 Good afternoon to everyone and welcome to today's webinar Express why do most brands look great but say I'm terrible and what can you do about it? We'd like to speak at Chris West and the event was organized by the CIM Safe East Group. If you are a university student attending today's webinar then you may want to sign up to the CI Marketing Club. You'll keep up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. All you do is hover your camera over the QR code you can see on screen and that will take you through to the Marketing Club sign-up page. Next slide, Chris. So I would now like to introduce our guest speaker, Chris West. Chris is the CEO of Verbal Identity, widely considered one of the world's leading specialist consultancy in creating effective brand turn of voice. The business was formed 10 years ago and in that time has worked with the leaders of businesses as diverse as Alphabet's Moonshop Factory in Silicon Valley, LVMH spin-offs from General Motors, national brands here in the UK, including Mulberry, John Lewis, Talk Talk and Vauxhall, as well as startups in fintech, data science and beauty. Chris's book, Strong Language, detailing how you can build an effective differentiated brand turn of voice, which number one on Amazon just 36 hours after it was launched. So if you're ready, Chris, it's over to you. So CIM, a lot of respect for CIM. I have been watching from afar CIM for a number of years and being delighted at what they're doing, delighted at how they're building such an engaged community. Thank you very much for your time. I'm going to speak for about 30 minutes and then some questions at the end, which you're going to ask me, I hope. Now, there's a poll in the middle and I think there should be a bylaw against PowerPoints with just tons of information because if that was the point of a PowerPoint or presentation deck, then you could just send a PDF. What I want to do is show you some things, talk about some things and get you to think and then maybe you can ask me some questions at the end. So the subtitle for this is faster, smarter, cheaper because we all have to write every day and look around you in your company and if it's not lunchtime, then what is everyone doing? Generally, what everyone is doing is either writing because they've got one of these things, a keyboard or they're reading an email or a report or something else that someone else has written. So all the time we seem to wherever we are in our business we'll come to this in a minute, all the different places, language is working but it seems like language is a fundamental thing that we all need to have. So wouldn't it be nice if we could write faster, smarter, cheaper? I just want to check in with everyone before we start though. It's lunchtime and I just want to ask you how many of you are now like me, what I would call a dairy dodger? So I've given up dairy for various reasons. A little bit of health, but there's some other thoughts around dairy. So when you have your cup of coffee after lunch today or a cup of tea after lunch today, do you have it black or do you have it white? And if you have it white, do you have it with dairy or do you have it with one of these dairy alternatives? Why is that important? Well, because I want to explain to you why I think language is probably one of the most valuable things that you can get hold of in your company. And what happens when you don't go down the route that everyone else has gone down, which seems to be just creating the same old, same old kind of language. When you're brand and your business looks great, why aren't you going down the route of creating language which really stands out? So back to this after lunch coffee that you're going to have. If you're a dairy dodger like me, you will possibly have opened milk in your coffee. And there are two brands out there. I think the earlier brand onto the market was Root Health. And Root Health said, well, you know, it's about healthier lifestyle. That's why you drink oat milk. And so healthier lifestyle is, you know, doing yoga and climbing trees, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Whatever, yeah. Then Oakley came onto the scene and Oakley said, why should you drink oat milk? Because the dairy industry is destroying the planet. The dairy industry is destroying the climate. You look at the emissions from the dairy industry and you see the damage it's doing. So on the one hand, we had a brilliantly valued company, Root Health. They were valued at 70 million, I believe. And this is where we're going to come to the poll in about 30 seconds. Talking about what you might expect. They were valued at 70 million. And then Oakley came along and they used language to talk about something else. But before we start doing the poll and ask you, what do you think Oakley was valued at? Let's just take a step back. Oat milk is really oats in water. And if it's oats in water, you're not going to expect to notice a lot of difference between Root Health oat milk and Oakley oat milk. They're both very good, I would say. And I've tried both and for me, for my palate, I can't tell the difference. And I've actually done a blind tasting and I can't tell the difference. So oats in water versus oats in water, well, they're going to taste the