Invisible Brand

CCHM Creative Director Lucian Camp comments on the underestimated importance of a distinctive tone of voice.

How would you like £1000 for ten minutes’ work? Then take this simple bet. I bet you £100, at odds of ten to one, that you can’t match ten short pieces of financial services marketing copy to a list of ten financial services companies. Just email me and I’ll send you the pieces of copy and the list of names. I don’t expect to be flooded with emails. I don’t think you’ll fancy your chances of being able to identify one company’s promotional copy from another’s. And even though the odds are ten to one, getting it wrong will still cost you £100.

The funny thing is that if I made exactly the same offer in the context of visual style, I’d expect to get a lot of interest - and, indeed, to lose a lot of money. Pretty much without exception, major service-sector players have worked hard to achieve consistent and distinctive design styles, and despite the odd lapse they tend to stick to them.

What’s the reason for this striking contrast? Why is it that when it comes to achieving differentiation, 99% of the effort goes into the look, and only 1% into the voice? What’s the point of explicitly showing your customers that you’re different, but then implicitly telling them that you’re the same? With a language rich and flexible enough to give us Shakespeare’s sonnets and Daily Sport headlines, how can we be so easily satisfied with the generic, the pedestrian and the deadly dull?

It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It matters very much. For one thing, we’re all well aware that winning and keeping our target markets’ attention is the biggest communications challenge that we face. People aren’t, as a rule, hugely enthusiastic about reading our stuff, or hugely determined to remember whose stuff is whose: making our copywriting interesting and distinctive is one of the more obvious things we can do to overcome the problem.

What’s more, it’s not that there’s a lack of evidence that it works. Even today, people still talk about a Chelsea estate agent, Roy Brooks, who, back in the sixties, ran property ads that actually told the truth about the properties - overgrown gardens, leaky roofs, titchy bedrooms and all. Forty years on, I guess that a dotcom like The Motley Fool relies on its tone of voice and its attitude to differentiate and engage. And outside the world of marketing communications, ten million people a day aren’t reading The Sun for its art direction (regardless of page 3).

Yet even though it matters, even though it works and even though it’s not that hard to do, I doubt if one in twenty communications teams - on agency and client side alike - give any serious thought to choosing from the thousands of different tones of voice available, from Straightforward Conversational to Rhyming Couplets, the one that works best for their brand and their target market.

On the contrary, all too often in my experience, clients, account handlers and even copywriters can egg each other on to new heights of apathy. Clients don’t want anything interesting, account handlers and planners don’t call for anything interesting in the brief, and copywriters don’t bother even to try writing anything interesting, because they know that if they did, the best bits would attract a swarm of blue pencils before the ink was dry.

I wish I could tell you that CCHM and its client base is a happy exception to this rather depressing rule. I think we’re a good deal better than average - on about a third of our accounts we have clear and agreed copy guidelines in place, on another third we don’t, and on the third third (?) there aren’t any agreed guidelines, but at least we have a sense within the agency of what we’re trying to achieve. But even so, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

It’s an improvement which I’m extremely keen to encourage - partly for the rather selfish reason that it makes the average copywriter’s working life a good deal more stimulating and challenging, partly because as a consumer I’m tired of reading those endless reams of characterless and unrewarding copy, but most of all because I hate to see clients fail to make the most of a source of real competitive advantage.

And all of that said, I think that’s enough of the Straightforward Conversational version. Let’s take it from the top in rhyming couplets:

Take this bet at odds of ten to one And play a game that might be kinda fun. Read ten short bits of copy, and then choose Which is which, or rather whose is whose...