Oatly’s ‘Ditch Milk’ OOH campaign in Shoreditch, London.

Language makes us human. It’s what separates us from our primate cousins and the rest of the animal kingdom and it’s one of the most powerful tools for building connections we have. Yet, in business and marketing, language is too often overlooked. It’s undervalued and under-resourced and the responsibility for language is usually delegated downwards. Over the last twenty years, an explosion of new digital channels has shifted much of marketing’s focus from creativity to understanding and tinkering with these new media channels. The consequence has often seen budgets largely spent on tweaking consumer indifference rather than making brands famous. In the face of much of marketing’s obsession with digital and performance marketing, Chris West, founder of Verbal Identity and author of new book ‘Strong Language — the fastest, smartest, cheapest marketing tool you’re not using’, argues that the time to reconnect with language is now. In this interview, Chris talks to eatbigfish’s Jude Bliss about the three levels of brand voice, world-class examples such as Oatly and Reformation, and how to develop a powerful brand language with the constraint of just one day.

What was the frustration that led you to write Strong Language?

Most brand owners or marketing directors will have sweated their logo and visual identity. If they’re smart, they’ll know what they want to challenge as a brand and why they should adopt a challenger mentality. They’ll have carefully looked at their brand behaviours, products, and everything else.

But often seem to have forgotten these days about a fundamental and most powerful tool we have, which is language. And it’s frustrating that language is so underused. And it’s underused simply because so much else has been happening in the last 25 years with digital and, more recently, performance marketing. But I think there’s a much greater competency in digital now, and people are saying, “Well, we have so many channels, what are we putting in those channels? Oh my goodness. Shouldn’t we have better language?”. And the recent success of the book makes me feel that the time to revisit language as one of the smartest and fastest marketing tools we have is right now.

How should brand owners start thinking about creating or developing a world-class brand voice?

Many people think brand language is just a tone of voice, but there are three levels for every powerful brand voice. At 10,000 feet, if you are looking over a city, you’ve got a sense of territory. The 10,000-foot overarching narrative in a great brand voice provides a sense of the world we want to create. Oatly is a great example. It’s clear what Oatly stands for and what it stands against. And, of course, what a brand stands against is incredibly powerful in creating real clarity around a message.

Now, if you come down to 1000 feet, you get a sense of the personality of the structures and the buildings. The best Oatly stuff that I’ve seen, the messages that stick in my mind, is where they’re calling out the dairy industry. And they do some other things on the packaging, which is a wink and a nod, “You’re one of us now”, and everything else. But, what’s powerful, I think, is this confrontational sense. So Oatly has a 10,000-foot narrative that’s clear what it stands for and against, and at 1000-feet, it has a personality that’s confrontational.

Now there’s a third level as well, which is what I call the ground-level details. Oatly could have talked about climate impacts in a jargon-heavy or pompous way using detailed carbon measurements, for instance, but it doesn’t. The language and words that Oatly use are accessible to you and me. The sentence structures are simple and conversational. And the grammar follows that as well.

So for me, Oatly is the perfect example of getting consistency across all three levels of 10,000 foot, 1000 foot, and the ground-level details to create a world-class brand voice.

A brilliant example, and we’re long-term admirers of Oatly’s brand at eatbigfish. Which other challenger brands do you see as utilising powerful and distinctive brand language?

Reformation Store, Seattle. Photo: Reformation.

I subscribe to only about four newsletters, and one of those is a womenswear newsletter - not because I’m into (either metaphorically or literally) women’s clothing!

It’s because the brand language of The Reformation does that tricky job of making flat, 2D images of clothing on a small screen appealing. They’re a joy to read when they arrive. One newsletter was talking about women’s dresses during the wedding season. And it read, “Dresses, which look great, but are cut comfortably for those long boring wedding ceremonies”. I love that insight. We say ‘humanity wins’, and here, there’s an excellent insight into humanity: you and I both know what weddings are *really* like, so let’s be honest. But they’re not just being frank; they’re focusing us back onto a particular element of the product, in this case, the cut. And then another was about a dress styled to work throughout the day and long into the evening, even when you’ve had one too many, and you’re standing up at the microphone to tell the bride and groom how much you love them. So there were these sweet insights, which I thought were fantastic.

If I’m unable to change the brand voice, for instance, it’s an identity or set of guidelines I’ve inherited, how can I make it more compelling?