same. Not only do they taste the same, but if you look, they're packaged the same. Then these tetrapacks, not just tasting the same, packaged the same, they're distributed through the same channels, pretty much. So if I go into my local supermarket, reach into the chiller cabinet, there I'm going to find Root Health shoulder to shoulder with Oakley. So they taste the same. They're distributed in the same channels and they have the same packaging. One is valued at 17 million. Talking about, you know, health is yoga and climbing trees. The other one said, no, hold on. We can use language to create a difference. And the language that they were using was talking about the impact of the dairy industry on the climate. And actually this was a much bigger thing to do. So here's the poll. And at least in the CIM team are going to run the poll for us now. But what would you think? Root Health, an established brand, was valued at 17 million. Along comes this challenger, Oakley, says, no, it's not, Oakley is not about health. It used language to say it was about something different. Do you think it would be valued in tens of millions? Do you think it would be, Oakley would be valued in hundreds of millions? Do you think perhaps Oakley might be valued, oh, let's be ridiculous at a billion. Okay, looks like most people are going for around about 100 million. Fair enough. The actual answer was 13 billion. So somehow, oats and water tasting the same, packaged the same way, distributed through the same channel, somehow Oakley managed to create a huge valuation for their business. And I want to say it's dropped down $6 billion, like $6 billion is still a huge valuation for oats and milk in the same packaging, distributed through the same channel. And I am a sucker for art direction. I love brands that are well-art directed. So I would acknowledge that I like the art direction on Oakley a little bit more than I like Root Health. But it is the language that is making the difference. It is the language which is compelling people to pick up Oakley in the first place. And I haven't seen any advertising. It's not like they spend more on advertising. It's the language and particularly language on the pack, some on the advertising. Let's maybe want to pick it up. It's language that because I feel it is the language that's made me feel great about choosing Oakley and doing something for the planet rather than doing yoga for myself. And it's Oakley really, it's language really that has helped position Oakley to this $13 billion, $6 to $13 billion valuation compared to 70 million valuation. It is language which has built that. And that I think is a really interesting thing that language wins customers because that's what Oakley did. They built the market and they pulled loads of customers into this market with language. It language wins customers faster. It deepens loyalty because we love sharing stories. So language shared, sorry, so Oakley shared a story through language and they built loyalty. And they did that in a really smart way not with loyalty cards or giving away anything else just with language. And they depositioned rivals to build this huge valuation. So that's why I think language is off, is should never be overlooked because it's language which wins customers faster, deepens loyalty, smarter and deep positions rivals. And that's the work that we've been doing. Phil was kind enough to mention my book which launched just at the end of last year, Strong Language, which went to number one. I am back in my early days a copywriter in advertising. So that's when my love, that's one of the places where my love of language came from and being recognized by DNAD. I've talked to business schools around the world including NYU, Stern in New York and also wrote short film at one, Best Film Barcelona Film Festival. Delighted to work with clients who are switching on to the power of language. So the question that's coming up is why is brand tone of voice critical again? And I think that's a really good question to consider just briefly. You and I know there are more channels our brands have to communicate in than ever before. That's fair enough. But there are more challenges than ever before. And when you don't have a lot of resources as a challenger one of the things you are going to rely on is language. So if you're a challenger, that's great. You can start telling a challenging story. If you're an incumbent and a market dominant brand then you need to start using language to lock off the avenues that the challengers can use. What we're also seeing through Black Lives Matter through COVID, through a number of other things is that consumers no longer want to be the recipient of a monologue from a brand in all these channels. They actually want to be asking brands, what's your view on this? And if you don't have a voice, you can't share your view. Most brands are fighting to win attention through performance marketing and they're spending a lot of money. But what happens when you win attention? If that's the first step, you actually want to engage people. And this is this other expectation that brands are always on. So now we can see that language is working everywhere. And I'll come to a little bit about that in a second. It's working