there a kind of philosophical model or philosophical rationale for taking the opposite to prove? But anyway, I mean, you know, who would want to write for a brand in a way that creates an identity so that people think the brand is inhuman, cold, hostile and distant, right?

Yeah. So human friendly, warm and approachable worked in the sense that some people were just writing corporate, distant and quite formal. But actually with more channels than ever before, that produces one big challenge.

And I think the big challenge these days is how can you be consistent across all of your channels? But how can you flex the voice for different channels in different moments? So you and I and everyone here with us on the show, we will probably speak differently on Twitter, if we're on Twitter, to how we might speak. to the in-laws or how we might speak to a lawyer if there's something going on yeah in that way so we know instinctively that we are still the same person but we're flexing our voice in real you know in our daily lives and actually that's what a brand needs to do when it's got so many it doesn't want to turn up on social media using the same kind of feeling creating the same kind of thing they might do in a customer service complaint letter yeah you want them to be coming from the same place. So we looked early on in the days of verbal identity in my business, we looked at how language worked.

And what we saw was that kind of almost whether... the brand owners and the brand designers and the brand strategists, whether they realized it or not, all brand voice is working on three levels. It's not that kind of tone of voice generality.

What we found was that behind every great differentiated brand voice, there's a very strong sense of a worldview, a world that they're trying to create. You know, it's almost like they never say it explicitly. Sometimes they do, but they usually don't need to. Everything they say comes from this place of we are trying to create a world where this is happening better. And therefore we stand for this and therefore we're going to call out and stand against that.

So we realised that was going on and we imagined that as almost a 10,000 foot overarching level. Gives you a sense of the territory and what is going on in the territory, even though that's never explicitly. or rarely is that explicitly mentioned.

You come down to a thousand feet, imagine zooming down from ten thousand feet to a thousand feet over an area and now you're getting a strong sense of the personality. I'm talking to you from Oxford right, it's a medieval city which is struggling with the demands of 21st century life. So you can see that narrative playing out at ten thousand feet, you know, 200 yards that way there's a medieval building, 100 yards that way. there's a shopping car park.

That's an attitude. If you come down to a thousand feet where I am now, you can see exactly that playing out in the total values. You know, these kind of buildings, there's no Manhattan-esque 180-story skyscrapers, right? Of course there aren't. You know, it just doesn't fit in with the narrative.

So for every brand differentiated, clear brand voice, there's this thousand-foot level where the personality is coming out, those strong tonal values. And then if you come down to the ground level, every great brand voice is very conscious of those things which you can actually put your finger on, on the page. Things like grammar choices, things like the words and phrases we use and don't use, things like how much jargon we use.

So one of our earliest clients was Fred Perry and wonderful CEO. He said, Chris, we've got to stop calling them stores because stores is an Americanism. I'm aware of where.

a British brand. And so we sell in shops, you know, so resolving those ground level details, the words and phrases we use and don't use, whether we're going to be really modern in our grammar, very street in our grammar, very formal in our grammar, how much jargon we use, deciding all of that stuff is really important, because it reinforces the tonal values of the thousand foot, which reinforces or is, you know, is informed by the overarching narrative at 10,000 feet. So I think that most brands and most brand owners and most kind of designers and strategists, when they're working with language, they'll often, or a lot of them, they'll often have a really strong sense of, no, this is right for us. And the client will look at them and go, no, it's just not. Right.

The truth is they're both right, but they're only both partially right. So the client might be seeing that this is our 10,000 foot worldview. this is what our brand is put on earth to do this is the world we're trying to create and and so this needs to inform the choices of everything we write about and the angle on the things we that we take that we that we write about now the designer might be sitting there designers brilliant right hugely empathetic very nuanced in their feelings very precise in what is what isn't now they could be focused on the tonal values And something they've said has thrown the client because the client's heard that that's a different 10,000 foot level.

But actually, the designer's got it right at this 1,000 foot level, this personality, these tones. What we need to do in these discussions is recognize these three levels, recognize which level we're talking about, and then make sure that these three levels all reinforce each other. Because once you get it right at the 10,000 foot level, it's suddenly a lot easier to know. what you should write about and the angle you should take on it. When you get it right at the thousand foot level and that thousand foot level, that tonal personality is a good realization of that 10,000 foot overarching narrative.

When you get it right at the thousand foot level, the copy, the language is just lovely. I mean, it's so true to you as a business. It's so personality driven.

It's really differentiated. And when you get it right at the ground level, when you've had agreement in advance on this is the start of... grammar we use these are the words and phrases we do don't use then you avoid getting that 7 p.m on a friday night call from a client or from a design team saying hey why have i just seen this on social media we don't talk like that well we've had the discussion right you know we flex our grammar like this in these places And we use jargon here, but not there.

