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D&G: Branding & creative
Internal blog:
Tone of Voice. What is it and why does it matter?
Have you ever thought about the way different organisations sound?
For example, the way an organisation like HMRC writes its letters is very different from what you might experience from your mobile phone provider. That difference is called ‘tone of voice’ and it’s a very important part of branding. Tone of voice defines the personality a business puts across, and also how customer should feel after we’ve interacted with them.
Why are you telling me this now?
We’ve recently changed our branding, and with it our tone of voice. We worked closely with an external branding agency called Craft. This enabled us to take a step back and have a completely objective perspective of ourselves and our business. And to fine tune the way we communicate with customers and potential customers.
What’s the big idea?
1 in 9 households in the UK have one of our products. That’s a lot of people. But our customers all tend to have one thing in common –they are the organised ones, and we believe they should be celebrated.
So, here’s to the tidy. The prepared. The methodical. The buttoned-down. The round-pegs in round-holes. The ones who see things conventionally. They are fond of rules, and they respect the status-quo. You can tease them, appease them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they insure things. They protect their home appliances. And while some may see them as the cautious ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can mitigate risk are the ones who do.
So there you have it. The organised ones are our customers. And we can relate. We’re the ones who take care of stressful situations. The ones who make life more straight forward. Across D&G, we’re the organised ones too. When someone needs us, we’re here and happy to help.
How does that affect our tone of voice?
Our tone of voice reflects the feeling everyone should have after interacting with us:
• CLEAR - Could anyone read this without context and understand what you mean?
• CONFIDENT - Do we know what we’re talking about?
• CONVINCING - Does this make you feel reassured? Do you believe what we’re saying?
You can find more detailed explanations within the new brand guidelines.
What difference will this make to me?
We don’t want to take away from your individual expertise, the diversity of your perspective or any of your unique attributes. Consistency isn’t about losing or toning down any of those awesome qualities that got you hired in the first place! It’s about making sure everything we create looks and feels like it came from the same company. With a simple, shared focus we will reduce confusion and build trust with our customers and clients.
We’ve also created a number of different assets that you will find helpful and save you time when you need to pull together a PowerPoint presentation (for internal or external use), Word/Excel document or even an email.
And that’s not all.
We’ve also created a number of different assets that you will find helpful and save you time when you need to pull together a PowerPoint presentation (for internal or external use), word/excel document or even an email.
Remember, the Brand team are here to help. You can contact them at...
Customer loyalty programme launch
The benefits and qualifiers for the three levels of Rewards+ are different, and therefore each needed a different targeted approach.
Rewards+ Lite – aimed at people who can register a new appliance or one that is up to 8 years old
Rewards+ Standard – our existing D&G customers with 1 or 2 policies/plans
Rewards+ Premium – our most loyal customers with 3+ policies/plans
Initially it was important to identify the target audiences because once we know who we’re talking to, we know how to start a conversation. For each of these we created fully integrated campaigns and strategies to engage with them, whilst maintaining an overall consistent look and feel.
This is one example of the ambient concepts:
One of the benefits of Rewards+ is the feel-good factor for registering. We wanted to recreate this for people in the street. “Freebies” at commuter stations are highly effective. By handing out small bunches of flowers on the way home, we are giving people something that has the highest possibility of making it home –to the place where they can carry out our CTA. We can extend this reach with PR support.
Registration leaflet redesign
Registering a new appliance is one of the biggest challenges that manufacturers have post purchase.
As standard, there has always been a sticker on the appliance and a registration card or leaflet with any new appliance. This large bundle of information (manuals, promotions etc) are often filed away for later reference and just flicked through by most customers.
We wanted to change that, whilst using this behaviour to our advantage.
Instead of having a leaflet or flyer, we changed this to an envelope which is big enough to hold all the new appliance information inside it. In fact, that is how the registration envelope is used and delivered to customers with their appliance.
Due to importance of this piece of collateral to Domestic & General and our clients, it took a year for this to be signed off and was just going into circulation when I left. It's estimated that it'll take up to 4 years to know the KPIs.