everywhere. It's working all the time. And it's working with a greater velocity. In my early days, a brand director could brief a team and review the work this week or next week. Now you've got 100 tweets going out today. We did a back of an envelope calculation and found that the average, that the CMO of even a medium-sized brand is responsible for producing more words tomorrow than the editor of the Guardian puts into the newspaper. That's not just advertising. It's all these other places where language is working customer service when the CEO stands up to give a presentation. How do people in your business talk about the brand? How do you talk to the board about the brand? What's on the pack? When you have influencers talking about your brand, how do they talk about the brand? All of these things, language is working everywhere all the time with a greater velocity. And so we were talking to the CMO of BMW in Germany recently. He made the point, but absolutely no way would he allow his logo or any other aspect of his brand's visual identity to go out looking like this. Yet so many brand owners, because they don't feel they have the way to control language, are effectively doing this with their brand language. So the question really is, how can you make your brand tone of voice as consistent as your other brand elements? But how can you also make it flexible? Because we know that social media is one of the channels, but it's a different environment to advertising, which is different environment to the CEO standing up and giving a quarterly report to the city or even an investor relations chat or even talking to your team about what business is doing. All of these different places, language is working. It needs to sound like you as a business as one brand talking, but you need to be flexible in these different channels. How can you do that? Well, there's a framework I'm about to share with you. And I'm gonna ask you to think about something for 30 seconds and then raise your hand virtually, even if we're not gonna see you raise your hand. But let's look at Minion Ferrari. I mean, if a Ferrari drove past my office now, you'd be pretty sure if you heard the car engine that that is a Ferrari. And then going the other way, that's probably a mini. So just by the sound of them, you can notice a difference. And certainly both brands spend a lot of time engineering the sound of their cars. Visually, they're both red. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm Chris pointing that out. But the one on the right is clearly a Ferrari. Straight away, you can see that's a Ferrari pretty quickly on the left, you can recognize that as a mini. And even from, say, 500 meters down the road, you'd know that's a Ferrari, that's a mini. So they're visual identity, they're all, the sound of them is very carefully controlled. So do you question for you, do you think that the brand owners of Minion Ferrari can make their brand voice as differentiated? So you know, that's mini and that's Ferrari. Well, there's a way to test this. I'm going to show you now two pieces of copy. One is from Ferrari, one is from Mini. In both cases, the brands are talking about how their car takes a corner. Now normally you would see this with, you know, font and color palette and photography and all the other elements of the visual identity. But I've taken all those away and presented it in the most straightforward font I can do. So I'm going to ask you, two pieces of copy, one is from Mini, one is from Ferrari, which is which? One of those is from Mini, one of those is from Ferrari. There's no indication from the visual identity. So did you think that Ferrari was the copy on the left? Hand up in the virtual world, I can't see you. Did you think that Mini was the brand on the left? I reckon all of us have put our hand up to say, yep, brand X, the copy on the left is Mini. How on earth can we know that? There's no other visual clues. It's just from the words and the language and the way the language is constructed. That's brilliant. Somehow Mini and Ferrari have managed to make their language as distinctive, as identifiable, as supportive and creative of the brand identity as just as any of the other elements. And that's what I hope we would all want to do as well. So what's going on here? Sorry, you might have said, well, born to quarter or ton of fun, fun or high curves. High curves, that's definitely, that's definitely going to be a Ferrari thing. Ton of fun, that's definitely going to be a Mini thing. So what is it? Well, when we take a step back, we realize there are actually kind of three things going on in all brand language. And when you pay attention to those three things, that's what makes your brand language differentiated, is what makes it consistent, and it's what makes it flexible as well. So when you read the copy on the left, it feels to me like these are a fun bunch of people and as far as they're concerned, driving should be fun. You should get out of the car smiling. And probably what they don't believe in is kind of being too pompous about it. Now, Ferrari on the right, you know, as far as they're concerned, driving to the shops or whatever for a weekend, that should be like an F1 experience, kind of highly technical. So they're really standing