How Verbal Brand Tactics Can Boost Business Resilience 

Today, verbal branding has become a critical strategy that powers everything from the ethos and expression of a brand’s positioning to the defining characteristics of its personality and tone to its advertising, marketing, content, sales and experiences. 

But a confluence of fast-moving forces are disrupting how brands deliver on their promise. As behavioral and attitudinal trends evolve and accelerate, the role and impact of a brand’s verbal identity are evolving too.  

Growth-oriented brands looking to stay ahead will need to adapt their verbal strategies to navigate new — and sometimes seemingly competing — imperatives to maintain relevance, share of voice, ROI, growth and resilience.  

Tension #1: Showing Up Authentically in an Era of Skepticism 

Consumers increasingly want brands to be authentic, share their values, and communicate transparently. Indeed, 86% of consumers say authenticity is crucial when choosing brands to support. And 92% of marketers believe consumers perceive their content as authentic — yet 57% of consumers think less than half of brands actually are authentic. 

It may feel difficult to balance authenticity with credibility; you want to communicate expertise, leadership and your competitive differentiation, which might feel at odds with younger consumers’ preferences for less polished, imperfect and casual content, especially on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. 

At a time when 52% of consumers say they keep authentic brands in mind when considering future purchases, but 20% would unfollow a brand if it appeared inauthentic, getting the balance right is critical.  

Takeaway

It’s not always clear what being authentic means, looks like and requires across the organization at both the macro and the micro level. So, it’s important for stakeholders to work cross-functionally to unpack and define authenticity — is it being more transparent? More relatable? Is it a tonal shift? Operational? — for the brand and customers, along with how you might deliver. 

Macro authenticity might include instituting new ways to support transparency, like codifying a process to stay ahead of and communicate changes, such as price increases, to your audiences. It could mean taking a fresh look at your organization’s values and instituting new behaviors and metrics. Maybe it means operationalizing empathy, such as integrating new social listening and response tools. It could mean updating your marketing plan to include relevant niche micro-influencers instead of major influencers (or using influencers for the first time). 

On the micro level, authenticity might mean softening hard-sell language and hyperbole on your website, updating call center scripts, incorporating short-form video and behind-the-scenes moments, rewriting product descriptions so they read plainly, adding customer testimonials and using a more conversational, approachable or inclusive tone. This can build trust and a willingness to follow, driving engagement, affinity and loyalty.  

Tension #2: Staying Conversant with Language Trends—But Avoiding Trending Language 

As brands strive to be more authentic and accessible through language and tone, it can be tempting to mirror popular slang. The problem is that language changes fluidly—and quickly, driven by social media and today’s digital instant feedback loop. That means it ages just as quickly; what worked two years ago can already feel incredibly out of date, or worse, out of touch. In fact, some reports show language changes happening within a year.  

The rate of linguistic change can make different cohorts feel like they’re speaking entirely different languages at times. For instance, in one report, 30% of Gen X workers said they struggle to understand millennial and Gen Z co-worker slang. Yet brands still need to connect in a way that’s modern and relatable.  

The answer isn’t to brush up on Gen Z or Gen Alpha slang. As Jessi Greiser, an assistant professor of English Linguistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said in an interview, “One of the death knells for slang is when it shows up in corporate social media. When [brands like Wendy’s are] saying, ‘Come vibe with our Baconator’ — that’s it. It’s over.” 

So, if the solution isn’t to add a bank of slang to your brand book, what should brands do to authentically connect? 

Takeaway 

First, know there’s a difference between how your audiences speak and how they want to be spoken to. In some of our work across media and entertainment, for instance, we found Gen Z content creators want brands to speak to them, not like them, preferring a tone that sits between professional, conversational and encouraging.  

Second, dive into your customer data, social listening tools and key metrics, and/or conduct new research to find the sentiments, attitudes and behaviors behind your audiences’ communication styles. Do the same to surface their communication needs and preferences, then update your tone of voice principles to play in this sweet spot.  

And third, don’t look at your verbal identity as something fixed and static, but rather dynamic, kind of like the “middleware” between the brand strategy and in-market activation. Just like software, it needs regular updates. Create intentional processes and cadences for teams to check in on the verbal brand regularly, say every six months, surfacing insights from digital marketing metrics, A/B copy tests, social listening, customer feedback, focus groups and the like. 

Tension #3: Balancing Performance Strategies with Brand Storytelling 

For the last 20 years, brands have increased their investment in demand or performance marketing and, along with it, focused on metrics like clicks and conversions. While these tactics drive short-term sales and gains, the over-reliance of performance marketing can negatively impact your brand equity, fragmenting the brand, creating an inconsistent experience for consumers and worse, one they don’t necessarily remember when it’s time to make a future purchasing decision. 

As we found in our new research report, “Brand and Demand: Marketing’s Great Love Story,” brand and demand don’t have to compete; instead, growth-oriented brands are doubling down on brand-first performance. That simply means bringing the brand story to performance touchpoints—indeed, delivering a consistent, cohesive story and experience can increase revenue by up to 20%. 

That’s challenged by the afore-mentioned instant digital feedback loop, especially on social and vocal consumers who have increasing ability (and willingness) to shift perception—and profitability—of a brand. It makes consistency an imperative because consistency builds trust, right along with your brand. And for 60% of people, a brand’s most important traits are trustworthiness and transparency. 

Takeaway 

Look to build consistency in brand storytelling across channels and platforms. One of the smartest ways to do this is by creating and codifying a brand voice and messaging strategy that’s modular yet cohesive. This gives both brand and demand teams the structure to stay on-brand, on-voice, on-message and on-strategy, but also the flexibility to adapt the message, story or tone to meet the needs of the specific moment, audience, channel or touchpoint.  

Tension #4: Balancing AI Speed to Market With Differentiation in Market 

Brands want to pump out content at scale, which is why companies of all sizes are experimenting with generative AI. And for good reason: it’s an incredible time-saving resource, especially if used to get ideas going, skim off surface fluff, brainstorm various angles and play with expression.  

The issue is trying to use AI to generate drafts and final content without assiduously evaluating and revising for brand voice, on-strategy messaging and copywriting best practices, such as understanding linguistic psychological triggers and optimizing for conversion.  

What we’re beginning to see as a result of the latter is that large language models (LLMs) are challenging differentiation with generic content that’s threatening to create homogeny at scale. LLMs aren’t thinking or reasoning; they’re guessing which word comes next in a sequence, based on what they’ve been trained on. (And increasingly LLMs are having to train on content they’ve churned out already, leading to worries that it will all devolve into nonsense in a phenomenon called model collapse. But that’s a conversation for another day.)  

Takeaway 

Brands can combat the slide into homogenization by prioritizing specificity and precision in language to differentiate amid the flood of AI content. That means being intentional about surfacing strong and credible proof points, being specific about offers and differentiators, being precise with language to credibly demonstrate value and continually training your LLM on your brand voice. 

It also means balancing productivity with best practice and brand governance, such as retaining a copy director, content manager, managing editor, editorial director or brand creative director of copywriting to manage and evaluate generative AI output. Roles like these can make a significant impact on the quality and effectiveness of content assisted by AI; LLMs can help generate ideas, angles and different modes of expression and your editorial director can then spend their time on more impactful work, such as punching up creativity, elevating tone of voice, devising A/B tests or sharpening copy best practices. 

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