ON VOICE: How it sounds

If you've missed the first two, you can catch up with On Brand: How It Feels and On Design: How It Looks before diving into this one.

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of Irish and British manufacturing.

These are industries built on precision. Every process is analysed. Every movement has a purpose. Production lines are refined, waste is removed, standards are documented and quality is measured. Entire Lean programmes are built around making small improvements that add up to extraordinary results.

Then someone opens a Word doc to write the company website and all that discipline goes out the uPVC window.

"We provide innovative solutions."

"We are customer focused."

"We deliver excellence."

"We are committed to quality."

By the end of the first paragraph, you're still none the wiser about the business and, by the end of the second, you're most likely losing the will to live.

That should concern us far more than it does. Because words don't simply describe your business. They shape how people experience it.

Long before anyone visits your premises, meets your team or sees your products, they've already heard your voice. And whether we realise it or not, human beings are astonishingly quick at judging what that voice says about the organisation behind it.

I call it tone of voice but, out there in the real world, it’s effectively a trust-building tool. 

We're All Experts in Brand Voice

The funny thing about tone of voice is that everyone understands it instinctively.

Imagine if Lidl suddenly started describing its products like Marks & Spencer.

“Our thick-cut British potatoes are hand-cooked in small batches before being delicately seasoned with hand-harvested Cornish sea salt for an irresistibly crisp, perfectly balanced finish.”

Sounds intriguing coming from M&S but plain ridiculous coming from Lidl.

Equally, imagine if Marks & Spencer filled its advertising with giant red price flashes and "While stocks last!" banners. It wouldn't suddenly become better value. It would simply stop feeling like Marks & Spencer.

Neither approach is wrong. They're simply right for the businesses behind them.

The same applies to airlines. Few people would confuse the voice of Ryanair with that of easyJet. They both do the same job in the same market. One has built a reputation around uncompromising efficiency and low fares – some have described them as cheap and nasty and Ryanair themselves might even revel in that. They're no strangers to a bit of controversy.

The other has historically leaned more heavily into friendliness and making low-cost travel feel just a little less transactional. They have been described as nice and cheap.

See how cheap can also be different things to different people? Context is everything.

Neither voice happened by accident. Both are carefully crafted to reinforce the experience customers expect before they even board the aircraft.

Or think about Screwfix and B&Q.

Both sell tools. Both sell building materials. Both occupy similar markets.

Yet they speak to entirely different audiences.

Screwfix sounds like the experienced tradesperson who knows exactly what they need and wants to get back on site before lunch. The language is direct, practical and relentlessly efficient.

B&Q speaks to the homeowner imagining a new kitchen, a freshly painted bedroom or a weekend spent improving the garden. The language is more inspirational because the customer isn’t buying plywood – they're buying possibility.

The products often overlap. The language never does.

Construction Buyers Are Still Consumers

This is where many B2B companies underestimate the importance of language.

Somehow, we've convinced ourselves that branding matters in consumer markets but not in construction, manufacturing or engineering.

As though procurement managers, architects, specifiers and commercial directors become entirely different people when they arrive at work on Monday morning.

They don't.

The person specifying roofing systems probably shops in Lidl or Marks & Spencer. The buyer comparing window manufacturers still books holidays, buys cars and scrolls through social media. The engineer choosing an industrial supplier still recognises an authentic brand voice from a generic one within seconds.

Their professional decisions may be supported by specifications, certifications and commercial value, but they're still made by human beings whose brains have spent a lifetime learning which organisations feel competent, trustworthy and memorable.

Brand doesn't stop at the factory gate.

The Language of Lean

One of the reasons Ripple enjoys working with manufacturers is that many of our clients already understand something fundamental: every process can be improved.

Lean teaches us to eliminate waste, create value and standardise what works. It asks difficult questions.

·      Does this step add value?

·      Can this process be simplified?

·      Is everyone working to the same standard?

·      Does this make life easier for the customer?

Those questions apply just as powerfully to language.

Every unnecessary word is waste.

