Brand Copywriting

Your brand is always talking

Like people, brands have personalities and attitudes, and they’re talking all the time. Online, on social, on paper, on air and on the side of buses. You can’t escape them. But what are they actually saying?

A brand is more than a logo, colour palette or typeface. It’s also the words you use, the things you choose to talk about and the way you talk about them. Get those things right and people begin to recognise you before they’ve even seen the logo.

That’s where brand copywriting comes in.

What is brand copywriting?

Brand copywriting is the use of words to define and express what a business or organisation stands for. That can include a name, proposition, tagline or strapline, key messages, mission and vision, values, tone of voice and the language used across everything from a website to an advertising campaign.

Some businesses come to me with little more than an idea. Others already have a well-established identity but know that the words no longer quite fit. Either way, my job as a brand copywriter is to work out what makes the brand distinctive and find language that makes that difference clear.

It’s not just what you say

How you say something can change how people feel about it.

The same message can sound reassuring or evasive, intelligent or pompous, confident or arrogant. A brand’s tone of voice is the difference between sounding like everybody else and sounding like yourself.

I can help define a new tone of voice or refine an existing one, then turn it into practical guidance people can actually use.

There’s little point producing 40 pages of instructions nobody remembers when they sit down to write an email.

Finding the words at the heart of a brand

Brand work often means reducing a great deal of thinking to very few words.

A mission statement needs to explain why you exist without sounding as though it was assembled in a committee room. Values should mean something. A tagline needs to be memorable without trying too hard to be clever. And key messages need to survive contact with the real world.

That usually involves asking awkward questions, challenging assumptions and removing a surprising amount of language that could belong to almost any organisation.

‘Innovative.’ ‘Customer-focused.’ ‘Passionate.’ ‘Solutions-driven.’

If your competitors could say exactly the same thing, it probably isn’t doing much for your brand.

Brand naming, taglines and straplines

Just Do It. I’m Lovin’ It. Because You’re Worth It.

The best-known taglines look obvious once somebody else has thought of them. Getting there is rather less straightforward.

I develop brand and product names, taglines, straplines and campaign lines that are appropriate to the organisation rather than simply clever for the sake of it.

A few words may be all anyone sees. That doesn’t mean they take a few minutes to write.

Brand messaging and tone of voice

Once the central idea is clear, it needs to work everywhere.

I can develop the key messages and tone that give people across an organisation a common starting point without making everything sound as though it was written by the same robot.

Good guidelines create consistency without becoming a straitjacket. They should explain how the brand sounds, what it talks about, the language it favours and avoids, and how the tone flexes for different audiences and situations.

The aim is recognition, not repetition.

Brand copywriting services

Depending on what you need, I can help with:

Brand and product naming
Brand positioning and propositions
Brand messaging and message frameworks
Tone of voice development
Mission and vision statements
Core values
Taglines, straplines and slogans
Brand stories and About copy
Verbal identity and brand language
Practical tone-of-voice and messaging guidelines

You may need one of those things or several of them. I won’t turn a naming job into a six-month brand programme if it doesn’t need to be one.

An experienced brand copywriter

I’ve spent 30 years writing for organisations of very different shapes, sizes and personalities.

That matters because branding isn’t about imposing a fashionable tone or making every company sound ‘bold’, ‘human’ or ‘disruptive’. It’s about understanding what is genuinely distinctive, what matters to the audience and what language the organisation can credibly own.

I can work directly with your team or alongside branding, design and marketing agencies, joining the process while the strategy is still taking shape or helping turn an established strategy into words people can actually use.

The result should sound like you. Just clearer, sharper and rather more deliberate.

Need help finding your brand’s voice?