Rachel Van’t Land: Finding Your Brand Voice – Episode 42

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Rachel Van’t Land helps businesses speak in a credible voice that aligns with their brand. She is a copywriter, brand strategist, and content strategist based in Seattle, WA.

Rachel and I talked about:

• how she defines “voice” and how she helps her clients find theirs
• the importance of voice – it’s every bit as, if not more important than, your logo and other visual branding elements
• how you can end up with an “accidental” brand voice if you don’t pay enough attention to it up front
• how there’s a perception that “anyone can do the writing,” whereas not everyone can use Photoshop or make a logo
• her process for helping clients articulate their voice – it works best if you can work alongside the brand and leadership team from the start
• the importance of deep foundational work to inform the articulation of the brand voice
• the combination of qualitative and quantitative (analytics) research to inform voice development
• how the starting point in her projects can vary depending on how much of that fundamental work has already been done
• how the terms “conversational” and “authentic” drive her nuts
• her hunch that most people mean “relaxed” and “approachable” when they say “conversational”
• Microsoft’s success in developing a conversational tone in their consumer messages
• her thoughts on the differences between “voice” and “tone” – you usually speak in  the same voice but adopt a different tone depending on the context (e.g., Target using a pun in an Easter promo but being much more formal when letting you know about a data breach)
• the unique benefits of establishing voice in a consulting role, as opposed to an in-house role or as part of an ongoing agency team
• how “voice” is a living, breathing thing, worth revisiting on a regular basis
• her work with a company that has grown and added products by acquisition and how to maintain a consistent voice through the process
• her use of a “this not that” methodology to fine-tune one-word descriptions of an aspect of voice
• the differences between voice-and-tone and grammatical-style guides
• her work with chatbot auto-answers, making sure they conform with the brand voice, and how it is often really more of a tone problem that needs to be solved
• “It’s never to late to work on brand voice.” – never to late to revisit – a quick site audit against the current voice and tone guide, e.g.
• circling back the “conversational” voice – how The Evergrey has established a genuinely conversational style in their publication

Rachel’s Bio

Rachel Van’t Land is a copywriter and consultant who helps organizations use storytelling to bring the right messages into their marketing. When she’s not at the keyboard, she’s meeting up with friends, coordinating her family schedule, or nerding out over marketing books. Her favorite things are desert hikes and free refills on coffee. You can find her at suncatchercopy.com.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 42 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us, Rachel Van’t Land. Rachel’s a copywriter, a content strategist, and a brand strategist here in Seattle, Washington. She runs an outfit called Suncatcher Copy, and I’ll let Rachel tell you a little bit more about herself.

Rachel:
Yeah, thanks Larry. Thank you for having me. So as Larry said, I am the founder of Suncatcher Copy. And I help brands come up with the right messaging and positioning, and then the way to convey it effectively to their audience. That involves a lot of storytelling, but it also involves finding the right voice and the way to connect the message with the audience. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

Larry:
Right. That’s why I ask … Rachel and I are old friends, and we’re also both members of the Impact Hub in Seattle. We were chatting there awhile back, and the idea of voice and tone came up. I don’t think, in these 42 episodes, that I’ve done an episode dedicated to voice and tone. So, bad me for waiting this long, but I’m happy to have Rachel here.

Larry:
So tell me a little bit about how voice … we’ve talked a little bit about this, about how it can be, I don’t think elusive is the right word. But sort of tell me how you define voice and how you help your clients kind of come up with theirs.

Rachel:
Yeah. Well, actually I think elusive is a good word because it can be. If you’re just trying to pin it down without doing the foundational work around the brand first then it’s gonna feel really hard to define. Voice is actually a foundation of branding, and a foundation of brand work. And I think a lot of times when we think about brand we think about logo and colors and fonts, and the visual identity. But how you sound is an equal part of how somebody else perceives you.