for technical and they're standing against probably the fun, flippant thing attitude that a lot of people bring to their cars. So there's a kind of worldview behind what they're talking about, even though they haven't said we're exclusive in F1 or we just think it's a laugh in Mini's case. So there's that worldview. But then there's tonal values in the language itself. So fun, you know, Mini is trying to make it about a lot of fun. The language on the right with Ferrari is very technical. It's almost engineering as well. Very complicated. Language on the left, simple straightforward. So there's another level. There's those tonal values. And then, but neither of those two things are actually things you could specifically point to on the page. And then there are other things which you can point to on the page. The nuts and bolts, if you like. This is a specific word. So ton of fun or fun, you know, that's not a word that you're gonna see appearing in Ferrari's copy. Go-kart handling is another expression. And in fact, this key expression, Mini likes so much that if you go and look at the Twitter bio of Mini, for Spain, Mini Spain on the Twitter bio there, it says El Cacida, go-kart handling. So, you know, they've identified that this is a key expression for them. But even their sentences are shorter. So that first sentence, three words. I don't think there's a sentence short in about 15, 20 words on Ferrari's copy. And my old grammar teacher at school, he would say, my English teacher at school, he'd say born to corner, that's not real grammar, Chris. Right, there's no noun verb or all of that stuff. You know, there's no do, verb, do, whatever. It's not proper grammar. Well, it's modern grammar. So Mini on this kind of ground level nuts and bolts, they've chosen also to adapt their grammar. And Ferrari have chosen their sentence length and their technicality and things like that. So over the last 10 years that we've been doing this, we've built this framework, which identifies really that if you want to make the brand voice consistent and true to who you are, but also flexible, you need to identify and define these three layers, these three levels of the brand voice. The 10,000 foot overarching narrative, once you define that for everyone writing on your brand, they'll know what to talk about and the angle they can take on it. When you come down to a thousand feet, then what you're talking about there really is what you're using there rather, the tonal values, what personality do you want to create? Kind of quite severe engineering, technical expertise, aloof, maybe elitist or fun, easy going, relax people. And then the nuts and bolts. Do you use the ground level? Do you use jargon? Do you not use jargon? Get clear on your grammar choices. Get clear on other things that sentence say. It's amazing how many hours of meetings you can remove once you've agreed on those ground level details. And once you put all of those together, it's not just about the brand language we found it actually unleashes a lot of creativity. So that's the 10,000 foot ground level details. And that's what only did so well to produce such a huge valuation. And just as an example of that 10,000 foot kind of quite controversial narrative, you can see Tony's chocolate only if you don't know the brand, I'd say, please look out for it, please hunt it down. And Brewdog, which a lot of people know, very controversial, very kind of change orientated, very challenging in their mindset. And so is Dash a soft water drink? But just because you're kind of controversial or rocking the boat at the 10,000 foot world view level doesn't mean that when you come down to 1,000 foot, you have to be aggressive like that. Definitely Brewdog is aggressive. Tony's chocolate alone is confrontational. In the nice of, Dash has the same view as only believes that, you know, agriculture is in danger of damaging the climate. But when you come down to their 1,000 foot level, the personality they've created, talking about wonky fruit, misshapen, is much more conciliatory. So identifying those three levels and knowing where you can go at each level is a critical thing. I'm going to jump over this. I'm going to jump over Uber as well because it's just really to a straight point that they've changed different levels of their voice. So the question is, how good can you make your guidelines? If you're sitting on guidelines for your brand voice which say human-friendly, warm and approachable, I would say, well done, you've started. But unfortunately, probably what your writers here is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because every brand wants to be human-friendly, warm and approachable. I mean, which brand, in a way, wants to be inhuman, hostile, cold and distant? And if it's ridiculous to say the opposite of those values, it must be equally obvious and kind of same as everyone else to say those values themselves. So if you've defined your brand voice with four total values on a page, I would actually say, well done, you have done more than 50% of the rest of the world who's hoping that the writers will just do it or they're having another meeting where they're saying, it's not quite us. I don't know, have another girl or whatever. Or they're investing all their