Welcome back to Snack and Girl Snacks. I'm Steph Grignola and I'm here with Senior Copywriter for Refine Labs, Eric Zina. We're going to talk about establishing a unique brand voice and I'm so excited to have Eric here. Well, his official title is Senior Copywriter.
On any given day, Eric's role fluctuates between Idea Broker, Dot Connector, Brand Obsessive, and occasional armchair anthropologist. With seven years of experience in marketing and advertising, Eric has developed creative campaigns and executions for brands like Google Store, Blackberry, Foursquare, and Zscaler at agencies across the United States. Eric, I'm so excited to have you with me today. But we're going to start with some food questions.
So Eric, what was your favorite childhood snack? I think my favorite childhood snack has to be gutters and down. I mean, for me, I could go through boxes and boxes of those as a kid, admittedly even still today, honestly. Alright, diving into our topic at hand, we're going to kick this off with an exploration of finding your voice.
So first off, why is it so important to establish a consistent brand voice? For me, I think it's important to establish a consistent brand voice because it really helps you establish your own unique identity and personality as a brand. It gives customers a sort of calling card, if you will, something to remember you by. And ultimately, it helps you stand out and break through the noise.
And so when we talk about brand voice, it's like everyone has their voice just as a person, as an individual. And I think that's the big piece here, is like giving your brand individuality and giving your brand something that helps you stand out sort of amongst the crowd. Because as we know, Bw is very saturated these days. How do you find something that your customers can point to and be like, alright, that is Google, that is Amazon, that is Blackberry or whatever.
So I think that is the most important part there. And where do you start? When you're constructing a brand voice, how do you incorporate brand values and your target audience and all of the other million things that you have to consider into your writing? When I'm coming up with a brand voice, when I'm really starting at the ground level, I start with life.
I start asking questions. I start really at the heart of everything. So, I'm very unfamiliar with Simon Sinek, he's a great author, a great keynote speaker. And he has his concept of the Golden Circle.
He says that most brands, whether they're in a beauty space or a beauty space, when selling and marketing themselves, start with what they're selling, what's their product, what's their service, how do they go about selling the service and how do they go about creating everything, sort of what's the process behind that. And then from there they go to the Y, it's sort of these series of concentric circles ending up the Y, you know, why does your brand exist? Where does your brand exist? What does your brand's mission?
What does your brand see? Those things like that. So with the Golden Circle, Simon Sinek sort of flips that. And he starts with why, he starts with, how does your brand exist?
Why do you do what you do? Why do you wake up in the morning? It goes to the how, how is it done? How does your product or service work?
And then again, what really ending at the most practical part of your brand, what exactly is it that you do at the most pragmatic level? And so I think for me, that sense of starting with the Y is sort of how I go about starting this process of developing a brand. Voice is what do you care about? What do your customers care about?
And what sort of things can you can you let on to as far as as you mentioned values, principles as a brand, like what are your virtues as a brand and things like that. So definitely all about your target audience or as we say the ICP and really finding what they care about and having that common ground between your brand. When you're starting to craft this, do you do any research into competitors? Do you research their writing?
Subscribe to their newsletter? Do you do research to try and land on your own place in that landscape? Yes and no. I think a little bit of light research is necessary.
I think you should have a very fundamental understanding of your competition and the sort of the landscape. But anything more than that, I feel like it's almost excessive, right? Because I want the mindset that too much research is almost a burden. Some of that can really cloud your judgment and make your voice sound like everyone else's, which we don't want that.
And especially in the B of B space, as I mentioned, so saturated that it's easy to sound like the next cybersecurity brands, easy to sound like the next cloud, cloud technology brand. But I think for me, it's about researching culture, researching your audience as an actual ICP, finding their tensions that need solving essentially, what problems do they have? And from there, what insights can you derive from those problems, right? To come up with a solution that you ultimately come up with.
And so, yeah, I think research is necessary to appoint. But for me, all the research should be about your audience. Or I would say maybe 90% of research should be about your audience. And really studying them, I call it almost being an anthropologist and sort of really being observed and asking questions and being curious.
And so that is the extent of the research, I think. But that's my opinion. Eric, thank you so much. This has been amazing.
We will see you all next time to talk about staying consistent in your brand voice.