Leading with language

Yeah, I did just hit you with some Comic Sans on slide one of a talk about brand!

It’s probably affecting a little bit about what you think about my style, but maybe my personality as well.

But what if we change it to something a bit more hand drawn, bit folksy, it’s maybe a little bit sort of millennial Instagram content creator kind of vibes.

What about a sort of old style Serif in gold, dramatically traditional, bit medieval, a kind of dark academia to it, right?

Actually, so maybe something like this feels a bit more comfortable. It’s a clean, legible Sans Serif with just a little bit of quirk. The point is that the way things look affect our expectations for how they’re going to be.

We all know this. It’s why we rightly put a lot of emphasis on getting our visual identity right, to strike the right tone for our brands.

But it can lead to this sort of sentiment that when we crack the visuals, we’ve cracked the brand. And the trouble is, this doesn’t really tell the whole story. So what about how we sound and what we say? Let’s take a little look at that.

How we sound and what we say

Challenge #1: Crack the visuals, cracked the brand

How might your expectations change if I introduce my talk like this? “Welcome to my neat little talk about words”. To give you a sense of the type of talk you might be in for. Does it feel kind of casual, conversational, maybe a tad irreverent.

But what about now? “It’s my pleasure to introduce a session on the strategic importance of tone of voice”, so it feels a lot straighter, right? It’s quite corporate, maybe a bit sort of formal.

And how about now? “Behold! the power of language shaping brands and minds alike”. This is totally over the top. It’s dramatic. It’s exaggerated wordiness.

Now, none of these tones are right or wrong. They’re just tones. They obviously all sound very different, and they can massively affect our expectation of the person or the brand that’s doing the talking.

So why wouldn’t we want to intentionally shape this expectation?

Big truth #1: Your visual identity might be that killer outfit that grabs someone’s attention

Because the truth is, your visual identity might be that killer outfit that grabs someone’s attention, but your tone of voice is a personality that makes them want to actually hang out with you.

Our tone of voice proves or disproves what our visual identity sets up. It should add context. It can create stronger emotional connections, and it helps build trust.

Put simply, people pay attention to what we say and how we say it, and yet, when it comes to brand developments, our process often looks something like this, strategy, visual identity, delivery implementation.

So where’s the tone of voice?

Tone of voice is often conspicuously missing in this process, and sure, the strategy means that we use words and our personality should start to give us a steer on tone of voice, but not explicitly pulling this out as a hugely missed opportunity to create a brand that can show up consistently everywhere and get everyone across your organisation using your brand.

Challenge #2: But only brand and marketing do tone of voice.

We’ve probably sort of heard this response if we’ve ever tried to argue the case for tone of voice, you might have even said it yourself like, oh, that’s just what the comms team do when they’re trying to write some punchy or quirky brand copy.

And it’s true that brand and marketing teams might be responsible for some of our top level language, some of our tones, our brand strategy, our narrative, our strapline, our hero messaging, campaign propositions or fundraising messaging, but really, that’s only scratching the surface.

So what about social posts or press releases or blogs or internal comms, our newsletters or funding proposals? What about FAQs, form fields, code conduct, error messages, privacy policies, or even chat bots? Yes, even chat bots need to think about tone of voice. The truth is, our tone of voice should show up everywhere we use words.

Big truth #2: Every team uses words. And every word used is a brand interaction.

When it comes to brand and getting people involved, we can say that every team uses words. And every word we use is a brand interaction. And actually, when we add it all up, that means more of our brand interactions are verbal than visual, and it also means that every team across the organisation is using brand whether they realise it or not, just like when it comes to visual identity, the risk of not tackling our tone of voice is real.

Risks of not tackling tone of voice

At Red Stone, we always try to identify the risks of not tackling something to try and make the business case for it. There are a lot of different different risks when it comes to tone of voice, but I’ve covered a few of the most common ones that we find can apply to any sized organisation.

1. Inconsistent messaging

Number one is inconsistent messaging. A brand without strong and clear tone of voice risks undermining a lot of other aspects of our brand. Without clear tone of voice, teams can struggle to explain things in a consistent way. This makes life harder for them so consistently having to reinvent the wheel, and it can make the brand seem a bit vague and a bit messy.

2. Misalignment with strategy

The tone of voice should be the bridge between our brand strategy and the interactions our audience has with our brand. If it’s undefined or if it’s inconsistent, the words people use can unintentionally contradict something we’ve spent months developing.

3. Lack of internal adoption

The words are something that unites everyone across our brand. So building our brand around language is a really good way to get people to understand it and to adopt it. Without this, it’s really easy for people outside the brand and marketing teams to dismiss brand is not relevant to their team or to their work.

4. Reduced standout

A great visual identity can absolutely set a brand apart. It’s only one tool at our disposal, and a brand’s voice is often what creates stronger emotional resonance and more memorability with our audience. Without a strong tone of voice. At best, teams will often default to generic, kind of safe messaging that sounds the same as everyone else, or at worst, they go completely off the way at rails.

5. Frustrated audiences

And finally, number five, probably most importantly, is frustrated audiences. An inconsistent or generic tone of voice doesn’t just mean we risk not standing out. It can never negatively affect our audience experience.

If the way we talk to someone in those high frequency, low attention interactions, so things like filling out a form or providing information, if that’s inconsistent with how we’re talking in those great big sort of punchy headlines, our audience don’t know what to expect from us, so this might lead to them feeling frustrated, disengaged, or like we’re coming across inauthentically.

And over time, no matter how great and how consistent our visual identity is, our trust is going to suffer.

VS what you could have won

The good news is that things don’t have to be that way, and if we put tone of voice at the heart of our brand, we can drive greater consistency across how we look, what we say and what we do across all our channels, not just the ones that the brand team are responsible for.

We can translate a strategy into a usable, emotive piece of content that teams and external audiences get, and we can give every team across our organisation a way to use our brand and to feel invested in it.

We massively increase our potential to stand out and be remembered, and most importantly, we make our audience interactions with us better. All of this helps us build trust, positive associations and brand loyalty. Dreamy, right?

Challenge #3: “Tone of voice is complex and full of jargon”

Well, once we’ve convinced people that tone of voice is a good thing, we’re usually followed up by something along the lines of, “but wait, tone of voice is complex. It’s full of jargon, and besides, my audience is different, and tone of voice is going to box us in”.

That’s true that tone of voice can have a reputation with some people for being overly complicated. Can be a little bit waffley, full of jargon, and sometimes not that practical, and also can be seen as something that people don’t think is going to work for their teams or with their audience, and for small brands where there’s only a few people writing everything, we don’t necessarily need layers and layers of details, and we should always be trying to keep things as simple as possible.

But equally, when a brand has a lot of distinct audiences or a lot of different teams creating content, it’s true that a rigid single tone isn’t going to cut it either.

All hail the tonal scale

What is tonal scale?

Thankfully, there is a third way - all hail the tonal scale. Like some medieval wizard descending from the heavens to save us from brand copy, this is our secret weapon in creating tone of voice that has the breadth we need to shove across different channels and for different audiences without that complexity that can sometimes come along with it.

So what is tonal scale? In a nutshell, is how you intentionally flex your voice without breaking it. It’s what allows you to speak to different people in different ways without going wild in the aisles. It’s a bit like bowling with the guys up. If you think about yourself, if you have a kid or a pet, you probably have quite a different tone with them compared to how you talk to your colleagues or your clients.

But you probably, or hopefully at least, feel like you always sound like you. This is flexing your tone and your scale is simply about defining the extremes of those tones. There should be limits here, and just like you don’t want to start speaking in a way that feels kind of wildly out of character. Your brand should be flexing within an intentionally defined space.

Flexible consistency™

At Red Stone, we call this approach ‘Flexible consistency’ which means you can adapt your tone to meet the needs and expectations of different audiences across different channels, while always sounding like you. So we’re looking for flexible tone, consistent personality and consistent voice.

What does a tonal scale look like in practice?

There’s not really any one size fits all, and it can vary from brand to brand. Some of the brands we partner with at Red Stone need something simple, like whether a tone should just be informative or emotive.

For others, it’s about the volume of their tone, so quiet when they’re in more of a get support space and loud when they’re in a give support space.

For some brands, we work with an extra level of detail might be beneficial. So where we have several very specific tones that we want to achieve, whichever scale you use, what all of them share is an ability to flex your tone of voice for different contexts and different situations.

In doing so, we create a single tool that everyone using the brand feels they can use to talk to their audiences across their specific channels.

Tone of voice was at the heart of our work for Turn2us

Turn2us offers information and support to anyone struggling financially, and they also challenge the systems that should be there to support those people. The growth of the organisation and a lot of different teams with very distinct audiences had led to some tensions around how the brand should sound.

Despite having a top level brand strategy in place, people were struggling to articulate the brand’s position in a really simple and consistent way. So these are common challenges that we face, and they can easily apply to small, lean teams just as much as larger ones.

How do we go about solving this challenge?

At Red Stone, we think tone of voice should be easy to understand, should be easy to use, and it should be clearly linked to your brand strategy. So to do this, we build it around three areas.

1. Personality (the descriptive bit)

A brands personality should describe how you show up, both visually and verbally. This is the bit that sets those sort of guardrails we’re talking about at Red Stone. We use brand archetypes as a way to frame that personality. But because traditional brand archetypes can sometimes be a bit abstract, some people find them a bit hard to grasp. We often use celebrities mapped against archetypes as a slightly more sort of accessible way to stand in for them when we’re running brand discovery workshops.

So a brand might be a little bit Alison Hammond, so sort of caregiver every person archetype, but they might also be a little bit Greta Thunberg, so the advocate or the rebel. We also always make sure that we try and use at least two archetypes as part of our personality. The reason we do this is that the best personalities for us have a bit of tension at play there. We want two descriptive words that give us some interesting spaces that we can start to occupy internally.

Our process for defining the personality for Turn2us started in the same way with workshops. We love a workshop at Red Stone, we ran workshops with different teams, senior leadership, and Turn2us, co-production partners, to get a sense of how people using the brand saw the personality of the organisation. Using word association, those celebrity archetype activities that I just mentioned, we started to define where the brand should be positioned, and in the case of Turn2us, we landed on two themes that gave us that sort of tension and that distinction that we’re looking for to be bold and outspoken and to be supportive and reassuring.

This ultimately led to our brand personality, the outspoken friend. It reflects a desire to be bolder and more direct from a campaigning perspective, but also acknowledging that the need to provide reassurance to audiences who are coming to Turn2us at extremely difficult times. So that friend aspect allowed us to occupy both these spaces really naturally. We think about a friend, it has levels.

So they’ve got your back, whether that’s an arm around your shoulder or speaking up for what’s right. And this really resonated with our teams, with something everyone felt they could see themselves in, and they could start to see how it might start to make sense for their work and their audiences. So there’s a massive tick there.

2. Voice (the consistent bit)

When we’ve decided our overarching personality, we can start to think about defining our voice the consistent bit, and this is how we want to always sound. So our voice should unpack our personality in a bit more sort of practical, granular detail.

For us, it’s usually made up of three or four voice traits, and these will say whether we’re straight talking or effusive, whether we’re bold or understated, they’re sort of the meat on the bones of our personality.

These traits also form the basis for our tone of voice guidance down the line, so they need to work pretty hard for us. And as with the personality, there should be some range in here, but also a little bit tension in our traits. So if we have four traits that are all bold and brash, it might make for an attention grabbing tone of voice.

But how’s that going to flex when we want to show want to show up to an audience in a vulnerable position? And likewise, if your voice traits are professional, expert and knowledgeable, you’re likely not going to have enough flavour, enough spice. You’re not going to end up with a particularly exciting tone of voice. You sort of end up in the space of that classic Spider Man meme where everyone looks a little bit the same and everyone’s a bit confused.

The final thing to remember around voice is your traits of the foundation for your tonal scale.

So start thinking about how they’ll let you dial things up or dial things down to reflect what you want your audience to feel. Here, it’s important we have a little bit of breadth, but we don’t want too much. Again, bowling with the guides up.

With Turn2us, we started by breaking down what an outspoken friend would look like. We knew that being trusted source of information was really important for the brand and how it shows up on its digital products. But a friend doesn’t talk in complicated, highfalutin language, so we opted to keep things credible but straight talking.