So the three key components are really identifying this 10,000 foot level, the overarching narrative, 1,000 foot level, tonal values, personality, and ground level details of jargon, grammar, a couple of other things. And then making sure that they're all reinforcing each other. So I really, really like that because the way I visualize everything, that's how I operate. I create visual frameworks for everything.

So the way I see it is the higher up the levels you go, the more strategic they are. The lower down we go, the more tactical they are. So at the top level, we're talking about what we're for and what we're against.

In the middle level, we're talking about personality and attributes and the way we want to talk. And on the ground level, then we're talking about the tactical. approach of the language, the words we use and the environments or the platforms within which we use them. Is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you said they're more strategic, higher up and lower down, I thought we're going to say more mechanical, to a certain extent, tactical and mechanical overlapping here. You don't want to be in long, I've been in meetings in New York with the New York office of a global firm that started in Britain.

And they had a long, expensive meeting about whether they should use IZE or ISE, ISE or IZE, at the end of those kind of words, in America, in their communications, because they're a British brand. And should they, you know, nationalize, nationalize? Wow, what an expensive conversation to have, right?

But fix it because it's mechanical. Well, and what was the outcome, just out of curiosity? Can you remember? I think the outcome was that you stayed with the.

British dictionary because the rep not for any I mean not for kind of random or or kind of nationalistic reasons but just because the rest of the brand had leveraged a sense of Britishness you get this kind of service and that had had echoes of what people in Britain will think is great British service and you know you'll be treated we'll do things in this particular way so there was Britishness throughout so it kind of made sense that the like you know so that was 10,000 foot world view right it was just that's it And their personality, well, we're not going to turn up and be brash, you know, hard-driven, loud-mouthed. No, we're going to turn up in real life and in language with these kind of whatever their tonal values were. So therefore, the ground level details would have been wrong if they'd Americanized.

Yeah. And by exactly how you've laid that out, if you have your top level, if you have your top level clear, then a simple question at the top level can fix anything. confusion at the bottom level really really quickly yeah and here's the interesting thing some people naturally intuitively I think have a focus on one of those levels so if I'm in a conversation with people who've come through come through journalism or PR their tendency is to think that they're going to define the voice from ground level details because if you sit in the Guardian newspaper if you sit in the New York Times one of the things you're given is the style guide And the style guide is really those mechanical ground level details.

We treat abbreviations this way. We spell out numbers up to the number, you know, we write up to number 12. Yeah, whatever it is. You know, if you are a wonderful, intuitive designer coming from the graphic design, visual design world, you've played so much with nuances of personality. You almost locate almost inevitably located around the thousand foot personality level. Yeah.

If as a business owner, you've had to grow as a designer, you've grown your own business, you're now leading a business. And the conversations you're having with clients are much more around business and strategy. Then your thinking has gone up to that 10,000 foot level.

But you can never throw away any of the other levels. That's why I think it's a really useful framework. Yeah, I absolutely love that because it just gives you and that's the thing. I believe systems or frameworks are the cornerstone of any business.

And I certainly believe that within branding too, because brands are so, can be so creative and expressive. And, you know, if you're given a sandbox to play in, it allows you to go wherever you want to go. If you understand the rules of the game. Now, do you recommend, because obviously you're a copywriter by trade. So verbal identity is something that, you know, you've brought a, you know, a gun to a knife fight if you're going toe to toe with somebody who is not from a copywriting background.

Do you recommend working with copywriters as a strategist if you do not have that copywriting background? I would like to think if I twist your analogy, I think I've brought a buffet to a knife fight, right? It's not it's not zero sum game, you know, particularly with designers. Right.

I mean, I remember talking to the creative director of the brand over in Ireland and he said, yeah, but the thing is, Chris, right. I get all that around the language, but it's visuals. Visuals attract.

I said, that's it. Exactly. Visuals attract. Verbals engage. You can see it.

You go to a gallery, like the Clore Gallery in London, and there's Turner's shipwreck, this huge painting, beautiful, dramatic. People step into the gallery and they're momentarily stunned. And you can see them.

They walk over. They walk right up to it. And what do they do?

They bend to the right away from the frame of the picture because they want to read that little plaque on the side that the curator's written. You know, the visuals attract, the verbals engage. So with copywriters, with designers, with strategists, with business owners, I don't want to think that I've brought the heavy armory.

I think what I've brought is the buffet, right? It's to say, look, you've got this. We've got this. Let's pick what we want that's going to make this work together. And so I would say to a business owner or to a designer.

If you've found a copywriter that intuitively gets what this brand is about, throw your arms around them and hold on to them. Yeah. Yeah.

And let's hope they don't go on holiday. Because. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I love what you said before about visuals attract and verbals engage. And one of my rules of thumb within branding. If there's any doubt, bring it back to the human situation. And the whole idea about visuals attract, verbals engage, we can all relate to the attraction of another person, no matter who you are.

