Language is the brand’s personality

Branding has come a long way since it involved burning a mark of identification on the hide of a cow. How language is utilized, how a brand’s personality is presented, and the messages it projects are being given increasingly greater importance as markets become more crowded. It is the content, the copy, the unique message the brand delivers that counts today. Graphic design provides the brand identity and copywriting provides detail to the brand personality.

Many brands – both product and corporate – have made huge progress over the last decades through their use of graphic design and imagery, but so have consumers, who are now very brand-savvy. In today’s saturated landscape everyone has a brand, but it is not always clear what the brand stands for. It is not enough just to have a smart identity. The brand copywriter must understand the brand’s essence, its reason for existing, and explain this, with supporting information, using a voice that reflects the brand’s characteristics and appeals to the target audience.

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”

John Russell, President, Harley-Davidson

Organizations face growing competition all the time and, for many, a strong brand is the way to build market share. However, the opportunities to create future brand innovations purely through design expression are diminishing, and the shift toward delivering meaningful content consistently is the new battleground, where good copywriting comes into its own. This emphasis will increase, and as a brand and marketing copywriter you could find yourself playing a key role as the owner and guardian of the tone of voice of a client’s brand.

The brand expression has to be ahead of its time

You have to give careful thought to every aspect of a brand’s language and its tone of voice, because it mustn’t chop and change to suit the mood of the day. This means thinking ahead about the market, the customer, and how things will evolve. You’re not just looking at plans for the brand this year or next, but for the next five, ten, or more years.

Consider how the marketplace is likely to adapt and evolve over this time, and the role that your brand is going to play within this. How will its products and services adapt over time? There are no firm answers, but your aim is to allow enough freedom for the voice to evolve without needing to be redefined in the near future.

It’s not enough to create a style and tone that suits the current conditions or reflects the company’s heritage. This means taking a few chances in the short term in order to be strong in the future – the voice you create may need to move on a lot from where it is has been. The brand has to avoid being fashionable, but it must be forward-thinking. This means you must be prepared to craft messages and use a style that is ahead of its time, so that the brand tone of voice is still current in three or four years.

The challenge of rebranding or creating a new brand

What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Does it matter what the brand’s name is, or is this the most important aspect?

It is unlikely that you will be given the brief to come up with the new corporate brand name for Nike or Coca-Cola, but you may be asked to create the name for a new range of trainers or a new drink for these giants. You may also find yourself in the team that is repositioning a tired or unfocused business and everyone is looking at you, the copywriter, for the new name.If it were that simple everyone would be doing it. It’s not easy, but there are a few useful techniques that you can learn.

“A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.”

Scott Talgo, brand strategist

Giving a name to an identity

Brand naming is a tough call. Where a lot of the challenges of copywriting require a number of language crafts and creative skills, creating a single name, a word, is anyone’s game. Having the eye to know which will work well, and which won’t, is not as easy as it might seem.

You develop your critical eye for assessing a brand name over time, and through experience, but no one can claim to have all the answers when it comes to backing a specific name, and there are always surprise hits and misses. Branding requires vision, and vision requires nerve and commitment. Naming a brand is like naming a new baby. At first the name can seem unfamiliar and possibly unsuitable, but very soon the child “owns” the name and the idea of giving the baby another name is unthinkable.

“It is a pretty recognizable brand name. Originally it was ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’ but we settled on ‘Yahoo’.”

Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo

In most cases the word that is selected as the name for the new brand will seem strange. It doesn’t exist on the shelves anywhere, and doesn’t have the tangible nature of existing brands. You have to rely on your vision, and picture how the audience will respond, and how it could fit into its marketplace. If the graphics and market positioning have all been thought through and the new identity resonates with the audience, your brand will soon find its feet.

There are several routes to creating a shortlist of brand names. You could experiment with amalgamating industry terms or words to create a new hybrid name that has some relevance to the industry. You could trawl Latin and Greek dictionaries to find interesting words with good connotations. You can brainstorm your rough ideas with other creatives or business brains, pool the ideas, and see if you can come up with a couple of contenders.

Use a pencil to scribble down all of the possible words and relevant short phrases on a large sheet of paper. Try lots of routes, including looking up relevant words in dictionaries and thesauruses, searching on the internet for other possibilities, and even making up entirely new words that have a good sound or feel to them. While you’re doing this research, note any competing brands. Think laterally, play with the words and mix them around, keeping the brief in mind at all times, and establish whether hybrids can be formed. When you’ve exhausted this process have a break and return later to assess the words.

If you’re lucky, one or two of the rough ideas will appeal to you, and you can draw up a very short list of serious contenders, supported by a second list of possibles. (You should keep the rest of your roughs to one side for future reference.) Otherwise, you’ll have to repeat the brainstorming, and spread your net wider, looking for inspiration in other areas of life once the well of business language runs dry.

Next, pressure-test the words in the serious contenders list. Do any have double meanings? Could they be misinterpreted? Are they like any existing brands? Can they be spelled differently? What are the alternatives?

You’ll then have a shortlist of top potential names, some second-division alternatives, and the “also-rans.” It is worth prioritizing these as soon as possible and having two or three hot solutions that stand out confidently above the rest. Giving your client too much choice can be overwhelming and the poor ideas can water down your good ones. Never present ideas that you are not completely happy with, even if this pares down the options to the bone.