money in one writer and desperately hoping that they never go away on holiday or get ill. But how good can you make your brand voice guidelines? Three, four years ago, MailChimp were very good at publishing freely their brand voice guidelines and they were pretty good. And if you want more examples of brand voice guidelines, please get in touch with me, very happy to do that. They were three or four or five pages, but I think if you can define your brand voice guidelines using this framework, it's not only doing the job you need it to, not only showing you consistency and flexibility, not only kind of mapping out what you can write, what you, you know, the angle that you can take on the things that you're writing and the personality and removing all these hours. I think if you build guidelines based on this, you can actually get into quite a lot of detail for your brand and your brand voice. And actually, why is that a great idea? Because it means that when a new writer starts on Monday, by about Monday, four o'clock, they're already using the brand voice and they're often running in it. Instead of a month late and six meetings and they're disappointed because they're smart and they're being well-paid and they don't get it. Someone says, I don't know, maybe we should let them go or something terrible like that. Or you're sitting there at 10 o'clock at night, write it, surprising that copy gets written at 10 o'clock at night, I found. If you've got really good comprehensive guidelines, then actually you're in a great place because you spent the time, you've done the foundations, you've aligned everyone with it, you've not gonna get calls from the board saying, why have you said this? Because it's really clear in your guidelines. This is an example of guidelines we built for a car brand. We talked about the narrative, the tone of voice, we talked about the ground level details, but we went into a visual representation of voices positioning. We gave lots of examples of the voice in action with writers' tips. We even defined humor. What kind of humor would they use? So just coming to the end now, I did say smart, fast, cheap, and writing. Here are some tips. This is a beautifully produced version of Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, beautiful artwork. We all wanna create absolutely the perfect thing the first time you sit down and write. Here's what it looked like when Bob Dylan started writing, okay? All I wanna say there is, if you wanna write faster and smarter, encourage version, not point crap. This was an advice given to me, excuse me if you think that's rude for me to say. This was advice that was given to me by, let me just work with Alphabet. They said, look, every time we produce anything from this business, it's not gonna be right. And actually the biggest determinant of the final quality of the product or the writing in this case is how soon we start and how quickly we just get that first table version out. Because as soon as we've got that out, then we're rolling and then we can make it better. It's never perfect first time. Version, not point crap is always the first version. So encourage that. Read it aloud. Did I miss one? No, I'm sorry, I missed a tip. Maybe that's an encouragement for you to get in contact with me and say, Chris, what was writer's tip number two? Next brilliant piece of advice is when you've written something, just spend some time, read it aloud. Because if you read it aloud, absolutely guaranteed that if it sounds wrong when you say it, it will read wrong and confuse people when they read it. Oh, there's writer's tip number two. Who would follow? Write like they're walking away. Brilliant piece of advice that was given to me, which is most people don't have time or interest, inclination to read what you've written. So when they pick something up to read, they're already mentally walking away. So don't wait for paragraph two or three or four to say what it is you have to say. Say it in the first sentence. Put your position right up front. See if you can catch them before they mentally or physically walk away. So write like they're walking away. Will writer's tip from the people in newspapers, editors have got this habit of when an article is being proposed, when an article is written or submitted to, they'll cross out the first paragraph and start reading from the second paragraph. If it makes sense reading straight from the go at the second paragraph. Choices are the first paragraph wasn't necessary, so they're chucking away. They'll cross through the second paragraph. Does it make sense reading straight from the third paragraph? If not, then you need that second paragraph to keep it in as where you start. If it still makes sense reading from the get go from the third paragraph, cross out the second paragraph, write like they're walking, already walking away. How can you write faster? Throw up on your typewriter in the morning, clean up in the afternoon. In the back of my head, I think this is an understanding way quote, but I very much doubt it. I think it's probably my association with this boozing lifestyle. I don't literally mean throw up in the morning, clean up in the afternoon, but it's another good editorial piece of advice, which is don't worry, turn off the