How to Find OCA’s Brand Voice — UX and Brand Voice

Quick and affordable approaches to find your brand voice.

Imagine you walk into a party and you want to make friends. You must be thinking “I want to create a good impression”. Well, to create an impression on other people you must have a strong personality right. That is also why your brand needs Brand Voice as its personality.

In this case that is what OCA needs. As a startup competing with other companies, OCA needs to create a memorable personality. OCA doesn’t have it before and now wants to strengthen its digital presence.

Hopefully, with this brand voice OCA can have guidelines in marketing, designing their campaign and products. That is why I’m here, to find OCA’s brand choice.

Background

OCA requested I find a brand voice ASAP. That is a big challenge because the brand voice is not a one-man job in a single night time. But I can see that we can compensate for a few things and still manage to find a brand voice that fitting OCA well without wasting time and money.

OCA is a startup that focuses on omnichannel marketing and CRM tools for customer support. Most of their customers are B2B but they also want to appeal the B2C.

Tools

So, to help me with this I’m following the steps from Column Five Media. You can find their article about Guide to Find Your Brand Voice to learn about it too! (Shout out to Mbak Mayang for sharing it with me)

Because this is a free method so there are no fancy tools too. I only used the workbook and questionnaire from Collum Five Media.

The Gameplay

For finding a brand voice I divided the steps into two layers, preparation and molding. The preparation step is where I can collect all research and data that I need to work with. The molding step is where I start to think, work, and find the brand voice.

Preparation

1. Brand Heart

I need to understand the heart of OCA as a brand. The brand heart is the core belief that embodied them as a brand and company. There are four most important things:

• Purpose: Why do you exist?
• Vision: What future do you want to help create?
• Mission: How do you create that future?
• Values: Who are you? How do you work?

Understanding the brand’s heart can help the brand voice to express it. For example, if your company is an environmentally friendly one you don’t want to sound too corporate and sarcastic but you want to sound close to people’s life.

So, I asked the C-level board and some other employees to fill up a Brand Heart Workbook from Column Five Media. The answers were varied but I got the red string.

2. Target Personas

The real question is who are you speaking to? This is important to understand who are the people that you are trying to attract. It’s like defining who is your soulmate, what kind of person they are, how they speak, what is their hobby, and so on.

I asked the marketing team and the design team to share their existing Personas and I did some research from users' feedback too.

3. Analyze Your Competitors

Be different is important, you don’t want to be associated as the remix right? In this case, you must characterize your competitor's brand voices too. Well, I stalked like 8 of them.

I collected the character of competitors’ brand voices from their content, website copy, and social media. I make a brand voice character chart and voila we have competitor analysis.

Molding

This is where the game start. After I had all data that I need, I can start to find the brand voice for OCA. There are 3 steps to this section:

1. Quiz Your Team

I used a different questionnaire from the Brand Heart one. The question in this questionnaire directly about the brand voice. In the town hall meeting I asked all of the employees to fill up the form with these questions:

1. When people interact with our brand, how do we want them to feel?
2. What adjectives would we use to describe our brand?
3. What does our competition sound like/how can we differentiate?
4. What is another brand with a voice we love?
5. If our brand were a celebrity, who would we be?
6. How do we want to talk about ourselves?
7. Who do we NOT want to be/what do we want to avoid?

You can read more about it here.

2. Formulate Your Personas

Let’s just quote a beautiful paragraph from Column Five Media

“Your brand should always be genuine and authentic, but it needs to communicate in a way that connects with your target customers. Consider how these people talk, the words they use, the challenges they face, how they express themselves, etc. What publications do they read? What do their Twitter feeds look like? What’s their sense of humor? These influences might help you find a voice they relate to.”

There’s nothing much here since I just combined the personas from marketing, design, and the customers’ feedback.

3. Review All OCA’s Contents

Yeah, I stalk OCA’s contents too. This is where the self-reflection comes. Just like stalking the competitors, reviewing your own content helps you to understand your own characteristic.

The Result

After all questions and self-reflection done, this is the result:

We are the Inviting and Lighthearted Brand!

We want our users to feel comfortable by offering concepts at their most basic level in simple wording. Keep sentences and paragraphs short, and use everyday language that the largest possible audience can understand. Find common ground with our audience and break the ice with a little humor, but remain polite and respectful to build trust.

The OCA tone of voice can be summed up in 4 factors.

Fun but educational

A little humor can go a long way towards making our message accessible and relatable. Getting people to smile along with us helps them develop positive associations with us. Engage them with information and education rather than plain fantasy or entertainment. Remember, we are smart but not snobbish.

Casual

We make what’s difficult look easy. We avoid words that are fancy, techy, and difficult to understand. We demystify B2B-pep talk and educate more.

Genuine and understanding

We know exactly how one feels about replying to tons of messages, tech terms, or limited time to reply. That means we relate to customers’ challenges and passions and speak to them in a familiar, warm, and accessible way. But we still can complain about annoying things. Hey, we are still human.

Matter-of-fact

We talk simple, straightforward, and single-meaning. We are transparent, clear on information, and realistically as possible to build authority and credibility.

Examples:

We create a simple recipe for multi-step things:

1. Log in to OCA

2. Open OCA Blast

3. Create your email

4. Ready, set, BLAST!

5. Watch your campaign working

6. Don’t forget to check the report too.

We tell a story:

“That mini broken heart, when losing a sale because late to reply. No more heartbroken if you know OCA sooner.”

“Ever wish replying chat was… easy? OCA combines chat, omnichannel marketing, collaboration, & large customers based in one platform, making it easy to do your work and reach your customer.”

We keep it simple:

“This month, OCA Interaction will be free for you!”

We keep it fun:

“Have you ever reply to a Karen? Oh, we know that struggle. Well, you don’t have to if you have these tricks.”

That is how I find a brand voice for OCA. You can try it too 😁