And how many times have you met somebody where you look at them and you could look at them all day and then you talk to them and they just bore the life out of you? Yeah. You know, there's a misalignment there because the visuals attract it.

but the verbals failed to engage. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we can all kind of relate to that in some kind of way. What do you think the correlation is between a brand's personality and the verbal identity? Because from my perspective, I believe that personality is something that, you know, is a main course in and of itself.

From your perspective, do you see a correlation between personality being created as its own part of the puzzle? Or do you see that as part of the verbal identity? Yeah, it's a smart question, because it makes me think personality is a thing which, when defined properly, has its own value, is valuable in itself. It's a valuable... asset entity that you've created for the business.

However, the value can't be realized until the personality causes something to happen in a particularly personality driven way. So you could be very pure and say personality is distinct from verbal identity, just as personality is distinct from visual identity. And largely, you're true, you're right.

But I think that the point of the personality is to drive how you turn up in the visual. It's how you turn up in the customer experience. It's how you turn up in the brand language.

And I think probably what we've had working with businesses as varied as Alphabet's moonshot factory in Silicon Valley, to a kind of billionaire jeweler in India, to a kind of two person startup. in skincare business in London. What we've often seen is that when we develop the verbal identity, there's this wonderful moment in the middle of a project when the client team or the agency team will say to us, ah, that's helped us understand something that we hadn't quite got focused properly in the brand personality.

It's helped us understand a bit more about who we are. and I'm sure that whether you're a visual designer or customer experience designer you've had that same wonderful moment in a project where as far as you're hired what you're hired for is let's create this visual identity. But actually through that, I mean, that's kind of wonderful, but boring ultimately.

But through that, you're helping the brand team understand more about the personality of their own brand. And I think that's a wonderful moment. So I think, going back to your question, they are distinct, but they inform each other in a really interesting way. Yeah, and I think we could even throw visual identity in there as a trifecta.

Because the personality, you know, seasons the visual identity and the verbal identity. But, you know, they all feed back into each other. And without one, you can't have the other. Now, in terms, let's bring it down to the ground level for a second.

And let's get into the client situation. Because... We deal with clients on a daily basis and maybe the term verbal identity might be a bit overwhelming. Talk to us about your process of bringing clients in to this framework or this process and what does that look like?

So we're in a lucky-ish position, which is people are connecting with us and saying, give us a brand voice. And. partly because of a kind of supply-demand issue, but partly also from an honesty and ethics point of view.

The first thing we'll say is, why do you want one? Right? If you think this is going to answer all of your... Someone contacted us recently from a startup, and they said, oh, you know, we've been doing this three years. We're not getting traction.

We've come to the conclusion it's around our verbal identity. My first question is not, you know, how much can you afford to pay? How long have you got? But it's, why do you think that? So being really clear on what role you think the brand voice has for your business is important.

I don't know. Is that kind of self? Is that is that really obvious?

Does everyone do that? I don't know. I mean, no, look, I think this is I think this is all relatively new, you know, and we're kind of breaking new ground with. with the various aspects of brand today because for me brand has been evolving for 40 years if you think about how brand was taught uh you know within you know a marketing uh degree 40 years ago brand was this subset of of marketing now it's grown into this overarching discipline that governs everything within a business from you know the the uh the internal environment within the business you know the types of people they take on the business decisions the supply chains to the the visual and the verbal identity and the the brand has been growing yeah just as this human entity and that's how i see it the uh you know the verbal identity now is is an area that like like an artist we're kind of refining the fine details and we're we're getting into the to the nuances of how brands connect with humans. So in our process, there are three or four steps, and it reflects a lot of what you're saying.

I heard this wonderful expression, and I think it was probably coined by Wally Owens back in the 80s or 90s. He said, a brand is the organizing thought for a business. That's fantastic, right? That's what I'm, yeah, it is. You've got so many decisions to make.

A brand is a set of... values around guiding those decisions. So that's why we will say right at the beginning, look, what role do you think Brand Voice is going to have?

Now, the next step, and there may be three, four, five steps in the process. The next step is, I think it's really important to get the client team to focus, if you can, on some metrics. And I know metrics are really boring, but...

Snap! some changes what is it you want to see what is it that you're hoping this to change and they can be really human factors they don't have to be kind of classic business metrics so we work with one large tech business and they said our marketing team are working three weekends out of four writing and rewriting and rewriting and we said okay that's a great metric to aim to change because there's a huge human cost there and if you know and if you want to put a financial basis to it we can equate that i mean they're not being paid over time but you could kind of calculate what that is as an overtime payment and effectively those people are paying the company that to work there you know as well as you know as well as the human cost or you can look at um well you know how long do you expect those people to continue being able to work three weekends out of four a year okay so you're gonna have to rehire someone in a year that's gonna cost money so or you can say some of the more conventional business metrics let's get an idea of those like we're engaging people to this extent in these channels or in these areas or even internal costs like For some reason, it takes us eight weeks to write a blog post, right? And then there's a surprising amount of businesses that are in that situation. That's, you know, what would happen to your business if you shrunk that to four weeks or two weeks without any extra hours, without any extra people? Once you've got some of those in place, what you find is that there are more people that want to change the brand voice rather than just the brand owner or the external agency or whatever it is.