internal editor, just get out there and write. And then this afternoon or even better tomorrow, come back and then have a look at it and just see what you needed to do. Okay, final thing, just the power of language. If you were given 10 million, 100 million pounds, 10 million pounds and a year to make your, you were the brand director of an airport, second airport in Chicago, and you wanted to make it famous, what would you do? You'd have all the different kinds of options, advertising, greeters, anything else. If you had a thousand pounds and one week and you still needed to get everyone in the world to know that your airport was friendlier and more welcoming than anyone else, what could you do? You could use language and that's exactly what Mitchell Airport did in Chicago. They put up this wonderful sign after you had to take your belt off your trousers, wonder where your phone is, wonder where the rest of your party are, had to pack everything up, et cetera, et cetera, and they labeled this area the reconpopulation area. Not after you felt so discombobulated, you got to be reconpopulated. And this has shown up again and again in people's social media feeds around the world. And that's what language does. It is faster, smarter, cheaper than any other brand, lever tool, anything you've got. Okay, that's it for me. If you want to reach out to me, I would love to talk to you. I spend too much time, I admit, on LinkedIn and you can find Chris West, that's me on LinkedIn. If you look for Chris West, Ferber Identity. If you want to email me, it's chrisatferberidentity.com. Thank you all so much for your time. And I will hand back now to Phil. Phil, I think that's 35 minutes. And maybe there are some questions around what you do with your language, where does language work, how long does it take, one of the most important things or even talk about some of those writer's tips. Phil, over to you. Thank you very much. Brilliant, okay, thanks very much for that, Chris. As Chris has said, we're now gonna have a quick Q&A session. Okay, Chris, I'm gonna dive straight in with question number one. This is a good place to start. Do you have any examples of guidelines built on the three principles? Yes, I do, and I could share, I mean, I think we shared some of them there already. Well, sorry, I shared one, that was for a UK car brand. And that were perhaps a little bit more detailed than the question I was asking for, because there I was showing all four, I was showing all 14 sections of the guidelines. Part of the issue is obviously that it's wrapped up in client confidentiality. I don't have anything that I can share at the moment, but as a fun exercise, if someone wanted to, we could look at kind of backward engineering what Mini's three levels would be and what Ferrari's three levels would be and kind of build them out that way. Okay, are there any sort of useful resources on your website that people can tap into? Yes, yes, there will be. So yes, if you go to verbidentity.com, you'll find some resources, quite a few I think. I don't wish to push the book unnecessarily, but a lot of the framework is talked about in the book. So I mean, have a look at the book is probably the best way of doing it. I think it's quite cheap on Amazon. Okay, still on the subject of guidelines. So creating guidelines is a mammoth task. Sorry, there's questions I'm leaving around here. Creating guidelines is a mammoth task. What's the best way to tackle it and how long should it take to achieve a reasonable meaningful document? Well, I mean, I think that's a really interesting question. It sounds like someone's been a little bit, but maybe or bruised by the process of creating guidelines. It hasn't been a mammoth task for us in the past. I remember when we worked with the car brand whose guidelines I did show you, we produced those in around about three months, right from the kind of first meeting to the all signed off by the board and getting the writers starting to get the writers trained. And I think that was about a year faster than that car brand was managing with their visual identity guidelines. So I would say, I wouldn't want you to think of it as a mammoth task. And at its longest, three months, four months, I would say for the verbal identity guidelines. And it can be even quicker. We're working with a startup at the moment and they don't have a lot of people in their business. So producing heavily elaborate guidelines would be entirely the wrong thing for them. So it's a much shorter set of guidelines, maybe eight to 12 pages. And we're doing that in probably half the time. So I think there's two things wrapped up in the answer. One is make sure you're choosing the right guidelines for your business that will actually make an impact, practical impact on your business. And secondly, even if you're a large business, we've worked with huge businesses, even with a large business, I don't think it has to be paid. It's certainly not not painful and it doesn't have to be a mammoth long task. You can expect in three months to have what you want, hopefully. Okay, are there any specific tips for B2B versus B2C content? Well, I want to be a little bit provocative here and say, why would there be? Why should there be? I know when I started advertising 