Brand Tone of Voice:

and tone of voicetake two recent examples, in January 2006 the Chelsea Building Society, one ofthe top six in the UK, appointed a branding agency to undertake a review of itsbrand position and ‘to give a more consistent look across the brand’s print anddigital collateral’, aiming ‘to give more cohesiveness to the brand, developinga literature system and reviewing material’ 3 . The following week, Design Weekreported that Argos, a catalogue retailer, had commissioned a consultancyto ‘look at ways of interpreting the Argos brand across its entire portfolio ofprinted collateral, including point-of-sale items, in-store elements, cataloguesand promotional literature … to develop more of a personality for the brandand create a cohesive tone of voice.’ 4The genre of leaflets and brochures is a shifting one, and crosses the boundarybetween marketing and information. In fact, as Varey (2002: 4) suggests,there is no such clear boundary: ‘One part of marketing communication isconcerned with effectively and efficiently providing information about thebusiness and the products to chosen customer groups’. Indeed, some definitionsof advertising appear very similar. Vestergaard and Schroder (1985:2) quote Harris and Seldon’s (1962: 40) definition of advertising as ‘a publicnotice designed to spread information with a view to promoting the sales ofmarketable goods and services.’ This view would suggest similarities betweenadvertising and marketing, to the extent that they would appear to share acommonality of purpose sufficient to classify them within the definition ofthe same genre, according to Swales’ (1990: 58) definition of genre as ‘a classof communicative events which share some set of communicative purposes.’However, as Cook (2001: 7) points out, ‘genres often merge into each otherand defy exact definition’.There is, therefore, significant overlap between the documents describedin this research and the genre of advertising, but this potentially adds to thepower of the approach: if a branded language analysis and synthesis of itsprinciples is sufficient to capture language choices in marketing materials,it may also be a fruitful approach to apply to advertising materials relatingto the same brand. Many of the observations made about the language ofadvertising texts can provide pointers for the analysis of branded language(see for example, Cook, 2001; Myers, 1994; Vestergaard & Schroder, 1985;Goddard, 1998; Delin, 2000), since both have in common the desire to expressa particular ‘feeling’ or ‘personality’ behind brand or product, to persuadepotential customers to position themselves and the product in certain aspirationalrelationships (cf. Fairclough, 1989: 202ff), and to call people to action.In what follows, I will be looking in some detail at word, text and clause levelphenomena that reveal both commonalities and differences between advertisingand branch-level marketing materials. This, however, is not the primaryaim of the research: what I am seeking to do is interrogate how specific brand