Curb Appeal: Developing Your Brand Voice and Personality

Developing a compelling brand voice and personality can be a real challenge for financial advisors and wealth management enterprises. Either they come from a corporate background and are afraid to let loose, they're holding on to the belief that jargonizing creates trust, or they don’t want to commit to a tone of voice that might alienate people. 

My advice is this: Alienate people. You want to.   

It’s true. Your Brand Voice & Personality are the flower boxes in front of your brand house. It’s the curb appeal that attracts the right people. But it also needs to repel the wrong people. Think “repel” is too strong a word? It’s not. Your Brand Voice & Personality should tell the wrong people to keep on walking.

Why? Because working with the wrong people is joyless. If your Brand Voice & Personality is all about fun and irreverence, you do not want to work with people who take everything too seriously and get easily offended.

If your brand is all about gentleness and compassion, you do not want to work with hyper-aggressive beast-moders.

If your brand is all about self-empowerment and personal accountability, you do not want to work with perpetual victims.

What is Brand Voice & Personality?

Brand Voice & Personality is your commitment to a set of attributes that permeates your content, creating a consistent emotional experience for people. You build out your set of attributes to dictate how your content feels and sounds and how it does NOT feel and sound.

Put simply: If your Value Proposition is what you say, then your Brand Voice & Personality is how you say it.

Now, the first mistake people make with this exercise is getting WAY too aspirational. You want to articulate a brand voice and personality that expresses who you are, not who you think you should be.

Can who you are be expressed in a few adjectives? Of course not. As a person or corporation, you’re far too complicated. What I do want you to think about is a few parts of your personality or corporate culture that have served you best when it comes to connecting with people. For me, I’m extremely casual, kind of nerdy, and I make people laugh. So that is what I built my brand personality around. Other parts of my personality? I also have a short temper, hold a grudge like no-one’s business, swear at really inappropriate times. I opted not to build my brand voice and personality around those little quirks.

I advise starting with 4–6 core attributes that resonate most strongly with you. From there, dive deep and define what each of these means to you. When you’re done creating your Brand Voice & Personality, you’ll have a powerful checklist for every piece of content that you write.

Start with this list of attributes and circle the ones that speak most strongly to you. Narrow it down and combine them to reach 4–6 primary attributes. Take a look at these examples for some inspiration.