Say It Better: Brand Voice Survey 2021

Brand voice comes of age…

It’s what you say as a brand that defines how customers perceive you. But finding, fine-tuning, and scaling a brand voice while optimizing for performance, enhancing the customer experience, and staying true to your company’s vision is a delicate balancing act. In the resource-draining disruption-frenzy of the early 2020s, it’s closer to a high-wire act. It’s no wonder 68% of marketers are constantly stressed about striking the right tone.

Our latest Orange Paper shows marketers the way forward. It features:

Survey data from 300 senior US marketers (Dynata October 2021) on their biggest brand language challenges
Exclusive insights from top brands including Best Buy, Currys, FARFETCH, Salesforce, Walgreens, and Wunderman Thompson
The AI-driven road ahead for marketers looking to scale and optimize their brand voice

It’s time to make your brand voice heard.

Highlights from the report

A large majority of 2021 survey respondents currently believe the brand language they are using helps their brand connect with customers and this has improved over time.

Organizations are struggling to keep language interesting and engaging, with 68% of marketers feeling more stressed about striking the right tone compared to a year ago.

Advice from top brands

“Our job is to support our customers to get the most out of their products, so our brand voice needs to consistently reflect that. We think about it as landing the right thing with the right customer, just in the right moment, for email or text, when you walk into a store, when you come on to our website. We’re working with strategic technology partners to try and make the experience as personalized and relevant as possible.”.”

Dan Rubel, Brand & Marketing Director
“The last 18 months have expanded our team’s mindset about what’s possible when it comes to optimizing our brand language for maximum reach, commercial impact, and customer loyalty. Consistency is core to our brand voice, but so is change. By testing, iterating, and optimizing we are constantly learning over time about what language resonates with customers and how that’s evolving. As we apply our learnings across all of our digital channels, we increase our laser focus on continuous improvement of the customer experience.”

Brian Tyrrell, Senior Director, Customer Marketing Platforms
“To build lasting relationships, marketers should use data to deliver relevant content throughout customers’ journeys with the brand and artificial intelligence and automation to optimize content for real-time personalization, based on customers’ engagement, to ensure meeting customer expectations.”

Blake Miller, Senior Director of Product Marketing
“As marketeers, one of our jobs is to make sure our copy hits the mark and really resonates with our customers. Our tone is on the edge of being not too
serious, yet not polarising, so the risk of veering off course is always there. By using AI technology, we can take our test and learn approach and marry that up with the brand TOV at pace across a number of campaigns and touchpoints. It leaves us with consistency and variety in our messaging and takes out the emotion (at the right time) from our decision-making.”

Ryan Martin, Head of CRM