Tone of Voice, Branding & Strategy Blog

PURPOSE: SELF-HELP FOR BRANDS

19 / June / 2017

“Find your love”, “Be driven by a higher ideal”, “The sky’s the limit”… These smoochy words aren’t a pep-talk from a well-meaning, high-fiving parent. To find these – and many more like them – go to a bookshop. And while you might think you’re heading straight for the self-help section (via a pit-stop to buy […]

Famous for 15,000 likes

16 / January / 2017

We’ve seen the future and it’s a selfie starring a mum, a dad and some screaming kids with the hashtag #parentingtheshitoutoflife. But this is no ordinary post from one of your real-life friends (remember them?). This has 32,000 ‘likes’ from some 400,000 followers and counting. It’s A Strange Thing for our times when ordinary people […]

When charity isn't a quick fix

11 / January / 2017

Every marketing department has a sacred cow. In charity fundraising, it’s the image of the doe-eyed child asking you for help. Charities go back to this image again and again because they know it works. But for children’s charity Railway Children, getting kids off the street is only the start.

When everything stops

16 / November / 2016

When is a Christmas hamper not a Christmas hamper? When you’re Gail’s Bakery and you put together a ‘survival kit’ to see you through the oh-so-slow bit between Christmas and new year. Perfect for those of us (us) whose first-world problems go off the scale when there’s no way to get a perfectly-steamed flat white […]

ELDERBROOK: THE NOT SQUASH

13 / September / 2016

Gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, fun-free, free-free… It’s all healthy this and deliciously that at the moment. So what’s a new drinks brand to do to get heard above all the noise, when the cold-pressed brigade are doing a healthier-than-thou thing and even the big sugary drinks brands are singing about joy, happiness, health and ‘choice’?

That name is so 2016.

12 / April / 2016

“Grandpa? Why does that sign say ‘Guardian Unlimited’?”

Proof that words make people love you. Probably.

10 / February / 2016

We’ve always been pretty sceptical about the “results” agencies stick at the bottom of case studies or enter into awards. You know the sort of thing: doing x (whether that’s a new tone of voice, rebrand or whatever) has increased sales by 900% and brand awareness by five dog years. Because, as any good statistician […]

One nil to Cambridge

30 / October / 2015

Cambridge University and the city of Dublin both launched brand campaigns this month. Each of them looks different from ‘the usual’, but if you put them side by side (and put yourself in visitors’ shoes), Cambridge’s campaign is the only one that actually has something to say.

Another slice of panettone: Christmas words for Carluccio's

02 / October / 2015

Christmas. 'Tis the season to write lots of hackneyed headlines and carol puns (like we just did there). We write Carluccio’s Christmas annual for them every year. We try hard to make it something different each time, without doing anything too obviously Christmassy. For their 2015 annual, they asked us to write the words for […]

And it's time companies learnt from apps

06 / August / 2015

A little PS to our last blog…