25 years ago as a copyrighter and I've done a lot of things since then. So, there was already at that stage, a kind of quite a lot of thinking saying that, people buying B2B do buy through a different process, but they're still humans buying and they're still having an emotional component to them. So, I think that we don't need to relegate or reconsider B2B as a separate category to B2C. Certainly not in the production of the guidelines. You might make, you probably would make different choices in the way that, in the kind of channels or different approaches to communication, but certainly the way you construct the voice, I don't think it's important. We have a process that's worked as well as the framework. We have a process that's worked for B2B, B2C, kind of multinationals and two-person startups. And the process is really around co-creating with the brand team because they're the people that intuitively and explicitly know the brand best and working with them is really critical. So, in our process, we typically develop or work with them, they develop three territories, broad territories. We're able to kind of finesse and polish those so there's, and then they can pick one and then we develop that. And we would use exactly the same process, B2B as B2C. Okay, great, thanks Chris. There's next question, maybe a croak in the heart here. Have you got any tips for overcoming writer's block? Yeah, I do. And yeah, it does sound like it's coming from the heart. I mean, that thing of version not point crap, get it out. Have a buddy, whether that's an accountability buddy or an editing buddy, have that person so that I know I've got to write something and it might be overdue if I don't do it soon. So, there's a great guy called Mike who's my accountability partner. I know he's gonna call me and say, have you done it? If you haven't done it, what do you need to do to put aside to make sure that you've got time to do it and do it? So an accountability partner's great, an editing partner. If you don't have someone that can look at it, then leave it for as long as you can preferably overnight. But there's really nothing that beats just encouraging, accepting and version not point crap because that's the first version of everything is terrible and waiting for inspiration. I mean, I would wait for the rest of my days to feel inspired. You just have to sit down and write. Yeah, give it a go, I guess. What are your top tips for getting all colleagues on board? Many of who are adamant that they don't need to be told how to write. Yeah. Well, I suppose it depends on the level of seniority of their colleagues that they need to be told how to write. Again, I don't want to push the book, but I'm doing that because I'm forgetting one of the critical chapters in there at the moment. But in there, there is a section on how to bring others on board. And you can do a simple questionnaire. You can say how well do you think our brand voice matches our overall positioning and then get as many people to fill in that questionnaire as possible. There's a bit more detail on how to do that and what questions to ask in the book. I think just, yeah. Another great way of doing it is to do what we did with Minion Ferrari, which is to take something that a few things that have been written, completely strip them of any visual identity cues, lay them out on the long boardroom table and just say, which is us? Hide the brand name or the product specifics and say, which is us? Here's 12 Investimations Chat, here are six customer service actors from six different brands. Here are four different pieces of website copy about us, pages from four different brands. Here's a, which are us? And if the people you're showing it to can't say, that's us, that's us, that's us, that's us, then what are you doing spending the money writing that stuff and putting it out there? If it doesn't in some way propel your brand forward, build your brand equity, shout who you are as a brand and what you believe in and everything you're trying to do. So I would say those are a couple of ways, kind of getting looking first of all for a wider consensus, but secondly, also looking to just de-identify and then different pieces of written work and then see if you can get people to spot, which is us. Yeah. Okay. Okay, thanks Chris. We've got time, I think probably for a couple more questions. I know we're running slightly over, but I'm just gonna sort of paraphrase the number of questions that come through on the sort of thing. Yes. If you work with an organization that has multiple brands or different products and services in different markets with different audiences, how do you maintain that consistency and turn the voice across? All right, in fact, how do you identify what the turn of voice should be in the first instance? You know, he's one person and I was a different person and I guess the supplement question is, you know, if you've got global markets, obviously you've got audiences that speak different languages, how do you cope with that? Well, I think I'll answer the second question, the second part of that question first, if I may, the great thing about this framework is, once you've specified it, the actual amount of trans-creation is really minimized, it's really minimized. But