Problem
For writers, the brand voice guidelines were too high-level to execute against. That meant voice and tone was inconsistent across our experiences and we weren't maximizing our strategic use of tone contextually.
Approach
We took a customer-led approach to designing our voice guidelines. Without budget and research support, that approach was fairly scrappy: we did a competitive analysis to find brands that executed effectively on voice, and sentiment analysis on customer feedback through Facebook, community portals, opinion lab feedback. We used both as a baseline to determine where we need to be and how to get there. We measured success through adoption. In the end, the output was what we call the empathy method framework: A collaborative tool to connect deeply with the customer and strategically build narrative and tone into all parts of the experience. One of the core underlying principles of the approach (other than empathy of course), is that to communicate effectively, we need to meet customers where they are and respond contextually. It's ideally used by design teams together as they're starting to define an experience.
My role in this project
I co-led the task force team, partnering closely with another content strategist to define the method , create the toolkit resources (with support from a visual design partner), and drive adoption through workshops and trainings.
A cheat sheet listing voice tenets and which tenets to emphasize based on desired emotional response.
Cheat sheet intended to guide teams through the approach as their defining the experience