Copywriting for brands: balancing style and substance

Kate van der Borgh is an award-winning copywriter that leads D&AD's copywriting Masterclass. Here, she talks about the importance of writing clearly and thinking clearly, tone of voice, and balancing style and substance when writing for brands.

When people think about copywriting for brands, they often automatically jump to tone of voice. Clients want to know: how do I find the four magical adjectives that will define my organisation’s tone and transform the way we speak? Are we Curious? Authoritative? Belligerent or Mellifluous? (Or are we, in fact, like so many others, in the obvious-and-not-at-all-differentiating space of Open, Honest, Professional and Human?)

But, for me, that’s jumping ahead. Way ahead. Because long before a brand thinks about how to say something, it needs to think about what to say.

Let’s imagine a fitness brand wants to create some new ads. The brand could encourage a potential customer to ‘be a brand new you!’ Or it could instead suggest that the person ‘be the same you, just a teeny bit more mobile.’ These are different ideas. And they’re both expressible in many tones of voice – or even the same one. So, the brand needs to settle on its big idea before deciding how to express it.

That might sound obvious. But there are plenty of organisations – big, successful ones, too – whose underlying ideas aren’t entirely clear. For example, I saw a rather strong response to a large bank’s recent campaign about ‘money wellness’. Copywriters up and down the Twitterverse asked what that phrase really means, and whether it’s even true that ‘there’s no right way to money’. I’m pretty sure I’ve moneyed wrong in the past. Still do, actually.

And it’s not just big, external messages. At last year’s D&AD Festival, Creative Director Matt Baxter and I spoke about how, within organisations, teams are scratching their heads at wishy-washy internal memos about touchpoints and leverage and platform-neutral approaches. And although the tone might be wrong, perhaps corporate and waffly, that’s often the result of a bigger problem: the writer isn’t 100% sure what they’re trying to say.

(Without wishing to bring up the B word, it’s worth thinking about the line ‘Get Brexit Done’. Yes, I imagine the conversational tone of voice helped make that line memorable. But the underlying idea was the real genius, as that feeling of ‘please, let’s just get this thing over with’ resonated with both Brexiters and Remainers alike.)

When we challenge fuzzy headlines, when we unpick and unravel corporate guff, we can interrogate and refine the ideas themselves. In other words, by writing clearly, we can learn to think clearly.

Interestingly enough, many tone of voice guidelines contain advice that is not actually about tone but is simply about writing clearly. For example, loads of guidelines include a recommendation about how and when to use the active voice. A great recommendation, I’d say. But it’s nothing to do with tone of voice. Talking about a new product, I could say that ‘audiences exhibit high satisfaction levels’ or I could say ‘people ruddy love it’. Both use the active voice. Both are entirely different in tone. So, I don’t recommend the active voice because it creates a certain ‘tone’, I recommend it because it’s an age-old piece of writerly advice that helps to make our writing clear.

All this is why, in our Copywriting for Brands Masterclass, we start by looking at how to make our writing – and therefore our ideas – clear and compelling. We start by thinking about how to write well. Only afterwards do we look at what brands, from Oatly to Lurpak, from Spotify to Coutts, do with tone to make their messages stand out.

I love talking about tone of voice. It’s fun. And that’s why it can sometimes distract us from other more fundamental issues. My feeling is that if we start with the substance, we’ll find it a lot easier to find the style.

To explore the connection between good creative copywriting and good thinking, learn how to develop tone of voice with personality, discover great copywriting examples from brands, practice several techniques of good copywriting, and more, join Kate’s D&AD Masterclass, Copywriting for Brands