if you think that for a brand, if you're talking to a team in Peru, if you've defined your guidelines here on those three levels, they don't need to say who are we, what do we stand for, what's the world we're trying to create, what do we stand for, what do we stand against, and therefore what can we write about and what's the angle we can take on different things we write about. That's already defined, that doesn't change. And the personality, you want someone walking off the plane in Lima to have the same experience of your brand as they did when they were, wherever they started their journey from. So the personality shouldn't change. It may be just down at the ground level, but even not all of that is changing very much, you don't need to change your agreements on jargon and whether you have a very formalized grammar or more kind of modern grammar. Actually really all you're doing is changing the lexicon, the words and phrases you use and don't use. So defining the voice in those three ways really helps. That was the first part of that question for us and that's why I've forgotten what it was. Yeah, it's where if you work for an organization that has multiple brands, yeah. Yeah, well, if they're different brands, they start, I mean, if they're literally different brands, different badged brands, they stand for something different. And so therefore you can imagine that the tone of voice is different. If they're different brands coming out of one identifiable place, what you might find is that a lot of work we've done at this top level, this overarching narrative, this worldview, what we stand for, what we believe in, that will be largely similar from one brand to the next. And it may be some of the personality is overlapping and it may be just at the ground level that you're doing a lot of changes. We're working, we've been talking to kind of house of brands and they've identified that they need a tone of voice for each of their different brands because they're approaching a different parlance market but they also need a brand tone of voice overarching for the parent brand as well. But it's definitely doable, it's definitely worth doing. I mean, it's the same question really, would you send them out with the same, exactly the same art direction? No, you would change some things but you would make sure they're seen as sibling brands. So it's a pretty similar process, yeah. Okay, great, thanks. And finally, Chris, again, now that people ask this sort of question, what kind of research do you suggest to understand as a brand that you've been talking about, where would you start? What kind of research would you do to understand what's going on in your market? Was that the question for? No, do you understand the pillars of the brand that you've been talking about? Oh, okay, well, I mean, it feels like all I'm here to do is kind of mention the book Strong Language again and I'm sorry about that. But in a 45 minute seminar, perhaps we're getting quite a lot of the sense but not everything. But back in the book, there is a research methodology for how do you identify the different pillars of the brand and some of that overlaps into classic brand positioning work. Some of that is particularly suited just for language. And really our personal view is you can do this outside in, we're inside out. Outside in is you say, well, you know, what's the market doing? Where's the hole in the market? How are we gonna fill that hole? Or you can do it inside out and say, look, there's something really good about this brand and it is walked around the building inside the heads of all of us. So actually, if we wanna know what's best about this brand, we need to somehow get it out of the heads of key people in this business. So there's a bit of a skill in choosing which people you ask to share that information and how you get it out of them. But with some subtle questioning, you can start to do that. And in the book, again, sorry, in the book Strong Language, there is quite a lot of detail there on how you can build up these, exactly that process of how you can build up these different pillars, combine everyone's information together in a really useful way. So you've got a strong sense of these are the three or four things that are particularly us. Okay, great. Thanks very much, Chris. We've definitely run out of time for our questions there, but thank you very much to everybody who submit questions and apologies if we haven't got land to yours. That today, again, thank you to Chris for your excellent presentation and to the CIMS Southeast Group for organizing the event. We do hope you have enjoyed the session and you found it interesting and worthwhile. We'll be back with our next webinar express called Imposter Syndrome, how to beat it with Caroline Donaldson on Tuesday, the 10th of May, again at our usual time of 1 p.m. You'll find further details about the webinar listed on the events page of the CIMS website. We'll also be able to register for the session. Just leaves me to thank Chris once again for a fantastic presentation. And to say thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Chris. And thank you for joining us today. We take everybody. We look forward to welcoming you again to our webinars in the future. Goodbye.