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The inauthentic voice – copywriting for brands who don’t know who they are

By Andrew Boulton

August 25, 2015 | 4 min read

It’s known, well by me anyway, as ‘The Brief Beef’. That one appalling moment during most briefings where there’s a request that makes professional copywriters groan inwardly and less professional ones curse like a trawlerman. (‘Beef’ – I’m reliably informed by popular late 90s television – is a moment of, not-necessarily, bovine confrontation).

For me, this dismal exchange normally centres around one particularly wearisome request – ‘we’d like an authentic voice’.

In itself it seems a reasonable, even fundamental request, so let me elaborate on my annoyance. An authentic voice is a perfectly acceptable thing to ask for in a brand if, and here’s the rub, they actually have an authentic voice.

To illustrate the, admittedly whiny, point there have been many occasions where a copywriting brief asking for ‘an authentic voice’ has, at the same time, also asked to sound like Innocent/Nike/Honda/Innocent/Innocent etc. which, and call me obstreperous, is somebody else’s authentic voice.

I think my objection lies in a belief that a copywriter, even the black belts, cannot create an authentic voice unless there is an authentic character already in existence. A way of writing and talking that is an inseparable expression of a brand’s true personality is less an exercise in copywriting and more a matter of simply formalising what already exists.

In the absence of such definitive and intrinsic personality, it’s very hard to simply manufacture a voice that is anything more substantial than squiggles on a page.

Take, for example, one of the brands I’m often asked to replicate – Nike. Regardless of how you feel about the semi-sinister way they loom over (and beyond) professional sport, their tone of voice is a masterful example of brand articulation. The same embodiment of positivity and possibility in evidence through all their products, images, events, content and athletes is also at the heart of every word they utter.

And brands like Nike, however varied their subject, the voice remains unchangeably theirs. Their voice is authentic not because they’ve crafted it that way, but because there is simply no other way they would ever think to talk about the things that matter to them.

So, if all of this is true, asking a copywriter to bestow upon you a unique and individual voice is like asking them to decide why you exist. Even beyond the small matter of the words we choose and use, how is a humble alphabet monkey supposed to produce what is nothing short of your fundamental ‘youness’?

That’s not to say copywriters can’t present a brand with the neatly packaged voice it asked for, it quite literally happens every single day. But to find a genuinely ‘authentic’ way of speaking requires far more than simply asking for it.

Creatives will frequently, often unjustly, accuse a client of providing incomplete briefs. But in a case like this, how can a copywriter interpret and illuminate what doesn’t instinctively drum out from the very heart of the brand we’re working with.

The frustrating thing is that many of the brands who see themselves in Innocent’s colourful whimsy or Nike’s sweat-drenched defiance often have all that is required to sculpt their own distinct voice. Perhaps then the ‘beef’ is not that we are being presented with an impossible challenge, but that we are being cheated out of the chance to do something original, inventive and properly authentic.

Follow Andrew on Twitter for various degrees of beef

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