Who’s on vocals in your brand?

Last week I found myself at a local bandroom known for hosting sweaty rockers. At the upper-end of my 30s, I don’t get to as many shows as I would like or use to. I have become that creepy old guy in the back of the venue trying to keep a low profile or pretending I am somehow related to the management of the band.

The band that night had come out of the punk/hardcore scene and the performance was suitably energetic.

Watching the frontman, it hit me how much the perception of the show and the band as a whole hung on his voice, his banter.

In most cases, a band’s identity is its vocalist, its voice.

Think about it.

The band’s other musicians such as the guitarists, drummers or accordion players (they didn’t have one of those) can be replaced to recreate the band’s sound, but change the vocalist and you change something core to what make them unique.

Let’s take Dave Grohl and his most commercially successful project Foo Fighters. The Foo Fighters have had a revolving line-up of guitarists coming in and out , but Grohl has remained the vocalist. Remove Grohl as the voice of the Foo Fighters and replace him with someone else, the whole identity of the band would change.

The band’s brand changes.

Voice is one of the strongest ways we understand identity.

You know how your friends and family tend to look, but should you be blinded by some freak run-in with magical gutter goblin out the back of a 7-11 on the way home from a late-night Slurpie escapade…well…you could still probably pick them out of a crowded room by the sound of their voice.

So why do brands constantly overlook this key attribute still expecting to rock their marketing and find fans?

How we adjust the vocals of our brand mix is more than making sure our copywriting is tight (although that is a huge component, especially across digital and social).

We need to first understand how we personify our brand. We often know what we want our brand to value and look like, but how much consideration do we give to how they speak? Their unique accent, tone and vocabulary?

How does your brand sound in emerging areas such as AI voice assistants or newer dominant digital forms such as podcast and video? Brands need to think more about their voice today than even two years ago.

So do you know your brand voice? Does it change too often?

Perhaps that’s why no one wants to listen to your stuff.

Time to mix it up.