Tone of Voice, Branding & Strategy Blog

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…

It's time apps took branding seriously

03 / August / 2015

Rob talks apps, meetings at Silicon Roundabout and branding.

How not to write guidelines

07 / April / 2015

‘An early April Fool’s joke’ said the first tweet, mocking the University of Warwick’s tone of voice guidelines. And then those guidelines went viral on Twitter… well, as viral as these sort of things go.

Tone of voice like it's 1999

01 / March / 2015

Molly wrote this for the Marketing Society…

No bluffing: our how-to guides

02 / January / 2015

Like method actors, one of the first things we’re asked is “so what’s your process?”. People like process; it’s comforting. It means everyone knows the steps involved to get the perfect piece of work. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all, ten-steps-to-success way to do branding. If anything, we’ve found that process gets in the way and […]

Made in Britain: 2014 via 1950

07 / October / 2014

Last weekend we went to Best of Britannia (BOB), part pop-up department store, part celebration of independent brands designing and making things in Britain. On top of ideas for Christmas presents, it made us think a lot about ‘brand Britain’. Many companies at BOB were selling an idea and image of Britain as well as […]

The problem with management books

18 / August / 2014

Jill Lepore’s take-down of ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ by Clayton M. Christensen (a management book popular with Silicon Valley types) in the New Yorker is worth a read — all 6,000 words of it. Here’s a (bit of a chewy) taster: “Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle […]