Style Guide:
Brand Voice + Tone
Client
CUPRA
Industry
Automotive
My Role
Time Spent
Content Designer
Researcher
Project Manager
6 months
*This guide is still as-yet-to-be released, so I’ll highlight only the relevant (and non-proprietary) details.
Target achieved
Creating a foundational resource for our agency to reference as they communicate for our client. This resource is meant to span across the organization for use on both digital and creative campaigns.
01
Introduction
Why was this guide created?
Being in a multilingual company with a lot of arms of content, it only made sense to create a guide that could unify our brand voice across all touchpoints — both digital and creative.
02
Research
We had a series of brand concepts that we’d been using as a guideline, but we never had a defined set of brand guidelines. That means we didn’t have a solid reference point for anyone trying to take up the voice of CUPRA as a brand. So that meant focusing the research on some specific points to create that definition.
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Coming from a UX perspective, you always start with the question: Who am I talking to?
This inherently led to:
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Who am I speaking as?
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What does that voice sound like?
Brand Language
What does the voice sound like?
To begin to answer this question, I needed to start by determining the words most commonly used by the brand. I gathered resources like our website, newsletters and social media copy samples, and pulled out the most commonly used words. Then, I grouped them together based on their unifying concept.
Then, I took a sample of text from each of our digital touchpoints and took an average of sentence length. No sentence went beyond 8 words, so this gave a good idea to keep sentences short, fast-paced and action oriented.
Brand Persona
One unique challenge that our team was faced with was the fact that we didn't have a defined persona to work with. We were working with a loose set of brand concepts but no concrete persona: neither from our target audience or from the brand.
Who am I speaking as?
Understanding this, I took the initiative to collaborate with our research team to do an investigation based on:
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explicit brand values
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implicit brand values
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commonly used vocabulary
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creative briefings
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target user concepts
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persona workshop findings
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From analyzing these findings, I was able to create and solidify an unofficial Brand Persona.
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The purpose of this persona was to give content creators who followed the guide an idea of who they would be speaking as, as they were "getting into character" to communicate as the brand.
03
Tone
Discovering the brand voice was the first step. The next step was to establish when it was most appropriate to "get into brand character", and when it was more necessary to use a tone that was more standard.
The key here was empathy.
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Think about the messaging you'd like to hear if you were being invited to learn more about an exciting new community partnership. Now, contrast it with learning your payment method had been declined. It would be very different.
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Here, the goal was to make it very clear that the tone should be adapted with respect to any case along the user's journey.
04
Grammar + Other Considerations
In this section of the guide, I outlined more grammatical and syntactic conventions. This was mostly based on common questions that arose during many "can you check/edit this" conversations within the team. They were also cross-referenced with the Cambridge dictionary for spelling and grammar rules, and with my counterparts on the creative team as advisors.
It's important to note here that my native English is US English, so there were points I needed to ensure accuracy and spelling in UK English, which was the primary language of brand communications.
I added in a section that included common spellings and vocabulary differences between the two, and further detailed this in the digital glossary.
05
Digital Glossary +
Content Library
The brand glossary was born out of a necessity to update the glossary we had. The idea was to create a place where content teams across the organization could easily find and update the terms we needed to use to talk about our products, at any time.
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The original document was ad hoc, hard-to-find, and left a huge opportunity for organization, so I created an internal glossary for both SEAT and CUPRA in one, easy-to-find space.
This grew into a place where all of our digital content resources live, and includes:
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alphabetized brand glossaries
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a hot link to the digital content design brief I created (to make task assignment easier)
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examples to see brand language in action (e.g. TV commercials)
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Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries, for reference
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An expanded list of UK and US English conventions
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in short, everything content related