A brand tone of voice defines how your brand personality sounds across any written or verbal content. Put simply, it’s the tone that you use whenever you communicate with someone on behalf of your brand. Whether you’re communicating on social media, an email, or face to face, it should always be in your brand tone of voice.
Tone of voice is an essential part of your branding, bringing together your brand values, personality and attitude, and it’s just as important as your visual branding. When done well, it’s what will help set you apart in your niche. In this post, we’re shining the light on five female-founded businesses that get their brand tone of voice just right. Join us as we take you through some of our favourites.
Bumble
Founded in 2014 by Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble is a dating, meeting and networking app set up to help challenge conventional dating rules. Its overall goal is to empower you to feel confident building connections, whether personal or professional. How? By giving women the opportunity to make the first move. That’s right, a thriving female-founded organisation that empowers women from the get-go. Their approach shakes up outdated gender norms and promotes a sense of kindness and respect whilst creating a safe online community where you can build relationships.
Bumble’s values and tone of voice
It’s not just the company ethos that makes Bumble so unique, though. Their brand identity stands out too – from their visual branding to, more specifically, their tone of voice. The Bumble brand values can be broken down into five keywords: kindness, respect, equality, accountability, and growth, and they’re reflected in every written and spoken element of the Bumble brand.
Let’s take a look at one of their recent social media posts all about dating fatigue, for example. The post, which went out on their Instagram account, encourages users to prioritise their mental health when using Bumble and to take breaks when they don’t feel they’re in the right headspace to date. In the post, they provide a series of helpful tips to keep in mind when you take a break – all of which focus on mental health.
If you feel you’re not in the right place to date, stepping back for some amount of time – be it a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks – can be really beneficial.
This statement alone showcases Bumble’s respect for its users, as well as kindness, and encourages the personal growth and accountability of anyone who uses the app. Their tone of voice feels considered at all times, and it shows in the content they create – it’s designed with their users in mind.
Double Dutch
Double Dutch is a premium mixers brand founded by Dutch twin sisters Joyce and Raissa De Haas. Inspired by their home country (and the birthplace of gin), the Netherlands, the De Haas twins founded Double Dutch to offer new and unpredictable flavours of mixers to the drinks market. They’d seen the drinks industry grow and develop to offer a diverse range of fantastic alcoholic drinks to consumers, but had noticed that there was a lack of change in mixers. So, it became their mission to create their own unique mixers and ensure that we “never drink dull” again.
Double Dutch’s values and tone of voice
There are five core values that Double Dutch live by when it comes to their brand, which are:
- Be a force for good and empower others
- Pursue excellence
- Be a good human
- Make complex things simple
- Set crazy big goals and make them happen
If we break these down into five words to describe their tone of voice, they become: empowering, quality, community, clear and ambitious, all of which Double Dutch shows in the content that they create for their brand. Shall we take a look?
The clearest example of Double Dutch’s empowering and community-focused tone of voice is on their website where they talk about their scholarship programme. Every year, Double Dutch hosts a scholarship programme aimed at supporting female bartenders and mixologists to progress in their careers. The scheme alone embodies their values of community and empowerment, but it’s the tone of voice that they use when they talk about the scheme that really adds authenticity to what they’re doing.
They describe the programme as a way to “foster up-and-coming talent” through “unique educational sessions”. This instantly creates a sense of excitement and empowerment and clearly lays out what mentees will get out of the ambitious programme. In just one sentence, Double Dutch has embodied three of their core values through their tone. Impressive, right?
Teapigs
Founded by Louise Cheadle and Nick Kilby in 2006, Teapigs is a tea company that was set up with the mission of getting the UK to drink better quality tea. Despite the UK being a nation of tea drinkers, the Teapigs team discovered that high-quality tea wasn’t so easy to come by – unless it was expensive. So, they took it upon themselves to bring quality tea, at a reasonable price, to the UK.
Teapigs is our tea of choice here at Matchstick Creative HQ so we’re more than thrilled to be sharing more about the female-founded company and its fantastic tone of voice!
Teapigs’ values and tone of voice
Teapigs’ tone of voice is framed around its values as a company, which are; quality, sustainability and community. However, what stands out most about Teapigs’ tone of voice is their love of all things fun, especially evident on their “about us” page.
