“The Tone Matters!” An Exploration of how Brand Tone of Voice Influences Brand Trust: A Case Study

Abstract

Brand tone voice enables businesses to express their individuality, values and vision through careful word choice. A brand's tone describes how the brand communicates its message to its stakeholders. Through careful word selection, it is used to convey a brand's personality and to evoke a certain mood in people. Creating a consistent tone across multiple touchpoints is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of your core brand and customer values (Teppo, 2021). According to Henriksen et al. (2004), the careful and successful use of linguistic features is important to properly reflect the image of the company. The success of a company’s growth strategy is dependent on its brand. The brand manager ensures product or brand innovation by creating brand awareness through pricing, packaging, logo designing and associating colours and lettering. Branding is about giving a company an identity that makes it stand out. In addition, communicating with customers is made easy by connecting with them through the brand’s tone (Renate, 2013). Thus, companies can communicate with customers through brand personality and gain their loyalty, trust and satisfaction by meeting their demands. Through emphasising brand tone, a company can distinguish itself from companies that lack that emphasis. The most critical factors to consider are how the communication is done and how tone of voice plays a huge role in communicating and connecting with the audience. Communicating with an audience may involve convincing them of a company’s expertise, effectiveness or camaraderie. Therefore, the selected wording may be tailored to convey authority, scholarly expertise or warmth (Daisy, 2020). This illustrates that by using proper communication tools and techniques, firms can reach to a wide number of customers and make a meaningful connection with them. Companies should consider customers’ emotions and feelings when they use brand tone of voice (BTV). In the scope of this dissertation, the author is going to concentrate on analysing the BTV practices at Nike, its communication style and finding the basic concepts of BTV, ranging from what BTV is to what its benefits are.