Episode 2 – Brand Voice

Hello everybody and welcome to the RunningWeb3 podcast where we talk about running a web3 or crypto business. I’m your host, Paul Lambert, and today we’re gonna talk about one of the first things you need when creating a company, the brand voice.

Now, many people don’t think about brand recognition when planning out a new company, but it’s very important. As a basic example anybody who sees a partially eaten fruit on the cover of a laptop will instantly know what brand it is. But it goes further than just logos. Cards Against Humanity, for instance, is well known for their brand voice. They’re sassy and sarcastic when responding to comments and constantly poke fun at the state of society. 

There are a few pieces of a brand that people will come to associate with the company – the logo, the products, and the voice. Many companies, especially in the current state of web3, will have the same or at least very similar products. So let’s look at the presentation or the voice. 

So what is brand voice? Brand voice is the way that the company communicates with the public. This could be with customers, this could be in press releases or for crypto specific companies, this could be your token holders or even talking to shareholders in public addresses. Brand voice is also the tone of the company to give people better understanding of who the company is and what they stand for. So a good example of this would be like meme coins versus a more traditional company such as Binance. With meme coins, they’re going to have a very different way that they talk with the public than somebody like Binance would. So with Binance, you have a very formal traditional tone, and this is consistent even with the employees there. So CZ, the CEO of Binance, keeps this professional tone informative and very formal tone when talking with people, when talking with the public, at events, at press conferences, things like that. Whereas with a meme coin, you have a very different tone. If you think even just the tweets from Elon Musk, and I know obviously he’s not necessarily associated with all the different meme coins, but that same sort of sarcastic joking “to the moon” type speech is going to be very different than what CZ uses when he’s talking with the public.

For an example that’s a little bit closer that I I’m more familiar with, we can look at even the previous projects that we have. So Altrucoin versus Bankerdoge. As a quick little history, Altrucoin we founded back in May of 2021 and Bankerdoge became a companion token that we created in I believe September of 2021 and they have very different tones to them. So Altrucoin has this giving, informative, and professional tone, whereas Bankerdoge has a fun and attention grabbing and playful tone. And you can see this on the website. 

So Altrucoin, for example, has professional sharp vector graphics and dark colors and really draws you in and gives this sense of formality and professionalism. Bankerdoge, on the other hand, has a more cartoony style with bright fun colors and it falls into that more meme type category. The two of those have since been combined and we as a team didn’t really like the meme style as much, and that’s part of what made us choose the Altrucoin specifically over Bankerdoge. There were a number of factors. But as an example, the tone that we had for each of them was very different, and we knew that going in. We intentionally set them up with different tones. 

Another example is even this podcast. So I set this up in the first episode, this podcast is still going to be very informative and professional, but I take a much more relaxed tone. I’m speaking directly to you, the listener, as opposed to this very almost stilted type, what you would traditionally think of as professional speech. While I’m still going to be going into technical details and going over the information that’s needed, it’s not necessarily joking around. It’s still a much more relaxed and informal conversation style of tone rather than a one way gate of information. 

So now that we have better understanding of what brand voice is – why is it important, why does it matter? Why should it be one of the first things that you’re thinking of when you’re putting together the specifics of your web3 company? Well, brand voice has two reasons that it’s important, and the two of them kind of play into each other a little bit. 

The first is it gives consistency to the company. Now, this is especially important if you have multiple employees within the company. As mentioned before, employees can use slightly different tones, but you still want that overall consistency. You wanna make sure that you have people using largely similar tones. 

The second reason is it sets the image that the public will have for the company. So this is important both for companies and for personal brands, for public figures. And you see it with – actually Elon Musk earlier was a great example of this. He has a very specific style of communication when tweeting for his “personal brand”. And even if you didn’t have the name at the top saying this was Elon Musk, you could probably still figure out that this is a tweet that would make sense for him to send because he has a consistent tone that he uses in his addresses and that bleeds over a little bit into the companies. When you see him doing product reveals and things like that, a little bit of his personality seeps into the tone that he uses when acting on behalf of Tesla.

This image that the public is going to have for your company is going to be important. So this is, as we talked about earlier with the great example of meme coins versus more traditional companies. If Binance were to have this very informal laid back tone or if Pancakeswap were to have this very laid back informal tone, the way that they are perceived by the public is going to be very different than the way that they are right now. And even, I guess you can see this a little bit with Pancake Swap versus Binance. Binance has a more formal tone than Pancake Swap, and you can see this on the websites that they have. As well as, again, going back to those logos – Pancake Swap uses a more cartoony, more colorful palette when they’re using their graphics than somebody like Binance does. 

So now that we know what brand voice is and we know why it’s important, let’s look at how you can build your brand voice. So you’re first starting out, you’ve come up with this great idea for a company and you go, Okay, I know I need to come up with the basics of my company. So first thing, for brand voice. 

There’s three things that you need to look at that will help you kind of build this brand voice for you. You need to look at your vision, your mission, and your values. So your vision is going to be, what am I trying to do with this company? So for Altrucoin, we’re trying to improve the cryptocurrency industry as well as make positive social changes in the world through the use of our token and our actions and the way that we implement this and show it to the public. So there are a lot of people that can create a token, obviously. There’s hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, the vision that we have for this is to improve the world with it, and we’re not just trying to make money, we’re not just trying to put another one out there. We’re trying to improve everybody’s lives through the use of web3. 

