Welcome back to Snack and Girl Snacks. I'm Steph Canola and I'm here with senior copywriter for Refine Labs, Eric Zina. Eric, I'm so excited to be back. We're back at Snacks.
What is the best snack you have in your house right now? If I told you to go to your pantry, grab me something, send it to Austin. What would you grab? Best snack I have in my house right now, oh man, that's a hard question to answer.
But I think for me, and I don't snack a lot these days aside from, again, the occasional gusher, probably has to be frosted brown sugar in the pot darts and just that flavor and they have to be toasted, cannot be microwaved. I'm very happy to hear about that. But yeah, that's the best flavor of pop tart. Okay, Eric, diving into it, we're building a unique brand voice.
You've got your tone, but how do you keep it consistent? How do you adapt that voice and those guidelines to different communication streams like socials, emails, websites, any other place that you're putting words? So I think there's a difference here between voice and tone, right? Voice is sort of that consistent thread that you have as brand that that way you speak, that way you show up that is really sort of static, I would say, you know, again, pretty consistent.
It doesn't really change much from year to year from quarter to quarter from campaign to campaign. But I will say, tone is a little different. Tone is the way you modulate that voice, right? Depending where you are, where you speak and see what things like that.
So an example would be tone for LinkedIn. A little more buttoned up, a little more professional resume on Instagram or Reddit, a little more colloquial. You're making a few more cultural references and things like that. So voice should be consistent, voice should be pretty static.
I would say that doesn't change much, but tone, I think, depending on where you are, where you show up and where you're speaking to, I think that that sort of modulates a little bit. And how do you balance consistency with freshness, making sure things don't get stale or feel repetitive? You want your voice to be consistent. You want your voice to be sort of the same year in, year out, quarter in, quarter out.
But you also don't want things to get stale. You don't want things to sort of plateau and drop off, especially when it comes to your audience, because you do have such a small window to get advantage of their attention, right? And I think for me, that just comes with coming up with different campaign themes, different concepts and things like that. And I think I can use a great example of this.
So as we know, it's a 50, 60 year old brand even, but it's sounded the same for veggies. All about competition, all about sort of doing your best and excellence and things like that. And they're sort of the spirit as imbued in this brand and has been for like a while. But as you think about the different campaigns, they're all pretty different, and especially as of recently, their latest campaign is am I a bad person?
All about painting the athlete as this hyper-competitive person that will do anything to win. You know, win at all costs. Even if that means sort of embracing the villain role and even like, I don't know, like stepping over people along the way, which is kind of an insane message to have. But it's sort of a left turn from what they've done for, if you think about Nike, historically, they've been the brand that's like, every body can be an athlete, right?
Every one can be an athlete. You don't have to be an NBA player, making tens of millions of dollars a year. Like you can just be regular person off the street running, dogging, whatever it is, you're an athlete. Whereas I think this speaks to that really competitive, that really almost invisible, insight of, sometimes you've got to be, excuse my friends, but like that a hill really to get your way and to, you know, to really kind of make it and excel.
And so that is an example of a brand that is, I heard this brand that has been around for a while. It was something different, you know, a little by little, every single time, but still remaining the same. So remaining true to who they are, which is, you know, competition and excellence and greatness. Yeah.
And what are some signs that a brand voice needs to be updated? Or how should a voice evolve as a business grows? Honestly, I think a brand voice, although it's pretty consistent, if it does change, it should change with times. It should change as culture changes and evolves.
And, you know, no brand has been the same for all of its entirety, right? And even about like heritage brands, 100 to 20 year old brands, they're still the same spirit and heart that they have, things I care about, you know, not why, for example. But the way they speak might change a little bit, you know, whether it's only, or would have you. But yeah, I just think as culture evolves, social view, as economy changes, as politics change, as, you know, social norms and cues change, you can change along with them.
And whether that means changing your manner of speaking or changing things you care about. But I think they're just sort of tweaks here and there that you can make to make sure that your brand really expands to test the time. Eric, thank you so much. This has been incredible.
We are going to be back and for one more week, one more snack to look out for some news and don't. Thank you so much.