The Lost Continent of Branding
Brands are losing control of communications as media fragments and stakeholders use social media to communicate directly. In one response, Martin Lindstrom in his popular book, Brand Sense suggests that brands should “become a sensory experience that extends beyond the traditional paradigm, which primarily addresses sight and sound”(page 3).Our contention is that the branding world has yet to fully explore the sense of sound. And that brand language, which is effectively verbal brand identity, is the ‘lost continent’ of brand communications.
Visual identity is big business. In contrast, verbal identity has no clear home. Specialist copywriting businesses are small and their market is fragmented. They’re often employed as sub-contractors. Companies’ brand language is also published by PR, advertising, IR and brand development agencies; sales and marketing consultants, digital communications specialists as well as in-house. No wonder brand language is often incoherent and contradictory. In the new media world articulate brands will develop and own distinctive competitive vocabularies. And many, particularly service and B2B brands, will invest in them more seriously than they do their visual identity.
Which brand advisers will be the first to fully explore and stake a claim to this lost continent? It will be those that use digital technology to navigate and map it effectively. And text analytics is the tool to enable them to do it. Text analytics is used widely in making sense of unstructured written data. Common marketing applications include CRM search and tracking, brand sentiment analysis and analysing free-text research responses. So how can it be applied to brand language?
As Lindstrom suggests, communication and brand language starts from the bottom up “not suddenly placed on top like a piece of decorative icing” (p57). A key strength of text analytics is that it can process vast amounts of data. So it can be used to study a universe of language; putting it into a competitive context when studying peer groups, or measuring consistency of internal communications. We’ve text analysed 120 brands, using over 650,000 words. A human researcher simply can’t process that much data. But a customer, investor, partner or potential employee reads every word that is important to them. If it’s not important it shouldn’t be published in the first place.
What exactly is brand language? We believe it is made up of two distinctive parts: brand vocabulary and ‘tone of voice’. Assessing brand tone of voice remains a subjective area currently, but objective analysis of brand vocabularies is now a reality. Brand vocabulary is what a brand is talking about. Not the words describing what it is (which may optimise search engine positions) but those words that communicate brand personality, and how and why the brand does what it does. Tone of voice is how this is expressed.
The matrix below shows examples of how brand language can be classified. In our studies of brand vocabularies, based on web site analysis, the least differentiated company was KPMG. Their brand vocabulary was 81% generic – and remember, we’re not listening to what they say they do but who they are and how they do it. The tone of voice of tax and audit firms is consistent. Perhaps not surprising given their essentially risk-averse cultures.
Greenpeace has the same tone of voice (urgent worthiness) common to all UK environmental charities. But they have a differentiating brand vocabulary ‘ocean/sea’, ‘boat/ship’ and ‘Antarctica’ for example. Virgin doesn’t have a particularly different brand vocabulary in their largely commoditised markets but they bring a distinctive, irreverent tone of voice, which is given substance by their corporate culture. M & C Saatchi is truly differentiated. Their brand vocabulary is different: ‘brutal simplicity’, ‘one word equity’. And it is delivered in a brutally simple tone of voice.
Text analytics won’t help you determine whether differentiation is relevant - it’s a new tool to add to existing techniques. But it can help you map what brands are talking about, and give clients the metrics to back it up. It can identify the brand themes that are specific to a given brand and which are just market generics. Here’s the market generic language for the global tax and audit firms:
Any tax and audit firm using this brand vocabulary is not differentiated. (Some have argued that they don’t want to be – in which case the analytics can make them perfectly generic). KPMG’s brand vocabulary is 81% the same as the above terms. This means we can now benchmark brand language differentiation. Looking at the Greenpeace example you can see, in the table below that their brand vocabulary is 84% different to the market generics specific to their sector. It’s an important step to be able to measure brand language differentiation. Markets and brands can be tracked. Objectivity replaces subjectivity. And performance indicators can be set and managed against the dynamic environment in which brand language operates.
Source: Linguabrand
Lindstrom suggests that “the first step in integrating specific language into your brand is to identify the words you want to ‘own’. Your selection should be based on those words you think best reflect your brand’s personality” (p53). Our contention is that you first have to put those words into a competitive context. What vocabulary are competitors using? What weight are they attaching to each idea? Which of them are market generics versus those that are differentiating? Finally, how can you measure and track brand language as it changes over time? We can now answer these questions.
There’s work to be done on developing quantified methods for tone of voice measurement, but we can now understand and measure verbal brand identity. Mapping this lost continent is a new adventure, with pitfalls and rewards to come. To set off properly prepared we have to take text analytics seriously and develop best practice. But, as increasingly competitive conditions drive clients to demand better brand differentiation, it’s a journey of discovery we have to make.
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Brand Language - The Lost Continent of Brand Differentiation
Published with kind thanks to Alastair Herbert of Linguabrand An incredible insightful and inspiration thinker who knows a thing or two about most things…
Alastair Herbert Managing Director Linguabrand.com
Dr James Freund Lecturer in Branding and Marketing Lancaster University
Tags: Branding, Brightenup, Copy Writing, Knowledge, Marketing