Rachel:
I like to think of it … you know in the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts is going through this transformation. And she, at the first part of the transformation they put her in fancy clothes and get her hair all done up, and someone looking at her would think she’s very wealthy, very refined. And then she opens are mouth and she’s using terrible grammar and just sort of street talk. And it’s really confusing to people who interact with her because her look and her sound are not aligned. They’re very different. And people don’t know what to make of her. And in the movie it works. It’s a funny part of her transformation. But you don’t want people to have that experience with your brand. So it’s important to develop it all at once.

Larry:
Right. You’re getting at some of the . . . I think one of the most important things in your digital or real-life presence these days is genuinely authentic portrayal of yourself. And it sounds like voice can be a really important part of that.

Rachel:
It can. It can, and it … I think a lot of times what happens is brands like to develop the visual identity and then they turn to do the voice, but sometimes the voice takes a backseat. Sometimes it’s a phase two, and it can come quite a ways after the website has launched or what have you. And then what can happen is that the voice becomes accidental. So a lot of times if it’s not baked into the branding up front, the brand voice just defaults to the writing style of whoever’s writing the website or whoever’s writing the email newsletters. And then maybe a freelance writer comes on, or they engage an agency, and then that writer is just emulating what they’re already seeing. And then it just sort of becomes accidental. And sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t because it wasn’t built with the messaging in mind. It wasn’t built with the brand’s reputation in mind. It wasn’t built with audience in mind.

Larry:
It seems like there’s a parallel universe thing going on here between, in the UX world and the design world there’s that whole disconnect there will be just lorem ipsum and copy holding something.

Rachel:
Right.

Larry:
And if you don’t have a voice it’s analogous to that, right? It’s just like something like lorem ipsum, like “Oh we’ll just use some generic thing. The writers will do that thing later.” Is it, it sounds like that same dynamic and attitude going on.

Rachel:
It is. And I think part of why that happens is that we’ve all written things throughout our lives. We had to write essays in school, and we all know how to use Word or Google Docs. So there’s a perception that, “Well, anyone can do the writing, but nobody knows how to use Photoshop or make a logo. So we have to make that a professional project, but then the writing can just be filled in by whoever has time.” And I think that also plays into the accidental nature of voice sometimes.

Rachel:
I was at a business forum this weekend, and I swung by the table of somebody. And she, when she heard I was a copywriter she said, “Oh, can you please take a look at my flyer? I don’t think we’re nailing the story, and my designer just filled in the copy so I don’t know if it’s good.” And that happens a lot. That’s not, it’s pretty common. And unless you’re really thinking of it upfront, that’s kinda what you’re gonna end up with.

Larry:
No, I think that’s the classic example you just gave there. It’s like, “Oh we’ll just have the, and you’ll just do your word thing right? And just take a few minutes and make it right.” But what you’re saying is there’s a lot of fundamental work that needs to undergird that whole project. Can you tell me a little bit about your process, like how you help a client articulate their voice?

Rachel:
Yeah. Well the most effective process is to be part of the overall brand strategy. So one of my favorite projects was working for a personal injury law firm, and it was part of a rebrand. And I worked hand-in-hand with the creative director who was handling the visual aspect of it to do some workshops with the leadership team at this law firm, to say, “How do you see yourself? How are you different from other law firms? What do you bring to the table that we wanna convey, that nobody else does? And how do you like to connect with your clients? What are your clients saying they need?”

Rachel:
We talked with the customer service rep who takes the initial phone calls and said, “What are the things that people are asking? And what are the things they’re afraid to ask, but they eventually ask?” Just getting at all the nuances of the way that they interact, and then the way that they fit in the general landscape of the competitiveness of that industry.

Rachel:
And then understanding that, then “Okay who’s your audience? When do they tend to seek you out, and in what ways?” And it’s from all of that that we can start to say, “Okay, well when people seek you out they’re usually recently injured or someone they love is recently injured. They’re feeling vulnerable. They’re worried about money. And at the same time, you’re an authority and you can really strongly go to bat for them.” So the voice needs to convey authority, but it needs to do it in a way that’s really warm and inviting and reassuring. But I wouldn’t have been able to come to that without all of that foundational work to understand the brand, and working alongside the creative director on the brand positioning and coming up with the messaging.

