To build a strong brand we need to be consistent in what and how we communicate - our Brand Voice.
What is a 'Brand Voice'?
A brand voice is your company personality. It is consistent across all channels, and is built on key themes, topics and a tone that portray your unique brand character to your audiences.
Brand Voice themes and topics
We anchor our communications around some commons topics and themes that are unique to our brand:
Creative Construction – our differentiator and tagline
Stories of our engineering-led innovative ideas and solutions. These can be technical innovations, but also more broadly, with things like sustainability. Using the term ‘Creative Construction’ in write-ups about our great ideas and innovations is a simple but powerful way of reinforcing our brand.Providing a Better Life – our Purpose
Stories of the positive impact we and our projects have on the community and our employees. We don’t need to use the term “Providing a Better Life” specifically, but we should be linking what we do and the projects we deliver to that purpose. See the examples below.Creating Better Together – our brand essence
Stories of our collaborative approach to working with our customers, business partners, and the community.Our ‘Employee Promise’ – our employee value proposition
Stories of what it’s like to be a member of our team. We use the term ‘Employee Promise’ as part of these communications. See the example website copy below for how we speak about our ‘Employee Promise’.
Brand Voice Tone
The tone of our communication is shaped by our “Brand Character”: best described by imagining that Built Environs was a person and you met them at a party… how would you describe them? That’s our brand character.
We’re engaging because we do lots of interesting types of projects across many parts of the world. So we’ve got lots of interesting stories to tell. We’ve also been around for over 60 years so clearly we’re accomplished at what we do. And we’re creative, happy to share tales of interesting solutions and ideas that we’ve developed over the years. Brand character: which is Creative, Engaging and Accomplished.
To make our communications Engaging, so we use down to earth, simple, conversational language, with short sentences and limited acronyms.
We don’t try and be too formal, unless it’s a legal document. So we use ‘The company’, or even better, ‘We’ or ‘Our team’, instead of ‘McConnell Dowell Constructors (Aust.) Ltd’ or similar. And we’re not afraid to inject a bit of humour in the right context.
If we’re explaining specialist information to subject matter experts, then we get a bit more technical and serious. We keep really detailed technical write-ups for bids and conference papers.
When we’re communicating to engineers, which is often, we add stats and facts to round out the story. Engineers love proofs, so we include them when we can.
For our social media channels we tend to amplify the Creative side of our brand character, using descriptive language that paints a picture in the mind of our audience. Again, humour can play a part, as can emojis.
The last part of our brand character is Accomplished so we tell interesting stories about what we’ve achieved. But they’re always told through the lens of our purpose of “Providing a better life”. We didn’t just build a new road, we connected a community and made it a safer, quicker journey.
And finally, because we’re a collaborative bunch and value Working Together, our achievements are always by ‘our team and in partnership with our customers and the community’.
How and where do we use our Brand Voice?
Here’s some examples of how our brand voice is used across our social media accounts, website and in our presentations.
Example LinkedIn Post – note the simple but engaging langage with a good mix of numbers and facts for the engineers, along with a little bit of descriptive humour. This post got really good engagement – on topic and told well.
Example website copy – this is promoting our Employee Promise. The tone is creative and descriptive. The content is anchored on our ‘Creating Better Together’ theme.
Example PowerPoint slide – Clean, simple, uncluttered design. The main heading is action-oriented and written in a way that brings our purpose to life through our accomplishments. Great picture too! This template is built into our standard PowerPoint pack – so use it.