There’s a business management technique called the Five Why’s for when trying to get to the root cause of a problem. You ask, “Why did it go wrong?” and people usually give a superficial answer. So you ask again, “and why did that happen?” And they’ll give you the cause of that. And you keep on asking until you’ve got a fundamental reason for why something went wrong. And it’s such a powerful, simple technique that I wanted to apply the idea to help people develop brand language, so we came up with ‘The five hows’ exercise. If someone says, “one of our brand values for our brand voice is friendly”, then you ask, “well, how is it friendly?” They might then say, “It’s like a friendly mate that’s always willing to help”. Already that’s a little more differentiating. You might then ask, “How come it’s always willing to help?”. They might say, “Because we’re good at understanding issues because we’ve been around for a long time”. So just by asking the five ‘Hows’ and scratching away, you can get down to the fundamental insight and often a more exciting brand voice and language even when what the marketing lead gives you can initially seem uninspiring.

Now, this is a tall order, but if I have the constraint of just one day to make progress in developing a brilliantly differentiated brand voice, how should I spend that time?

I would use the morning to look at your existing communications. First, pick eight or nine different channels, including the obvious ones, such as advertising or social media and the less obvious ones, such as customer service or investor relations. Now score each communication channel’s language between one to five, a five for hitting the brand values and a one for missing them by a mile. Now, what’s in front of you? Is your brand voice consistent? Is it all over the place? We can then start to see how off-brand or unbranded the language in each one of our channels is.

In the early afternoon, I would pick three competitors and one brand from outside your sector and do the same thing for them. First, make your best guess at their brand values and give them a score for each channel. Then once you’ve compared yourself to competitors and a brand or two from outside your category, you can start to see where the threats and the opportunities for your brand voice are.

Finally, after spending time on analysis, I would create a commercial rationale for changing the brand voice. For example, suppose you’re spending money to win people’s attention through performance marketing, and that attention isn’t turning into engagement or sales. In that case, you could argue that putting more effort and resources into brand language might help the brand earn more engagement rather than pay for it. It’s critical to build the commercial rationale before changing the brand.

What’s your view on using real human personalities to develop brand voice? Do you find that’s a helpful exercise?

People look at real human personalities and say things like, “Oh, can we sound a bit more like Stephen Fry?” And that’s because brand guidelines are usually defined in abstract terms and often don’t mean anything to anyone.

We worked with Vauxhall in the UK, and we wanted their brand voice to be slightly cheeky but in a way that was familiar. Unfortunately, their tone of voice sounded too distant, as though no one had ever heard of Vauxhall, and it was an issue we had to overcome. So we picked the TV presenter Dermot O’Leary as an exemplar of someone that feels familiar. Because what he’s so good at is communicating in a way that makes you feel like you understand each other. He’s somehow able to leap over formality and speak with real insight into your life. Including him as an exemplar helped Vauxhall understand how to talk in a more familiar way across all their channels. It wasn’t the only thing we said, of course; if we had said the whole brand needs to sound like Dermot O’Leary, it would all have fallen flat. But using real personalities in particular areas to illustrate your guidelines can help writers instantly understand the nuances.

How should I measure the effectiveness of my brand’s language?

If you’re a challenger brand, thought leadership is one of the things you want to be known for. And that will often show up through your brand language. So you can start tracking how well you’re perceived as a thought leader in your category or even outside of your category. But let me tell you a short story about effectiveness. So a while ago, there was a hopeful guy who wanted to become president. He was idealistic and young but didn’t have an established base. And to get elected, he needs to raise money. So his team experimented with all of the marketing assets you would expect them to experiment with when trying to raise funding. So they changed the website’s layout, changed the colour palette, and changed the candidate’s photographic style. And, of course, they changed the call-to-action button. And on the call to action button, they experimented with “Join us”, “Learn more”, or “Sign up” to see what got the most clicks. And changing the language was more effective than anything else they experimented with. And the most successful of all those call-to-action buttons was “Learn more”. And it was so much more effective that it produced a 40.6% increase in donations compared to “Sign up”, and because that was directly linked to donations, they could see how much more money this brought in. And this brought in $60 million more than “Sign up” would have done. And this was, of course, President Obama’s team. So language can make $60 million of difference. But it can also mean that presidents get elected. And for me, that’s the power of language.

What are your three bits of advice for writers?

The first piece of advice is that people remember narratives better than facts. Scientific American Mind reported an experiment where the same information from Chekov’s short story “The lady with the Dog” was given to two groups of students. The first group read the short story from the book. The second group read a simple list of facts as they might have been told or overheard in a divorce court hearing. The first group could remember about 30% more facts than the second group who just had the facts. So use narrative; it engages people and helps them to retain information.

The second piece of advice is that shorter is better. Half as long is twice as engaging.

Finally, read it aloud. If you read whatever you’ve written aloud, you’ll hear where it’s clunky and where you’ve repeated words. You’ll hear where you’re stretching the logic too far. And if you’re getting breathless, your reader will certainly lose track. So read it aloud. And if it sounds wrong, it is wrong.

How to use language to grab attention, engage customers and deposition rivals