Larry:
That must be an interesting . . .  it must be a really interesting playing field. Each client you engage or each project you go into, there’s probably been some attempt. I mean, they have a voice that, whenever you come in, I’m assuming.

Rachel:
Yeah. Yeah.

Larry:
And then, and a lot of this is like, is it kind of like crossing those … cause I’m assuming that there might be, depending on even personalities in a company like the branding guys or the just some copywriter has just been on a roll or something. How much of your work is kind of coordinating and aligning folks across those different activities that show what the voice is already?

Rachel:
Yeah, that’s a good question. And like you said, a lot of times there are different people involved. And that’s actually one of the reasons that I’m usually brought in, is like “Okay, we have enough people creating content now, and we need to have some sort of similarity. There needs to be some common thread.” And a lot of it is just building relationships with the individual stakeholders, and understanding why they write the way they write or if there’s something that they really like to convey.

Rachel:
A lot of it is looking at the analytics if they’ve been tracking analytics to see what types of things get the most engagement, and is there a commonality in the voice and tone there that might really be landing with the audience? So there’s a lot of … it’s a slow process. It’s not, I can’t just walk in, read your visual identity guidelines or your positioning statement and declare “Okay, this is the voice for you.”

Larry:
Right. It sounds like there’s a combination of, you were just saying, some forensic work, looking at the analytics and the traffic and stuff.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Larry:
But there must be some ethnography as well. You were talking earlier sort of talking to the stakeholders and getting a sense of the institutional kind of perception. Like talking to the customer service person for example.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Larry:
Can you tell me more about, is that, do you approach it that way like a researcher? Or what’s your sort of mindset as you go in?

Rachel:
Well a lot of it depends on how much a company has already put into branding. So if they’ve already done a lot of that foundational work, and they can kinda show me their due diligence and I can see maybe there aren’t a lot of gaps between what they’ve already done and what I would wanna know, then that’s a different starting point. But a lot of it is really understanding the audience. I think sometimes voice work can initially come from a place of “Hey, we wanna get this message out. We wanna be perceived this way,” and it’s about the output. But I really like to make sure that we’re balancing it with, “What do we know about the audience? How do these people normally talk? How do they normally think? How do, what do they need to feel excited about your brand?” And trying to bridge that with voice.

Larry:
That kinda gets to something we also talked about earlier. What the word “conversational” actually means, because that can take on different meanings, right?

Rachel:
Yes. And you see that a lot in voice descriptions. And actually it drives me crazy. The two words that drive me crazy are “conversational” and “authentic” because both of them really depend on who’s talking. I could write in a conversational voice that’s emulating my grandpa at his Friday morning coffee with his old geezer friends. And that’s a very different voice than if I am listening through the door when my 11 year old daughter is having a sleepover with her friends, and the way they talk to each other. So both of them could be described as conversational, but they’re nothing alike.

Rachel:
I think what people usually mean when they say “conversational” is they just want it to sound somewhat relaxed and approachable. I think, yeah, again it’s just who’s having the conversation. Until I know that, I don’t know how to interpret that in the writing.

Larry:
Right. I forget who said it, but who was the … oh it was, was it William Gibson or somebody, I think, who said that the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. And I think conversational, because I think some people when they think of conversational they’re like, “Oh I’ll just talk like grandpa or my daughter.” They don’t really think it through. But some people have nailed it. Can you think of, because I think we know good conversational style when we hear it, but I’m struggling to come up with an example here in the moment. Can you think of a good example of somebody who has really nailed the conversational voice?

Rachel:
Oh, that’s a good question. I think Microsoft does it well in a lot of their consumer communications. Let’s see, I’m kind of drawing a blank. I might need to circle back on that one.

Larry:
Okay, yeah. No, and that’s … I was struggling myself, so no worries. But hey, one thing that occurred to me as we were talking here. You know, you never hear just people, or rarely hear just talking about voice, it’s always voice and tone. You talk about the famous MailChimp voice and tone guide, and how that manifests. How do you distinguish between, and put together … tell me about your thoughts on voice and tone as a pair.

