Brand Tone of Voice:

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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
J. Delin positions do, or could, influence language choices made by producers ofsuch materials. The research reported here is intended as a starting-point forgenerating hypotheses about the links between brand position and languagestyle and form, and as such has a wide application beyond the current datato all the written materials generated by service industries.1.2 Language and multimodalityAs van Leeuwen and Kress (1995: 25) have pointed out, ‘All texts are multimodal.’While this paper focuses specifically on language, it is important to notethat other modes of communication do play a role in creating the meaning ofthe kinds of texts that we will be looking at: in particular, images, typography,and layout. As Cook (2001: 4) points out in his discussion of the context ofadvertising, other modes such as pictures and paralanguage also play a role, asdo the kinds of texts that readers perceive to be part of the same co-text (forexample, the relationship between a leaflet, a TV ad, and a set of posters in abranch all relating to the same bank).The leaflets and brochures analysed for this study contain images, diagrams,and tables. They are printed in colour and use a range of typefaces andtypographical styles, including bold, italics, caps, and underlining. They arestructured by headings and punctuated by quotations. All of these are not onlyimportant in creating the meaning, purpose and effect of the document, butare the most prominent means of communicating the identity of a brand (seefor example, Floch, 2000, on the creation of brand visual identity, and Allen& Simmons, 2003, on the relationship of visual and verbal identity, amongmany others).There is as yet no theory extant that is able to articulate the connectionbetween a particular brand position and the multiplicity of visual and graphicalresources that brand designers choose to express it. This is a fascinating areathat is likely to benefit a great deal from the combined perspectives of researchersand practitioners working on advertising (cf. for example Cook, 2001, whomakes extensive comment on both visual and verbal elements), on typography(e.g. McLean, 1980; Walker, 2001), on information design (e.g. Mijksenaar,1997; Joshi, 2003), on the relationship between documents, information, layout,and typography (e.g. Waller, 1987; Delin et al., 2002) and, of course, on languageand semiotics in multimodal documents and environments (e.g. Kress & vanLeeuwen, 1996). In addition, some useful recent work has focused on the visualimages used in corporate contexts (see Koller, 2004).While not debating the importance of the multimodal communicativeresources employed in documents I have studied, the purpose of the currentresearch has been to generate hypotheses that attempt to relate language in
Page 1 and 2: Journal ofAppliedLinguisticsjAL (pr
Page 3: J. Delin 4, I discuss conclusions,
Page 7 and 8: J. Delin they cannot keep control o
Page 9 and 10: J. Delin Other brand values that oc
Page 11 and 12: J. Delin 11cations. In fact, the ad
Page 13 and 14: J. Delin 13What is important for th
Page 15 and 16: J. Delin 15Brand elements are there
Page 17 and 18: J. Delin 17or through explicit asse
Page 19 and 20: J. Delin 19animate objects, we woul
Page 21 and 22: J. Delin 21Orange’s subordinate r
Page 23 and 24: J. Delin 23ProcesstypeMaterial:acti
Page 25 and 26: J. Delin 25Minimiser Action Results
Page 27 and 28: J. Delin 27The crucial point here i
Page 29 and 30: J. Delin 29many of the products and
Page 31 and 32: J. Delin 31And you don’t have to
Page 33 and 34: J. Delin 33relative absence in the
Page 35 and 36: J. Delin 35be part of brand positio
Page 37 and 38: J. Delin 37clients to further their
Page 39 and 40: J. Delin 39general impression. The
Page 41 and 42: J. Delin 41ReferencesAllen, T. and
Page 43 and 44: J. Delin 43John, O. P. (1990) The

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