Dear Ueno: How do you maintain your voice across all content?
This post was originally published on Ueno’s blog on May 1, 2018. Dear Ueno was an advice column for people who for some weird reason thought we knew what we were doing.
Jugal Paryani in Dubai sent us an email:
“Dear Ueno. From the content of your website to the posts from individuals on your blog, your voice is funny, simple, humble and a little sassy. How do you maintain your voice across all content? Is it built into the hiring process? Do you have tone+voice guidelines? Is it culture building?”
Valgeir Valdimarsson, word designer (just kidding) at Ueno, cheerfully replies:
Hello, Jugal. Thanks for the question and the flattery. I’ll try to answer you in a way you’ll find funny, simple, humble, and a little sassy. Meow.
Let’s start by talking about companies and voices.
Voice and tone are human concepts. For a human, having a voice is pretty straightforward. Your voice may come in different tones depending on what you’re saying (or screaming), but it’s always your voice.
But for companies voice and tone are metaphors. A company’s voice is like the voice of a ventriloquist’s dummy — not entirely its own. It’s performed, in the company’s case, by different people, at different times, in different settings.
It’s terribly confusing, Jugal.
Now, as you’ve probably noticed, when it comes to the people and things in our lives, our brains seem to prefer a certain amount of ontological consistency. That’s why companies spend a lot of time and money trying to really nail down, once and for all, how to sound, how to look, and how to make people feel.
Having this consistency sorted out and maintained “across all touch points,” (as we’d never say) makes companies more likeable. It’s basically what branding is about. When companies do it well, it helps them sell more stuff. And that’s why they pay us a bunch of money to help them figure it out. Call now, our operators are standing by.
(Personal observation: A brand is a tool to help a company seem more like a person. But some people have this all backwards. With a completely straight face, they will tell you things like “I’m working on my personal brand,” and “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” My general advice would be to avoid these people.)
Anyway. Glad we got that out of the way.
So, back to your burning question. How does a company — Ueno, in this case — maintain a single voice, over time and in a variety of contexts?
To begin with, for a company to maintain a voice, it needs to have a voice. And to have a voice, it needs to know itself.
Some companies assemble their identities from scratch, going through internal and external brainstorming sessions, marketing studies, branding exercises, and all manner of things.
For others, there is a simple short cut.
Ever notice how Apple sounds a little bit like Steve Jobs? How Slack sounds like Stuart Butterfield, Virgin like Richard Branson, Basecamp like Jason Fried? How Flickr used to sound like what I imagine Caterina Fake sounds like? And also how a company run by sociopathic assholes sounds a little bit like a sociopathic asshole?
Well, Ueno has always sounded a little bit like Haraldur Thorleifsson, founder, CEO, and social media intern.
So this would be my first piece of advice:
To maintain a voice, base it on an actual person who has a distinctive way of doing, saying and looking at things, and who spends their day tweeting and poking fun at their employees on Slack.
This works for Ueno, but your mileage may vary.
My second piece of advice would be this:
Write down guidelines for the people who perform your company’s voice. Make the guidelines short, sensible, accessible, and mostly free of bullshit.
Speaking of which, here are the official Ueno voice guidelines you asked about:
“Ueno is friendly without being ingratiating, optimistic without being naive, cheeky without being nasty, confident without being arrogant, blunt without being hurtful, playful without being childish, unexpected without being unhinged.
“Ueno speaks human, not jargon. It sounds like a person, not a robot or a sociopath. Regardless of what we’re saying, the way we say it should make the person we’re talking to just a little bit happier, and her day a little bit better.”
To this we’ve added:
We speak in a clear active voice, not a complicated passive one.
We speak simply, clearly and concisely — we do not “muddy our rivers so that they may seem deep.”
We use simple, concrete words that mean something — we prefer simple earthbound Germanic words to their highfalutin Latin cousins.
We don’t like it when people say “utilize” instead of “use.”
Last but not least, there are the “Ueno Culture Values,” created in a lab by Prussian scientists. Read all about Ueno’s values here.
That’s more or less it. It’s not terribly thorough, but for now this seems to mostly do the job. It helps that we don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen and that Ueno’s voice is a pretty organic part of the company culture.
Note that our guidelines apply mostly to our websites, newsletters, and social media. This blog, Lorem ipsum, is mostly a collection of posts written by our people, and if they get a bit of help from an editor it’s just to make them sound more like themselves. If they sound like Ueno, it’s just a happy accident or a sign that they’ve been properly brainwashed. (It should go without saying that Ueno would never say something as pretentious as “When it comes to the people and things in our lives, our brains seem to prefer a certain amount of ontological consistency.”)
To summarize:
To maintain a voice, make sure you have a voice.
Try to let the voice reflect the company’s culture and its people. The voice should both originate in the culture and feed back into it.
Guidelines help, but they’re not enough.
Sassy enough for you?
Cheers,
— Valgeir
Valgeir Valdimarsson is still alive, and not nearly as smug as this photo indicates. He wrote a much more interesting post about copywriting on this blog a while ago.