We want to make sure that as a friend, we were human above everything, and that every piece of copy sounded like talking to a real person. We also wanted to be optimistic about the change that turned to us are trying to make. We never wanted people to feel afraid and telling it like it is, and being really clear about the work involved in making that change happen. And then finally, we wanted something with a little bit more needle, so something to give us that kind of license to really lean into the outspoken part of our personality.

So this needle became unflinchingly direct. It’s a real reminder for everyone to always check their copy and consider whether they’re being too nice, too vague or too neutral. With tone to us, it’s with tone of voice. It’s really nice to have something in there that can kind of push people a little bit, take them out of their comfort zone.

Each voice trait has a tension here that turns something descriptive into something distinctive and together, these four traits provide the foundation for both consistent voice, but also those different tones that we want to take.

3. Tone (the flexible bit)

Which finally leads us on to our tone, the flexible bit. This is how we start to adjust our voice to show up naturally across different channels for different audiences, a tone can be affected by a lot of different things, but we try and think about it through the lens of audience, content situation and feeling.

With our audience, someone seeking support is likely to expect a different tone to someone who’s taking on sort of a fundraising challenge, for instance. Likewise, content can also affect our tone. The tone for our website navigation is likely to be a bit more sort of functional, more dialled back than the tone we use for headlines, but also situation. A headline itself can require a different tone depending on where it shows up.

So a headline that we use on a report might be quite pared back, but that same headline used in a campaign might require much more punch, much more personality.

And then finally, the easiest and sometimes most useful way to figure out the right tone is to think about what you want your audience to feel so for Turn2us. Our voice traits became our tones. We built it around a simple scale of dialled back to dialled up. This scale offers additional context as to roughly how each tone should feel, and each tone evokes specific feelings for our audience.

When we want our audience to feel informed, we lead with ‘straight up credible’. When we want them to feel supported, we lead with ‘human above everything’. When we want them to feel inspired, we dial up that ‘optimistic with an edge’. And when we want them to feel challenged, we lead with ‘unflinchingly direct’.

So a very simple kind of structure, always using those single voice traits. But remember, when we dial a voice trait up, the others don’t disappear. All four of our traits should always be present. We’re just leading with different tones at different times.

Bringing it together!

So these were the three building blocks for our tone of voice, our personality, our voice and our tone, and bringing them together allowed us to tackle the brand with a really clearly defined approach for how we should sound and how we should feel across all our channels.

We use this tone of voice as a foundation to build out the rest of the brand starting with a new brand proposition. Because financial security isn’t a luxury, it’s essential.

This proposition had already been in development alongside the tone of voice, but once we got that tone locked down, we were able to really sort of fine tune that language to make it really here.

Alongside this, we developed an emotive brand narrative and a messaging framework that gave teams some really solid starting points, on headlines, on long and short messaging, and on call to actions, set of practical guidelines gives everyone more detail as well, without bombarding people with War and Peace.

Ultimately, the tone of voice and our messaging sets the tone for the rest of the brand, provides a really solid foundation for that visual identity development, leading with language, we’re able to bring everyone into the process.

We get people thinking about brand through words, which for some people, is much more comfortable, and it shows them when we come to those visual developments, we know exactly what we’re trying to achieve.

This is really for us, why leading with language makes visuals sing. Our personality and our voice traits ran through all the developments we made to the brand for Turn2us a bolder, more direct approach to typography embodies that sort of unflinchingly direct trait, while a character for new approach to illustration brings that optimism with an edge to life.

Focus on user generated photography aims at keeping things real and human and critically here, every visual element that we built works on that same tonal scale as our tone of voice, so both our visual and verbal identities are able to flex in the same way.

Alongside a new proposition, the brand gives Turn2us the tools to show up flexibly in a consistent way, whilst pushing a bolder and more distinctive position to the fore.

So hopefully this gives you a bit of a sense as to how leading with language can help create a brand that gets more people using it and can show up more consistently across every channel.

Thank you very much.

By Red Stone

Presented at CharityComms Brand Breakfast forum

28th January 2026