Next is the mission. So the vision and the mission are actually very similar in the contents, but it’s the way that you approach them. It’s a little bit different. The way I like to think of it is the vision is the what you’re trying to do and the mission is the why you’re trying to do it. So our vision in this case is we’re trying to create this token, which is already done, and we’re trying to implement decentralized financial lending and improve the lives of people around the world. The mission on this is we see this new technology, this web3 development that’s happening right in front of our eyes, and we want to take that and use it to improve the world. It’s important to us that we can take this technology and use it to better the lives of people because otherwise, what’s the point of technology?

Lastly, you need to come up with the values for your company. So the values are going to be the core characteristics, the defining characteristics of your company. When somebody thinks of your company, what characteristics would they associate with it? So for Altrucoin, ours are growth, security, charity and the Global Initiative, decentralization, community, and transparency, I’d recommend somewhere between three and six different values. And like I said, these are when somebody thinks of your company, what characteristics do you want them to think of? So your vision, your mission, and your values are going to help form the basis of your tone. 

Next we look at who is your customer base and what do they expect from you? So the customer base for somebody like a DeFi token is going to be very different than the customer base for a web3 marketing agency. And because of this, you might use a different tone. You’ll definitely have different content. But you have to think about who is my customer base and what are they expecting? For a meme coin, they’re going to expect a very different style of communication from you. They’re going to expect more personal interaction and responding in things like memes. Whereas for an educational channel, they’re going to expect a little bit more professional, maybe more detailed responses, links to articles that you might have written or to podcasts or videos. And so you can see what they expect from you is different for each customer base. And because of this, you’re going to have a different tone that you use when you talk with them. 

So let’s figure out that tone. The easiest way to start figuring out the tone that you want to use is to look at different or contrasting or opposite ideas. So one example of this would be optimistic versus realistic. Now, these aren’t necessarily opposites, but they do contrast a little bit in how you’re going to be addressing people. Are you using a very hopeful tone where you talk about the future and you talk about the way that you can get there and a very supportive type tone? Or do you use a realistic matter of fact type tone? Either one of these is perfectly fine. It just depends on how your company is presenting itself to the public. 

Another would be direct versus indirect. So for example, for customer feedback, do you say, “what do you think our company could improve?” or do you say, “what feedback do you have about our company?” One is a little bit more direct than the other. Both are asking for feedback about the company, but they’re asking about it in slightly different ways, and because of this, you’re going to get slightly different responses. Even if the people that are giving you just plain feedback and the second one are giving you constructive criticism on what you could improve, the tone that is being used is going to affect a little bit the way that they think about the company.

One last example, this would be formal versus informal. So for example, this podcast is a little bit of an informal podcast. I’m speaking directly with you, the listener. I’m using the second person pronoun “you” as opposed to “one could do something” or “one should do something”. I’m saying “you should do this”, and that gives a very different tone between the two. Obviously, when somebody says “one should do something”, it sounds significantly more formal. I’m taking it a little bit to the extreme here, but it’s to give you an idea of the different ways that you can communicate with your customers. 

Lastly, let’s talk briefly about the logo. The logo is going to be one of the first things that a lot of people think of when they think of your company, and because of that, it’s a great way for you to communicate different parts of your project. It kind of falls a little bit into brand voice. You want your logo and your brand voice to also be consistent. So for example, Altrucoin versus Bankerdoge again. If you look at the logos between the two, they’re very different. 

For Altrucoin, we have darker colors and a fairly simple color palette. Whereas for Bankerdoge, we have brighter colors and we use things like pastels and multiple different colors throughout the logo. These give two very different tones looking also at symbolism, we have very different symbolism on these. So for Altrucoin, we have the heart in the middle reflecting some of those values that I mentioned earlier, the global initiative and togetherness and community and surrounded by that circle kind of symbolizing the world and how in theory, all of us are in this together to improve things. Bankerdoge, on the other hand, is much more cartoony. It’s a Shiba in a suit. I mean, it follows the Bankerdoge perfectly. The symbolism works well with it and still conveys that more playful and meme type tone. 

If you choose to use words or letters inside your logo, you wanna make sure that the font matches your brand voice. You don’t want to have this super serious formal type tone and then use something like Comic Sans as your font. Obviously, I wouldn’t recommend Comic Sans to most situations, but you get my point. You don’t wanna use a font that contrasts heavily with your tone. You want it to reinforce that, so that when somebody looks at your logo, all the different parts of the logo reflect your brand voice. For anybody that’s looking for a little bit more information on this, I’m going to be leaving some resources for you in the resource area. If you look at my website, it’ll have them listed out underneath the description so that you can read up more on how colors and symbolism and font and things like that affect your logo and how your logo affects your brand voice and public perception of you.

So at this point, we figured out our tone, we figured out our logo, at least to some degree, and we understand the brand voice that we want. The next important part is going to be that you stick with it. The whole point of the brand voice is to keep consistency within the company. So just make sure that whenever you are writing something, whether that be a response to a customer or to a token holder, or if you’re writing a press release, just make sure that you’re keeping consistent tone so that when people see this response, they associate it with your company and they understand that this is the same company giving the same information. 

And tada! There you have it. There’s your brand voice. You’ve put it together. Thank you everybody so much for listening. I’ll have a quick summary in the description of this as I do on all the episodes, as well as additional resources on my website.