Finding your voice

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

It takes the average person more than 40 hours to read War and Peace. Whereas Bob, apparently, can polish off Tolstoy’s epic literary masterpiece in a mere 20 minutes – and he won’t skip a word!

Of course, Bob isn’t human. He is a ‘word geek’ robot – a clever piece of proprietary technology developed by brand-voice experts Linguabrand to help make communication more distinctive and persuasive. 

“Bob measures emotions and attitudes and persuasion frames in language,” says Linguabrand founder Alastair Herbert. “It could be in transcribed research; it can be speeches, brand websites, social media. What is brilliant about him is that he never misses a word, while the best human readers miss at least 15% of the content on first reading.”

Herbert spent more than 20 years in marketing before setting up the language-driven research and development consultancy Linguabrand in 2011. In the late 1990s, he was the first marketing director at the newly created FTSE International, and launching its European Indices – market information that was previously given away for free – opened his eyes to the value of data. 

Appreciation of the significance of data underpins Linguabrand’s approach. Brand-voice development work has traditionally been considered a soft, creative art, rather than a data-led science. However, Herbert argues that Bob’s ability to benchmark transcripts or marketing content against millions of other words gives an insightful edge that is helpful for researchers, creative agencies and client companies alike. “Market researchers generally go, ‘oh my god, free text. What on earth are we going to do with that?’,” says Herbert. “The more people talk, the more problematic it is for them – but the better it is for Bob because, the more people talk, the more they reveal about themselves.”

Broadly speaking, Linguabrand measures four aspects of language: clarity, propositions, personality (tone of voice) and persuasion. Let’s begin with the first aspect. Unclear, needlessly complex language is, of course, a major barrier to understanding. For a recent project, Linguabrand analysed the websites of 30 US universities. Bob read 150,000 words in around two minutes and rapidly identified that – when it comes to clarity – a fifth of the universities had got it terribly wrong. 

“Although they were meant to be targeting undergraduates, when we looked at the reading age, you actually needed to be at postgraduate level to understand the way half a dozen of the universities were talking to you,” says Herbert. 

Away from academia, Linguabrand has worked with a broad range of clients – including Eurostar, Adidas, Samsung and Breast Cancer Now – and its work has inspired some significant changes. 

Herbert doesn’t mince his words when pointing out that Eurostar was a “boring” business. Its English, French and Dutch websites were dull, and it struggled to be heard in a competitive landscape of rival operators and budget airlines. Working with brand consultancy The Clearing, Linguabrand measured rivals’ websites and all of Eurostar’s channel and internal content. The metrics, analysis and “quantified tone-of-voice development” led to the award-winning Stories Are Waiting campaign, which replaced the drab function of ‘the journey’ with a “sensory destination experience”. 

Through these changes to its brand voice, Eurostar generated record customer numbers. “We helped turn it from a boring company into owning the emotional relationship between Paris and London,” says Herbert. 

With Adidas, Linguabrand worked with the senior team to redefine its core persuasive position – to distinguish it more clearly from staunch rival Nike – as well as its propositions and tone of voice. The brief for Samsung focused on customer acquisition in the mobile-phone market; specifically, Samsung wanted to know how to persuade disgruntled Apple customers to switch. Linguabrand ran 32 one-to-one interviews in London and Paris, and people opened up, revealing the deeper persuasion frames associated with their Apple dissatisfaction. The transcripts were fed into Bob, which showed how Samsung should speak differently to women and men. 

“We showed Samsung issues people had with its rivals so it could change the language it used,” says Herbert. “We gave it questions for in-store salespeople to ask if they discover somebody is ready to switch – then two follow-up questions for females and two for males. The results were extraordinary. Now that it understood the emotional backdrop to issues with an existing provider, it was able to project pictures [using sensory language] back to consumers that worked for it.”

Linguabrand has also done a substantial amount of work in the healthcare sector, alongside agencies such as Hall & Partners, and with charities and healthcare providers directly – for example, in understanding and defining disease states. When two leading breast-cancer charities merged to create Breast Cancer Now, Linguabrand was called upon to help define the new entity’s tone of voice. 

Bob was set to work analysing blogs written by women with breast cancer. What came through loud and clear was that the authors’ thinking tended to be framed around movement and forces; the women needed to ‘keep going’, wanted appointments to be ‘swift’ and lamented that their illness slowed them down. It was also evident that they worried about the disease hitting their families hard. These insights changed the way the charity spoke about the disease – it moved away from the ‘fight against’ terminology used by other leading cancer charities. 

Instead of talking about women ‘beating cancer’, it became about helping to ‘find a faster cure’ and ‘reducing the impact’ of the disease. Herbert says this shift in language sat well with women affected by the disease and helped shape the culture of Breast Cancer Now. 

Where, then, do organisations go wrong in their use of language? “Businesses love conceptual ideas. They will talk about things such as sustainability, creativity, loyalty, helpfulness. The problem is, that type of language makes the brain work too hard, and it is very difficult to connect to people emotionally.” 

Sensory language is far more persuasive than conceptual language. The drawback here, however, is that describing one thing in terms of another – projecting pictures, as it were – is much harder for brands to own. Unless, as Herbert would no doubt argue, you put Bob on the job.