Tone of Voice, Branding & Strategy Blog

Why brands need to stop going on about 'content' and find something worth saying

24 / July / 2013

We came across our first ‘content strategy’ just after we started We All Need Words. A planning agency had been hired by a big (non-sporty) brand to sponsor the sort of sports events that Nike do. Their twist on this was to support the spectators – the families and friends who go along to things, […]

Wild Lime Bar & Kitchen

02 / June / 2013

Move over All Bar One, Slug and Lettuce and JD Wetherspoon. A new high street bar brand is in town. High street pubs – especially those outside London – haven’t moved on much since the mid-nineties. Chains like All Bar One, Pitcher & Piano and Slug & Lettuce have struggled to reinvent their formula of […]

Shrewsbury nominated for D&AD pencil

22 / April / 2013

The branding work we did for Shrewsbury with & SMITH last year has won a D&AD award. Shrewsbury is the only branding scheme nominated for a D&AD pencil in its category (just nudging ahead of London 2012’s Olympic branding, no less). Read all about Shrewsbury here – then go there.

Who wrote it? I did

28 / January / 2013

We’ve noticed something. Behind a lot of brands with good writing, there’s a founder who penned the words themselves. Someone who had a clear idea of what they wanted to do, knew who they wanted to be and how they wanted to sound. It goes to show that good writing and clear thinking are one […]

Writing for social media: our theory to add to the theories

19 / November / 2012

‘How should our brand write for Facebook, Twitter and [insert the next big thing here]?’ That’s a question nervous brand managers ask us a lot at the moment. To their slight dismay, we don’t hand over a template, a guideline or a guaranteed-to-get-you-more-retweets-than-that-photo-of-Barack-and-Michelle trade secret. Because social media is different to other writing. You’re talking […]

Ten signs a copywriter is on autopilot

12 / September / 2012

It’s easy to blame bad writing on cautious clients or the scars of two-thousand-and-one track changes. But much of the blame has to lie with copywriters themselves. Too many of them have knocked out sloppy words for far too long. We want it to stop. So we’ve written, not rules exactly, but provocations. What if […]

No, I don't want to see your brand dodecahedron

16 / July / 2012

Brand strategy has puffed itself up to be so important it’s put on a pedestal, and it’s high time we knocked it off. Let’s drop the diagrams and faux-strategy once and for all. We’ve all been there. Brand presentations that take about three-and-a-half days to go through. The first part often goes over that particular […]

What's the big idea?

11 / June / 2012

Branding types love to talk about ‘the big idea’: a thought that makes you feel differently about something or see things in a new way. But most so-called big ideas aren’t really that big and they don’t have much of an idea behind them either. It’s much easier to come up with touchy-feely slogans than […]

Apologise unreservedly seems to be the hardest word(s)

09 / May / 2012

Oh dear. Diageo have got themselves in a bit of bother with small brewers BrewDog. You only need to look at Diageo’s apology to see how they got into trouble in the first place (and why BrewDog deserve to win more awards than them). Diageo’s at-arm’s-length statement vs… A Diageo spokesperson: “There was a serious […]

When small independents learn big companies' tricks

01 / May / 2012

As of today the contents of my fridge have changed. Bye-bye big name labels and uniform vegetables. Hello real food delivered from local shops by Hubbub. If you haven’t come across them already, Hubbub is roughly what you get when you cross the good bits of buying local with the convenience of ordering from Ocado. […]