Brand Tone of Voice:

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28 brand tone of voice(your cards, repayments, account balance, and your calls, phone, user guide, forexample). Beyond this, HSBC texts make assumptions that may be linked tocustomers’ lifestyles: your needs, future plans, spare cash, friends and family, forexample. Orange texts presuppose that its customers have a home, an office,they are on the move, they have groups of friends, they forget to take their phonewith them, they get some exciting news, they want to have some fun, they needto call from abroad, they want to know the state of the football scores, and manymore. Arguably, Orange lifestyle presuppositions construct a subject positionthat is more young, fun, and exciting than that constructed for consumers inthe HSBC texts.Going beyond presupposition, Orange uses implicature, a weaker form ofassumption that nevertheless still presents facts as uncontroversial. In theexamples below, again and any more give rise to implicatures that the situationhas happened before:You need never forget a birthday or miss an important email message everagain.You won’t need to rely on your old paper address book – or your memory– any more.The Orange texts also assert beliefs on the part of the customer: in the brochure,the following are given as the customer’s ‘voice’:I want to stay in touchI want to get through to peopleI want technology that helps meI want to be able to call abroadThey suggest scenarios to appeal to the customer as familiar:You’ve just finished a tough day at work and fancy checking what’s on atthe local cinema.Your child is feeling ill and you want to know where to find the nearestlate-night chemist.These are lifestyle suppositions which suggest a ‘knower’ with detailed understandingof the personal circumstances of the customers. There is no suchknower implied in the HSBC texts, as their suppositions are of the mostneutral kind.The kinds of presuppositions that appear in the HSBC texts suggest thatHSBC occupies a central position on the brand continuum: while there areinfrastructure claims, there is an emphasis on products and services. Theintroduction of services as through possessive pronouns (our) rather thanto the brand (HSBC’s) excludes customers from ownership of them. While
J. Delin 29many of the products and services mentioned in the HSBC texts are positive,the approaches and processes it mentions have a negative tone (security, fees,terms and conditions) that refer to the bank protecting itself rather than offeringadvantages to the consumer. While the Orange texts assume attractive lifestylesfor its customers (busy, with friends, popular), HSBC texts assume little morethan that their readers need to go to a bank. This may be in keeping with abrand position that is not closely associated with the ‘who we are’ location onthe continuum – the implication being that if HSBC is not presenting itself asa group of people, then they cannot know customers personally.This survey of an initial sample suggests a third hypothesis for furtherresearch:Hypothesis 3: Assumption. The closeness of readers’ engagement with abrand relies on the predominance of textual assumptions and presuppositionsthat are either (a) accurate about those readers’ lifestyles and beliefs or (b)represent attractive extensions of those lifestyles and beliefs.In fact, the decision about what kinds of lifestyles and beliefs to assume, andwhether to ‘stretch’ those to aspirations about desired lifestyles, may itself bedependent on the brand position a company is seeking to adopt. A factual,‘tangible’ position may rely more on accurate understandings of customers’current needs and lifestyles, while an ‘intangible’ position may seek morefrequently to project apparent beliefs that are not accurate, but which readersmight like to aspire to.3.4 Constructing social relations: tenorThe fourth and final analytical approach applied in this research was to lookat the way in which social relationships in general were constructed betweenbrands and potential customers through the medium of the texts. This involvesthe use of constructions of authority positions, which have been describedby Fairclough (1989: 182), in his discussion of political speeches, as existingin tension with claims for solidarity with an audience. In addition, there hasbeen much comment on the mixing of ‘everyday language’ with more public,institutional genres of discourse in a range of contexts: Fairclough (1992: 217)refers to the ‘appropriation of conversation by institutions’, while Goodman(1996: 141ff), following Fairclough (1994), describes extensively the way inwhich ‘informalization’ and ‘conversationalization’ of language is used to createan impression of social closeness, even in institutional, public texts. Conversely,as Fowler (1991: 128) suggests, the use of formal, impersonal language formsserves to construct and reinforce hierarchical relationships of power, in which
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Page 15 and 16: J. Delin 15Brand elements are there
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Page 41 and 42: J. Delin 41ReferencesAllen, T. and
Page 43 and 44: J. Delin 43John, O. P. (1990) The

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