How To Develop A Brand Tone Of Voice

seventy7 collaborates with luxury brands every day from our London, Manchester and Mumbai offices, it’s something we have decades of experience in. Which is why they keep coming back to work with us on first-class photography, branding, content, web builds, or any of the above.

With a huge number of specialists under one roof, our copy team collaborates with every department to work on these brands. When it comes to planning and creating a luxury brand tone of voice, our experience keeps us way ahead of the competition.

But it’s not enough to simply define a tone, leave it there and hope for the best. It needs to form and flow into the wider brand identity, and work across a number of platforms, especially digital channels like social media. To find out how we work together to develop this voice, keep reading.

Developing a brand tone of voice starts from understanding their audience, and the market they sit in. How their audience speaks, how they live, and the media they resonate with all inform how a brand can reach them emotionally. 

We begin by creating a picture of an individual who typifies the brand, and building a vision of how they behave.

We find out what the audience reads, watches, or wears, this helps find out what this person's passions in life are. We can even research their friends and family, and how they interact with them. This then leads us to see what motivates them and who they aspire to be.

Building a positive and engaging picture of that person helps lead down the path of hearing their voice clearly, and knowing how to reach them in a way that makes them feel seen. Hearing their voice is more practical than it sounds - it comes from tons of research and being a curious consumer of words. 

But tone of voice is just one element of a larger brand identity, and it should act similarly to the way a design look & feel or photographic signature would. It’s a rule of thumb, and it means that anyone and everyone who works on a brand writes in the same, consistent way. 

From high profile straplines right through to the way a brand describes a product, it should all feel cohesive. The customer needs to know a brand is confident and clear about who they are, so they can trust that brand. Tone of voice keeps that cohesion and builds connection, especially in the online spaces brands have to confidently take ownership of.

Luxury brand stories can sometimes be a little bit long-winded, or too abstract to feel like they translate well into digital channels. But adapting them for platforms like social media is relatively simple, provided the tone of voice is well defined in the first place. That’s the challenge up front, but it never phases our team - if we develop a brand's voice from scratch, there should be nowhere it can't tread. And communicating through digital marketing is an absolute must to get noticed.

When seventy7’s copy team works on this voice online, they’ll collaborate with our digital team to combine a sense of boldness and bravery in copy that’s used in design elements or on imagery, with an expert and familiar voice in captions. Keep the tone simple but timeless, and never fall for aloofness or being too faddish. Remember - beauty and approachability aren’t mutually exclusive, especially when your audience expects more from your brand. 

When it comes specifically to the luxury brands we work with, it’s important to not only understand the audience, but who that same audience aspires to be. It’s about creating a sense of elevation, a place of beauty and often an escape.

Whether through habit or intention, many luxurious brands can feel too exclusive or even snobbish, but that’s not a necessary element. In fact, it’s often very limiting in an age where digital-native audiences are shunning snobbish brands.

Instead our creative team focuses on creating a feeling of elegance and allure, and adding a scoop of warmth and invitation. This allows even the most avant-garde or boutique luxury brands to define a tone that emotionally connects with their desired audience.Looking for a multichannel agency to take control of your luxury brand and reach new heights through the right audience? Get in touch with our specialists today.