Every vague sentence creates friction.

Every paragraph that forces customers to work harder to understand you is a process that needs improving.

Good writing isn't about sounding clever. It's about making understanding effortless.

That's why great copy often feels simple: the complexity has already been removed.

Just as nobody admires a beautifully inefficient production line, nobody remembers beautifully inefficient writing.

Read more about the Language of Lean here – we speak it fluently. 

Five Questions Before You Write a Single Word

Most businesses don't have a writing problem. They have a thinking problem. Because the words are rarely the issue – the raw material you’re working with is.

Before we think about headlines, websites or brochures, we begin somewhere else – usually in one of these places:

Category

Every sector has its own language, expectations and conventions. Some of those conventions create reassurance while others create sameness.

Understanding the difference is critical.

If everyone in your market claims to be innovative, experienced and customer-focused, then those words no longer differentiate anyone.

Customer

Good writing starts by listening.

How do customers describe the problems they're trying to solve? Which questions come up in every sales meeting? What language do they naturally use?

The best marketing rarely invents new vocabulary. It reflects the customer's own.

Company

Every successful business has stories worth telling.

Processes developed over decades. People who have stayed for thirty years. Engineering breakthroughs. Extraordinary customer relationships. Quiet innovations that nobody outside the business has ever heard about.

Most organisations possess remarkable material.

They've simply become too familiar with it to recognise its value.

Culture

Every company already has a voice.

Walk through the factory. Sit beside the sales team. Listen in the canteen.

You'll hear it.

Some businesses are quietly confident. Others are energetic. Some are deeply technical. Others lead with relationships.

The job isn't to invent a personality. It's to reveal the one that's already there.

Competitors

Finally, look sideways. Not to copy but to avoid becoming indistinguishable.

Because if your website could swap logos with your biggest competitor and nobody would notice, your language isn't working hard enough.

The Great Corporate Disappearing Act

Here's an experiment.

Read this sentence.

"We are an innovative, future-focused organisation leveraging customer-centric solutions to deliver excellence across multiple sectors."

Now ask yourself: what have you actually learned?

You still don’t know what the company does, how they do it or why it's different, or why you should trust them to do it.

You don't even know whether it's a manufacturer, a software business or an accountancy firm.

It's the corporate equivalent of white noise.

Time was spent writing it, approving it and publishing it.

Yet it leaves the reader exactly where they started.

None the wiser.

Would Your Brand Survive on the High Street?

Here's a useful exercise.

Forget your competitors for a moment.

Imagine your business opened tomorrow on a busy high street or retail park, between Apple and Nike, opposite the Volvo showroom, down the road from Dunnes, B&M and Pets at Home.

Would people immediately understand what sort of organisation you are? Would your personality feel distinctive? Would they remember you after walking past fifty other shops?Or would you disappear into a sea of innovation, quality, excellence and solutions?

Consumer brands have spent decades learning that familiarity creates trust, personality creates memory and consistency creates loyalty.

Those principles don't suddenly stop working because you're selling roofing systems instead of running shoes.

If anything, they're even more important.

Construction buyers make fewer decisions, involving greater cost and greater risk. That means trust matters more, not less.

Language is Infrastructure

Because products can be copied, processes eventually catch up and technology moves on. But the organisations people remember are almost always the ones that know exactly who they are - AND have the confidence to sound like it.

At Ripple, we don't see language as the finishing touch.

We see it as part of the structure.

It should work as hard as your processes, your quality systems and your customer service. It should make things clearer, faster and easier to understand.

For manufacturers, there's a clear link here.

If you care about removing waste, improving processes and building quality into every stage of production, you already understand the value of better language.

That's where The Language of Lean comes in.

Clear communication isn't separate from continuous improvement. It's part of it.

Read next: The Language of Lean - why the manufacturers who care most about process should care just as much about words. 

 Continue the series

• On Brand: How It Feels - Why great brands are built on strategy, not logos.
• On Design: How It Looks - How design creates recognition, trust and commercial value.