Rachel:
Yeah. They’re often said together as a pair, and sometimes it can be a little blurred. I like to think of it as … When I was a kid my mom did the cooking in our family. While she was cooking dinner I was often in my room, on the top bunk, with a book. And dinner would be ready, and she would call in “Hey, Rach. Time to eat.” And then I’d keep reading. And then the second time it would be, “Rachel, we’re sitting down. Come on.” And then I’d keep reading. And by the third time it was “Get your butt in the chair.” So it’s the same voice, it’s my mom’s. She’s talking like mom. But the tone is different because the situation is different.

Rachel:
And the way you see this played out with brands is … Take, for example, Target. I was on their homepage this morning, and they had a subhead for one of their sections that it’s for Easter and it said, “Gift ideas for every bunny.” It was kind of cute and clever and playful, a little pun. But if Target were to send me an email letting me know there was a data breach and my data might be effected, they’re not gonna get playful with puns, right? They’re gonna be more subdued. The tone’s gonna be a little more serious. It’s going to be reassuring cause they need to convey that they take this seriously and all is well, and “Please don’t freak out, we’ve got this.” So they might use the same voice which might use maybe short sentences. It might be something that is really approachable and relaxed, but the tone is gonna be different because the situation is different.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that example of your mom was a perfect way to keep that in mind, cause I think we can all relate to that, the escalation. And like you said, context matters so much there with what’s the … is this a playful ad, or is this an urgent communication about something of importance?

Rachel:
Right, and your mom might have used three different statements to convey the rising levels of urgency. And her wording would have been different. So the voice would have been different cause it’s a different person speaking.

Larry:
Yeah. And yeah, and I’m reminded of some things that I won’t repeat here on the podcast.

Rachel:
Right.

Larry:
… at the top level of that escalation. Yeah.

Rachel:
So her voice was authentic, right?

Larry:
Oh it was authentic, and it was … she had a well-established brand as a parent.

Rachel:
Right.

Larry:
Yeah. So back to kind of how you do this, working with the clients. We were talking also earlier about how you work mostly as a consultant. You’ve, I think you’ve done, you’ve kind of been in-house as a consultant, I think, or a contractor.

Rachel:
I have.

Larry:
But anyhow, tell me about what you think of the benefits of operating in that realm as opposed to an agency or an in-house person.

Rachel:
Yeah. I think consultant is a great middle ground if you’re not ready to hire somebody as an employee on salary whose only job is communications.

Rachel:
Agencies are great. Sometimes, from my agency experience, you’ll have different writers rotating on and off projects. So you might get one writer one week, and then for the next project the next week you might get a different writer. There might be some back and forth. So in that case you kinda want your voice guidelines to be really clear, because they’re gonna be interpreted on the fly. It might not always be the same person. That said, a lot of agencies have somebody who’s acting as more of a copy chief who would catch drifts in voice and make sure it came across as cohesive to the client. As a client, that would be something to explore with the agency if that was important to you.

Rachel:
Having a consultant can be great because if you’ve got that person around long enough for them to pick up the voice then you can hire them on a project basis or on a retainer if you have a lot of ongoing content that you need. And that person gets the voice. They get the nuances of it. They can sometimes even help evolve it or help define something in the voice that’s consistent but hasn’t been defined yet. So I think the ongoing nature of a relationship with someone creating content, whether it’s in-house, agency, consultant, that’s really where the magic is because voice is really nuanced and it can take a little while to pick it up and to start getting really consistent with it.

Larry:
Yeah. Are you typically on a retainer? Or do you have an ongoing relationship?

Rachel:
Yeah, it varies. A couple of my clients, I do work on retainer. It just sort of evolved that way after doing some projects for them and building up that relationship and building up that rapport. And then as I get more knowledge with their brand I can add more value, because then I can start recommending things and be in more of a consultant role. So it varies a little bit depending on what’s needed, but I really do think the most value happens when there’s an ongoing relationship.

Larry:
Yeah. Cause it seems like, it’s almost getting, there’s a governance aspect to this. Once you’ve all agreed on the voice and tone, how do you make sure it’s implemented? And like you said some, and that probably depends totally on the company you’re working with, whether they have a managing editor or somebody on board. Is that how it works?

