“There are No Stupid Questions, Just Frequently Asked Ones”
Or, “Ryan Reynolds and Why Your Brand’s Human Voice Should Color Every Detail”
Find a good example of humanity on an “About” page lately?
I did. On a mobile carrier’s site, deep in a headline atop an otherwise stock-and-trade set of FAQ dropdowns … thanks to the brand’s voice.
Nice.
No surprise you’ll find this expression of brand voice on Mint Mobile dot-com. Yep, that’s the brand launched with Ryan Reynolds as its public face a few years back.
You can almost hear him saying the headline.
That’s Mint’s brand voice going to work. Even in their FAQ.
More than that, it’s human voice. And the people at Mint know where to feather it in.
Few can drop a headline like that. Mint Mobile can. Their competitors sure can’t. With Ryan Reynolds as the living genome for their brand voice, Mint has total license here.
Never mind that Mint is now part of T-Mobile. Ryan is still very much around. Moreover, the original Reynoldsian brand voice lives on, and in strong fashion, thanks to a team that puts it to work in the nooks and crannies of brand experience—details most brands neglect.
Details that lack a human touch.
Neglect and the Loss of Voice
Yes, neglect. It’s how brands rapidly lose their voice. And their humanity.
Too many neglect moments where the humanity of their brand voice can signal their attitude, point of view, or distinct approach to doing things. A human way of doing things.
In Mint’s case, that means a Reynoldsian way.
You’ll find neglected moments in the details. And the details are everything.
Consider how brands fall off when they gloss over the details. “Contact” pages take on the look and feel of stamped license plates. Email onboarding flows exude all the charm of antiseptic spray. And for brands with call centers, you get greeted with scripts that sound painfully forced.
Moreover, the risk of evoking such canned feelings only grows when the details of brand experience get left to AI.
Can AI writing breathe humanity into those moments? Can it even spot opportunities in the first place, like where a lilt of brand voice puts a typically mundane FAQ headline over the top?
The list of overlooked details goes on. Common to each of those moments, they lack empathy, they lack understanding, and ultimately, they underwhelm.
They don’t feel human.
Look at brand voice in that light and you can see why things like email retention campaigns find themselves in a funk.
“Overlooked details in brand experience lack empathy, they lack understanding, and ultimately, they underwhelm.”
Meanwhile, your brand voice elevates every moment. It makes them human moments.
Put another way, too much brand expression fades to beige when it finds itself farther removed from “marquee” experiences like homepages, campaigns, and videos. You know, in the details.
Yet consider the entirety of your brand experience. It’s packed with details, deep in renewal emails, SMS reminders, drip messaging, outage notices, and so on. Arguably, people encounter dozens of experiences like those far more often than your home page, because as your brand grows, your experiences grow as well—along with the volume of detail that follows.
Brand voice, your human voice, should color every detail of brand experience. Your voice reminds people they’re having a conversation with you, someone who gets them every step of the way.
Someone human.
“Brand voice, your human voice, should color every detail of brand experience.”
Attention to detail has never been more important because the details are everywhere. Let your voice be heard across them and get the experience in line with it. You can even start small. Like an FAQ headline.
Pair this approach with experience design that shows it gets them too and you’ll be unstoppable. Stick with it and see what it does, how your brand voice, your human voice, elevates every detail.
Personal experience says it’ll leave people with no doubt: That you get them like nobody else.
And results will follow.
* Thanks to Mint Mobile for today’s inspo.