Once, the brand voice that everyone wanted to copy (sorry, ‘take inspiration from’) was Innocent Smoothies. They were playful, self-deprecating – and totally inappropriate as a role model for most other organisations.
This led to some terrible brand decisions. Remember when Barclays bank spent a couple of years sounding all cutesy and twee. It was really embarrassing.
Those days are long gone. Today, there are examples of strong voices in just about every sector. I know this because Tone Knob, my Substack, is brimming with examples from all over the place – from beauty salons to government agencies to niche B2B science and engineering brands – and people send me more brilliant brand voices to check out every week.
But! I’ve noticed a thing. When people search online for tone of voice inspiration – they invariably still search for the same few ‘classic’ brands: Innocent Drinks. Nike. Liquid Death. Apple.
Which is fine. Those are, after all, world-leading brands. There’s plenty to learn from them. But there are two big drawbacks. First – everyone else is checking out those brands, too. Second – the reason their voices are great is often not something you can easily replicate.
So. Let’s look at each of the world’s most searched for brands for tone of voice examples, quickly learn the lessons – then I’ll share alternatives that might be more useful.
Innocent Drinks
Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how mind-boggling this is. A little British smoothie brand that’s over 25 years old is still the iconic example of brand voice. Partly it’s because they’re fun and playful:
But mostly it’s because they spotted the opportunity to take their voice into all the nooks and crannies that other brands ignored.
This is harder than it looks – because it often involves co-ordinating between brand, marketing and whoever 'owns’ these bits of micro-copy. (Apparently the ‘few small pebbles’ asterisk came about because Innocent originally ran the ingredients without the caveat, which triggered a letter from Food Standards Agency. They were gonna remove the pebbles reference, but someone from their legal team said actually they could leave it as long as they included a disambiguation. Having your legal dept thinking ‘how do we make this more funny?’ is still extremely rare and brilliant.
Try instead:
There’s a self-deprecating tweeness to Innocent that doesn’t really work outside of the, well, innocent world of squished fruit. (It’s no coincidence that most of the other brands who sound like them are baby foods and kids snacks). So if you’re looking for funny inspiration, try:
Who Gives a Crap toilet paper – they’re a great example of how to mix daft playfulness with a hard-edged message. They move between these seemingly incompatible voices easily and confidently.
Puccino’s coffee shops – like Innocent but snarkier. Their jokes are often at the expense of the whole idea of ‘brand personality’.
Apple.
The iMac. The iPhone. The iPad. Apple Watch. Over and over again, Apple’s radical simplicity gave us tech that was often literally unimaginable before they launched it. Their voice is simple and non-technical. Their wit is sharp and intelligent. They hold themselves to high standards. I asked copywriter extraordinaire and longtime Apple copy-fan for one of her favourite bits of Apple copy. She said it was this one. (She spent a long time trying to get AI to come up with the same headline.)
But remember – with Apple, it’s almost always the fact that they’ve got genuinely astonishing tech to write about that creates the opportunity for their voice to be so consistently great. (If your laptop wasn’t a) really light b) genuinely years ahead of the competition, the copy above would just have been insufferable. To write like this, you gotta be world-leading first, and then witty.)
Other clean, elegant brand voices:
Check out Lemonade insurance. They use a simple, natural voice to bring clarity and freshness to the usually dense formality of insurance contracts. It’s a great example of using simple language not just for marketing, but for the ‘deep work’ too.
Liquid Death
Take water. Put it in a can. Give it a badass name. Make like you’re a lager / energy drink / skateboard brand and boom, you’ve created the most talked-about brand of the last decade. Part of the reason brand folks love to talk about them is because it’s such a pure application of branding: the product is literally colourless, odourless, tasteless, and identical in every way to its competitors. The brand is everything.
I love Liquid Death. I wrote about them in Tone Knob here. But remember – the thing to take inspiration from isn’t what they sound like, it’s what they did: they used a fairly standard voice, just from a completely different category.
Other category mash-ups
Lemon.io – tech recruitment that takes all its cues from Dungeons & Dragons.
Unchained Labs - scientific instrument makers who talk more like surf dudes.
Nike
It’s interesting that Nike are on this list, because they’re not a brand that people associate with ‘writing’ in quite the same way as the others. What they do have is tons of attitude. This comes across in two ways. First is their ‘if you have a body, you are an athlete’ positioning. It’s open and democratic. It’s not elitist or high performance (even though they’re also associated with plenty high performing sports people.) And their words always have bags of swagger and energy. Nike are about doing, about action, about movement.
(There are a million Nike things I could reference, but there’s no way I’m gonna pass up the opportunity to share Nike’s iconic Nothing Beats a Londoner ad.)
There’s a million Nike things I could share. But this six page print ad for last year’s New York City marathon is typically vintage – words that echo the highs, lows, unsexy details and the rhythm and ragged energy of running 26.2 miles.
Other brands with bags of energy
It’s easy to forget that ‘sport movement energy’ is only one kind of energetic writing.
The Adventurists are an extreme adventure holidays company. Their writing has the kind of madcap energy that comes from getting out of oh-my-god-this-is-sketchy-but-will-make-a-great-story-to-tell-later situations by the skin of your teeth.
Woowoo are a skincare brand with bags of enthusiasm and infectious body positivity. It’s the feelgood energy of sun-drenched holidays and good times.
And Unchained Labs again: injecting surfer-dude energy into the normally cool, rational world of scientific writing is a brilliantly unexpected move.
If you’re looking for more inspiration for your brand’s tone of voice, check out Tone Knob. It’s the ‘world’s most comprehensive collection of brand voice deep dives’.
If you’re kicking off a brand tone of voice project, get your hands on Voicebox, the ‘simple yet sophisticated’ method for creating brilliant brand voices. It contains everything you need to manage a smooth process, run effective workshops, and inspire fresh creative work.
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