What’s your brand’s verbal identity?
Crafting language to serve as your organization’s signature—without lapsing into monotonous catch phrases—can be challenging, but it’s well worth the effort.
Recently I spent time advising a communicator who’s working to improve her colleagues’ understanding of verbal identity.
Many organizations have visual identities that specify how people must convey the brand through color, fonts and imagery. The details in these visual branding guides are astounding—down to half a point in type and a fraction of an inch on the page.
Verbal identity doesn’t get quite so much love. Some companies have a customized style guide. Others at least specify whether to follow AP style or The Chicago Manual of Style. Most have a list of acronyms somewhere, so you can interpret the alphabet soup of such terms as KPI, ROI and API.
But a full-on guide to expressing a brand in words? That’s a rare and wonderful thing.
Download this free white paper, “Auditing your Internal Communications,” for a step-by-step guide to assess which communications channels work best for your organization.
So, how do you establish a verbal identity?
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