Tone of Voice, Branding & Strategy 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 […]

Strategists! Step away from the acoustic guitar

17 / July / 2014

Here’s what I want from Airbnb. I want a website and app that work beautifully. I want to find an apartment so I can pretend I live in Brooklyn (even if it’s just for a week). And I want to make a few quid from my own apartment on the side. Here’s what I don’t […]

Something wonderful in Frome

11 / July / 2014

An uphill cycle race, a proposal to turn the town into an obstacle course, an art gallery and cafe in a loo, mysterious slogans graffitied on walls and pulled along by airplanes. Welcome to The Independent State of Frome. Since we worked on the branding project for Shrewsbury, we’ve been on the lookout for other […]

' Find your happy ' makes us sad

12 / June / 2014

At first glance it looks normal. It looks like a line. It sounds like a line. It reads like a line. Kind of. Because it isn’t normal at all. It’s been brandified. ‘Find your happy’. You can see how they got there. Rightmove is all about finding a home, but research probably told them that […]

The Turing Test for brands

20 / February / 2014

In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing came up with a test for artificial intelligence; what became known as The Turing Test. Could people tell if a machine or a person was ‘talking’ to them? If a computer could fool someone into thinking there was a person in charge, it passed the test. We’ve ctrl-alt-deleted the […]