Rachel:
Yeah, sometimes. I mean sometimes it’s the marketing director or even product managers sometimes. And sometimes there’s a brand team, and in that case it’s usually, the voice is usually established. But it’s always something that’s revisited. It’s a living, breathing thing. Times change, trends change, audiences change. And so it’s something worth revisiting every couple years.

Larry:
Well yeah. And you’re reminding me, well you’ve worked mostly in enterprises. I think you’ve done a lot with Microsoft. But you’re currently working more with smaller outfits like non-profits and things, right?

Rachel:
Right now I have the range. I have, my three, well my three or four clients are in a range from enterprise to mid-size business to one brand that’s just starting up to a non-profit. So it’s a bit of a range right now.

Larry:
Okay. I’m just wondering if you’ve been through growth? I mean, like you just said, there’s things just trends and market conditions and things like that change. But there’s also, especially with startups or with smaller businesses, there can be an evolution from scrappy startup to established player to budding enterprise. Have you ever been with somebody through that sort of transition?

Rachel:
Yeah. There’s one company that I’ve been working with for a couple of years now, and they’ve, they acquired a new product line. There’s been, they have several different brands under their umbrella. So I’ve really loved being a part of that because it’s really creative to go “Okay, we have this thing now. We’re gonna rebrand it at our own brand. How are we gonna do that?” And to just be there from … you know, the product existed, but it was being rebranded and folded into another brand. So it became a fresh opportunity.

Larry:
Oh right. So, that’s right, and that kind of thing comes up all the time.

Rachel:
Right.

Larry:
I’m also curious, as you work with people, what are the deliverables that you leave behind? Do you often create a formal voice and tone guide? What kind of guidance do you give to folks?

Rachel:
Yeah. Sometimes I’ll create a voice and tone guide. And a lot of times what I do for that, just because with voice and tone guides it’s common to use single words to describe what the voice would be. So it might be approachable or authoritative or what have you. But those can be a little bit hard to interpret when somebody actually sits down to write the copy.

Rachel:
So a lot of what I’ll do is, I’ll do “this not that” examples. So I’ll take a paragraph that maybe it’s written in sort of what the default voice was before we decided to actually shape the voice intentionally. And I’ll re-write it into the new voice. Or I’ll write examples for different channels like, “Here’s how it might look on the homepage. Here’s how it might look in the email.”

Rachel:
Something that could be easily misinterpreted, like friendly, I’ll take it to two ends of the polarity just to demonstrate “Okay it’s not super chatty like a cheerleader on crack, kind of like whee! It’s not like that.” So not trying to hard. And maybe it’s, “but it’s not a drab friendly it’s like this.” And I’ll give them the range so that they can help understand what we mean when we say “friendly”.

Larry:
Nice. You’re reminding me of my first magazine journalism teacher who, this still sticks in my head everyday, “Show, don’t tell.”

Rachel:
Right.

Larry:
So instead of some dry, boring manual you show examples of how to do what you’re setting out to do. Yeah, and what about, the other thing that often, they kind of go sometimes hand-in-hand, but just wondering how much overlap there is with a grammatical style manual. I think most people just adopt Chicago or AP or something like that. But have you ever helped embed voice and tone in more of a grammatical kind of style guide? Or how does that, is that ever manifested that way?

Rachel:
I haven’t seen it manifest that way. Most of the times that I’ve worked with an organization that is going to that length to describe or define voice and tone and style, they’re usually side-by-side. Sometimes the voice and tone will be described in the style guide, but then the style guide just gets into the nitty gritty of “When you’re talking about time do you say capital A, capital M? Or is it lower case A, period, lower case M, period?” You know, little nuances like that that are less about the voice and more about grammatical consistency. And especially if there are things in that industry or things unique to that company, that might not show up in Chicago manual style or the AP style guide that need to be spelled out specifically.

Larry:
Right. That’s, I guess that’s kind of what I was getting at, and whether voice and tone fit into that. Hey one thing I know, we talked about this a little bit before, and I know you’re not, you haven’t done a huge amount of work with it, but I would feel remiss in talking about voice without talking about voice interfaces and the rise of Siri and Cortana and Alexa and all those voice robots out there. Have you done any work with any copy design for those kind of interfaces?

Rachel:
No, not specifically. I’ve done some voice work with chat bot auto answers, just to make sure that the way the chat bot is responding is on brand and it sounds like it’s coming from the brand.

Larry:
That must be a … how did that go? Was it straightforward, or were there surprises as you worked on that?

Rachel:
It was pretty straightforward. I would say the biggest challenge was adjusting the tone according to what the chat bot was dealing with. So in this case it was a customer service chat bot, and so you start off a friendly “Hi. What can I help you with?” And it has to sound like a human having a conversation, and it also has to be on-brand. So if you were the ideal customer service rep for this customer, and you don’t know why someone’s calling, what would the tone be?

Larry:
Got it.

Rachel:
And then, when it was responses to a customer who was expressing frustration then it was again the adjustment. It was more of a tone exercise, I would say. It was the adjustment of, “Okay, now we need to be really empathetic, but not patronizing,” and walking that line. And getting to the point. They don’t want conversational chattiness at that point. That will make them angry. They just want you to quickly solve their problem.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at is, cause even as human beings we, as nuanced and experienced as we get we can still mess that up. And I can just picture a chat bot really blowing it.

Rachel:
Oh yeah, you don’t want three … I’ve interacted with chat bots where I’m kind of annoyed about something that happened with my order, and they’re going on for three or four sentences with all of this empathy building and trying to build a relationship, and I’m going “Can you just get to the point? I don’t have time. I’m not trying to be your BFF here. Just straighten out my order. Let me get on with my day.”

Larry:
Right. Well I think Rachel, I just noticed we’re coming up on time. Like I said, it always goes way too fast. But hey, I always give my guests a chance … Is there anything left? Is there anything that hasn’t come up or that’s just on your mind these days about content strategy or writing or branding or anything that you’d like to share with my folks?

Rachel:
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, it’s never too late to work on brand voice. So even if it wasn’t baked into your process, or maybe it was but you did your branding five years ago, it’s never too late to revisit and refresh it. And it can just be in small ways. It can be a quick website audit. Or it can be going back to the brand mission or the brand positioning and saying, “Hey. Does what we have on our site now reflect that? Do we need to make any adjustments?” It doesn’t have to be a huge overhaul. So I would say that’s one thing.

Rachel:
And then second, you had asked me earlier for an example of somebody who I think really nails the conversational style.

Larry:
Ah, yes.

Rachel:
And I thought about it, it’s The Evergrey. Are you familiar with them?

Larry:
I am. They’re friends of mine, actually. But why don’t you go ahead and tell folks about The Evergrey.

Rachel:
The Evergrey, well it’s a local email publication and website. And I think there are different ones. That’s the one for Seattle is called Evergrey, but I know they have sister publications in different cities. And it’s all about getting people really involved and feeling a sense of community within their own city. So The Evergrey will do spotlights on different neighborhoods. They’ll take reader questions. They’re always great at rolling out a list of fun events in the area. And they, I feel like they’ve really nailed the conversational style in a way that’s easy to read and connect with, but doesn’t feel like they’re trying to hard. It’s just, it’s really nuanced, but I think they do it beautifully.

Larry:
No, I agree, that is a great example. And I’m a big fan – I actually had Annika Anand, one of the co-founders, on the podcast probably about a year ago. And I can’t remember if we talked about voice and tone, but that is sort of the distinguishing characteristic of that publication is just how they engage with their audience.

Rachel:
Right. Right.

Larry:
And how consistently, and how well, they do it.

Rachel:
Yeah. And I mean, there are other places to find event listings in Seattle. The Stranger always has them, and there are other websites. But The Evergrey has its own feel to it, and voice is a huge part of that.

Larry:
Yep. No, I agree. I read it every morning.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Larry:
I totally feel ya. Well good. Well thanks so much, Rachel. This has been a great conversation.

Rachel:
Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Larry.

Larry:
You bet.