You suddenly got a lot more people engaged. And at that point, then you can do a kind of survey if you want. You can do a little email survey.

You can do a kind of series structured interviews around the client business, the brand business, just to get a sense of how people perceive their own brand, how aware of their brand voice they are. Now, we take a slightly different, in the next couple of steps, we take a slightly different view to other people. We believe that the best way to...

to identify the true brand voices kind of from the inside out. Understand the business, understand that quiet, nuanced personality of the business, and then work out how that turns up in a voice. Sometimes if you come from, say, a classic, reductive management consultancy background, what you'll say to a client team is, there's this size gap in the market.

Be like everyone else, but just be different, right? Okay, so that's an outside in, but we see it as working really inside out. So we do structured interviews, we do some email surveys for bigger companies, and we get then a bunch of different people in a room for one or two workshops.

And the key thing in these workshops is whoever you bring in, most of them will think, yeah, I'm not a language person. You know, I have no language sensibility or I can write. And actually, we can turn that around.

in five minutes we will get everyone in five minutes to understand that they intuit they are intuitive forensic linguists and that they can identify this piece copies from that person that piece copies from that brand and when you ask them how do they know it their answers will fit neatly into the three levels and at that moment you've kind of switched everyone on to oh yes language works really well so and then we'll tease out we'll work with them you know you different workshop exercises we've developed over the last 10-12 years and we will develop two or three different territories where the brand voice can work and we'll take that away. Final couple of steps are really to make those territories work as almost like a piece of clockwork, talk to the client team, guide them, let us be guided by the client team on which one of those territories is right and then start building them out into proper guidelines brand voice guidelines not four adjectives on a page our guidelines tend to be around about 20 pages lots of examples unpacking the three different levels lots of little tips for writers in there as well and I would then say that's 40 all of what I described is 49% of the job because the 51% of the job you know what it is it's training writers it's training the non-writers it's getting everyone in the business to start using this beautiful beautiful Now, I spoke a little earlier in the introduction about where you've come from and the fact that you've written a bestselling book on verbal identity. Look, there is strong language.

Now, obviously, verbalidentity.com is where you live as a business. Is that the best place to go to find out a bit more? about you or where where can people go if they want to grab that book yeah if they want to grab that book amazon of course if you're in the states barnes and noble uh usual places yeah and you still have physical copies available we have physical copies available old style physical copies where you can uh you know draw on the pages and or put it under the nose of someone else in your business and lovely big fat uh post-it note saying I think this works.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but I am terribly embarrassed about our website, verbalidentity.com.

You know what? You can tell. that I'm a writer, not a designer. You can tell that our business are a bunch of writers, not a bunch of designers.

It's shocking. It's shocking, really, Stephen. I mean, it's but, you know, if we can be forgiven for that, then you can look at verbalidentity.com. But the things that we see happening in language every day, I write a lot about on LinkedIn. So, you know, Chris West, there's probably only 10 million Chris West in this world.

So if you... If you look on LinkedIn for Chris West Verbal Identity, there's more going on there. Yeah, well, look, I'll be definitely leaving links, whether you like it or not, to your website and to the book as well.

So if you're listening to this or at the moment, you can jump on BrandMasterAcademy.com and find the episode of the podcast and the show notes there. Chris, it's been very enlightening into this new world of verbal identity. I really like.

uh your your philosophy and your thought process of of how to break down and develop that verbal identity and uh yeah it's been it's been very enjoyable so thank you so much for taking the time to to come on the show my pleasure thank you thank you everyone for listening thank you for hosting me and uh yeah let us know what you've got going on in the future i'll definitely uh check out your website if it's really bad i'll let you know um and no doubt i'll uh i'll see you in the socials See you in the sections. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Chris. We really hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to learn more brand strategy techniques to level up your skills, make sure you check out brandmasteracademy.com. There's plenty of free resources and premium content for you to download and get you going. like to join our Facebook group full of like-minded brand strategists all learning from each other then find us by searching for the brand strategy community where you can find exclusive content from members as well if you enjoyed this content please be sure to give us an honest review on iTunes Stitcher or wherever you listened and make sure you tune in for the next episode of the Brandmaster Podcast

Transcript for:Exploring Verbal Identity in Branding

Transcript for:
Exploring Verbal Identity in Branding