When introducing the team behind the brand, instead of just putting names to the faces, Teapigs has a tea-themed nickname for each of their employees. For example, Sharon, Head of Finance, is also known as the “Tea Counter”. This unique take on the “about us” page really helps you get a sense of who they are as a company – making them stand out in their niche.
Moving back to their core three values, though, all are consistently shown across the Teapigs platforms. Sustainability is at the heart of Teapigs and is proved through the schemes that they have in place. For example, Teapigs are a b-corp certified organisation which means that they are committed to using their organisation as a force for good. On their website, they have a specific section all about their sustainability and how they give back to the community.
Pip & Nut
Pip & Nut is a nut butter company with a twist. Founded by Pip Murray, Pip & Nut makes fantastic, palm-oil free, natural nut butters and nut butter cups. Put simply, they are “all about nut butter done better”. By better, they don’t just mean tastier. Pip & Nut believes that it’s their responsibility to look after their people and the planet and, through various schemes, they hold themselves accountable as an organisation.
Pip & Nut’s values and tone of voice
There are four key values that define Pip & Nut’s tone of voice: playful, honest, ambitious and accessible, and each of them helps to make up the sound of the Pip & Nut brand.
When it comes to their website, Pip & Nut is full of perfect executions of their tone of voice. Their personality is clear from the moment you enter the homepage of their website where the first thing you’re greeted with is a headline that reads “Nut butter done better”. This instantly shows their values of ambition and honesty. The ambitious and honest approach continues below where they talk about their impact report, which lays out how they’re striving to make their products in a more sustainable way.
As you move further down the page, their playful tone starts to come through in the kind of headings that they share. To highlight their drool-worthy Instagram feed, they use the heading “Pip & Nut in the wild”. Then, to lead you towards their newsletter, they ask you to “join the scurry” – another playful take on the usual “sign up to our newsletter!” CTA (call to action) that you’d expect from most company websites.
Their accessible value also shows throughout as they include features about how their nut butter is made, in an easy-to-read format, along with a feature section all about how you can use Pip & Nut in your own recipes. Everything that Pip & Nut says that it is as a company is right there on page one of their website.
The Body Shop
Founder Anita Roddick first opened The Body Shop in 1976, in what started off as a small beauty shop in Brighton, with the dream of doing something revolutionary. The aim? To start and run an organisation that would be a force for good.
The Body Shop’s values and tone of voice
What makes The Body Shop stand out from others within the beauty industry is its passion to make a difference. Through their five brand values, they’re on a mission to:
- Empower women and girls
- Showcase hard-working, natural ingredients
- Grow partnerships and support communities
- Champion sustainability
- Create products that are vegetarian and vegan friendly
This is reflected in the tone of voice that they emulate across all their channels: empowerment, natural, community-driven, and sustainable. Women’s empowerment is more than just International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day – it’s something that should be embodied in every moment of every day. The Body Shop lists women’s empowerment as one of their core values and they’re true to it in the voice that they showcase on their platforms.
Whilst The Body Shop uses national days, such as Mother’s Day and International Women’s Day, to practice women’s empowerment, their celebrations of women don’t end there. They continue to share empowering, inspirational messages across their channels all year round.
An example of this is in a post that they shared from their community which showed a woman talking about self-love whilst doing her beauty routine. The message that The Body Shop included alongside it was a quote from the woman which read:
Makeup is not about covering or hiding. It’s definitely about enhancing and decorating – Meet Jenna.
This is a great example of how The Body Shop encourages self-love and empowerment through both its visual content and tone of voice.
What can we learn from these brands?
1. When it comes to tone of voice, first impressions matter.
Headings are a great way to showcase your values in a few short words. Pip & Nut and Teapigs do a fantastic job of getting their personality across on their website with headings and subheadings. Always keep in mind how you can show your personality in every bit of content – no matter how small it might be.
2. Think about your people when you’re building your brand tone of voice.
Bumble is a brilliant example of a brand that understands and cares for its community. The Bumble tone of voice takes into consideration how a dating app user might feel and ensures that all of their content is made for them.
Want to discover more female-founded businesses that inspire us?
Check out our #FemaleFounders series where we talk to incredible women in business. Or, to further explore tone of voice, learn more about our tone of voice workshops. For the latest news from Matchstick Creative, follow us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
