Brand Tone of Voice:

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34 brand tone of voicesion of the services it offers without branding them explicitly, and it is not clearfrom the presentation how extensive or limited the list of services is. It is up toHSBC to offer or withdraw services from its customers at any time. It does notexpect a close relationship with customers as it has a regulatory obligation overthem, but at times can talk to them quite casually. Although positioning on theBrand Analytics continuum cannot be done precisely, HSBC’s language seemsto suggest a products and services emphasis – rather than an infrastructureclaim, which would place it in the leftmost position – but its positioning ofservices in relation to consumers is completely different from Orange’s in thatconsumers are not at liberty to call these services their own. This is perhapsa difference between the two brands that the Brand Analytics continuum hasnot the delicacy to reflect.We have also seen that language analysis can detect whether the positionsthat are being constructed for brand consumers are attractive and appropriate.Orange heavily constructs its consumers as young, busy, and popular, anditself as helping them do what such people need to do. The assumptions HSBChas about customers are either neutral or negative – such as the assumptionthat they may want to go into the red without authorisation, or the assertionthat the bank cannot take only one form of identification (presumably in casecustomers are lying about who they are) to open an account. Its own positionis one of checking up on them before allowing them to take advantage of itsservices. It is not in dispute that banks need to operate such procedures, butthe careful management of Tone of Voice is about how foregrounded and howwell counterbalanced these messages are.4 Discussion and conclusionThere are some important points to note about the methodology of this smallstudy, and of future, larger ones. Companies may not be using language thatsuits their brand position on the continuum, and so it cannot be assumedthat any existing text is a perfect example – or a perfect test of the theory thatlanguage can predict and reflect brand position. However, linguistic analysiscan expose shortcomings, and can act as useful means of triangulation, testingother means of auditing brand position.We should also bear in mind that any sample of language might be untypical.Companies produce large amounts of language, written and spoken. We knowthat language varies between genres and registers and so it would be odd toassume that a company’s whole language output, given that the document typesand purposes are different, will offer a consistent result. A company’s brandpositioning may also be deliberately inconsistent throughout its output. It may
J. Delin 35be part of brand positioning to reflect genre and register in different ways.Different brands output different genres of texts, and the pattern of genres thatare chosen are part of the brand’s communication identity. This means that wemay not always be able to find texts that are comparable between brands.However, I hope it is clear, even given these provisos, that the applicationof some well known language frameworks – chains of reference, transitivityanalysis, presupposition, features of tenor being but four – can add to ourinsights about how brands communicate and position themselves, deliberatelyor otherwise. What I have not done so far is to attempt to link brands to distinctbrand values, such as warm, expert, and friendly. Neither have I shown thatparticular language features appearing in the brand Tone of Voice will have apredictable effect on readers in general (or readers of certain kinds). That is, it isnot possible to say as yet whether deliberate use of, say, certain participant rolesor features of tenor will prompt readers to feel that the brand is communicatingthe values that the brand owners hope it is. It is crucial that consumer researchon the hypotheses outlined above actually tests whether different languagechoices are having the effects that we intuitively think they might.The four linguistic approaches outlined above represent only a small sampleof the possible ways in which linguistic theory can be used to interrogate thelinguistic construction of brand position. While there is not the room in thispaper to go into the interesting area of Appraisal Theory (see for example,Iedema et al., 1994; Christie & Martin, 1997; White, 1998; Macken-Horarik& Martin, 2003, inter alia), the kinds of features identified within the Theory(which might be more appropriately termed a model, or an extension of thevarious networks within a systemic grammar) are suggested to be those thatshow the writer’s or speaker’s point of view or evaluation of the content ofwhat they are saying. This is likely to be a feature of branded texts, and if so, itwill have a role to play in developing a notion of authorial presence (or brandpresence?) to readers and hearers. That is, if the brand (or author, or narrator) ofthe text is constructed as having a point of view, it is likely that they may comeacross as being more (or less) certain, human, authoritative, and so on – someof which features may relate closely to the brand values identified earlier on inthis paper. This view can be stated as Hypothesis 5:Hypothesis 5: Explicit evaluation. The reader’s/hearer’s impression of thebrand will be influenced by linguistic markers of the brand’s ‘point of view’such as those identified within Appraisal Theory.The weasel word here is ‘impression’ – we would of course need to find a wayof identifying what an ‘impression’ is, and how it might vary, in order to testwith groups of consumers.
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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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