How many times have you heard or read about the need to “find your brand’s voice”? If you read this blog, it was Monday. In the ensuring four days, I have personally counted another 14 times. It is always painful when a great idea becomes a cliché—just look at the “green” movement—but the discovery of a brand’s voice is marketing’s goal, inescapable and ultimate. I want to explore this process of finding a company’s voice, but do so without the clichés and buzzwords. Human-beings have been thinking about voice for a long time, and maybe the past has something to teach us, so for the first post on this topic let’s go back to a period where the gateway to your social network wasn’t a browser but a rotary phone, not an app but a neighbor’s door.

Cue: my English degree. When I think of the search for a voice, my mind leaps straight to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. (If you don’t remember it from English 101, you can watch it here on YouTube). Now I know half of you just stopped reading at the word Shaw, but the other half, you are the chosen, bare with me. The play follows Professor Henry Higgins, an expert linguist, and his attempt to transform a cockney flower girl into a young lady. In the process, he finds himself falling in love with her. This is the marketing dream.**

In this metaphor, the agency comes upon the young beautiful brand obscured by rags and a stilted dialect (just look at 1950’s BP ads) and the agency, like the professional Henry Higgins, has all the tools of the trade:

a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singeing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph

Of course, the tools have changed. Now we are each equipped with a computer connected to a web of brilliant people, revolutionary ideas, and ads for natural male enhancement, Blackberries, iCyan-3G-Z-berries, walls of white boards, a Gaiam balance ball chair (with pump), any piece of software Adobe has every made, Helvetica, and an external hard-drive for your illegal mp3s and arguably not-safe-for-work Waikiki photos. Yet the mission and its consequences are still the same.

We still work to find a company’s voice and somehow, if my conversations with my coworkers are anything to go on, a relationship develops, and then deepens over time. I think the motivation of marketing is something akin to what Henry Higgins describes to his skeptical mother after being called a baby:

But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.

Maybe that is what we do when we are at our best. I would like to hope so.

 

* Quotes from George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Dover Thrift Edition

** A cynic might argue that the dream client has money and not just great promise. We’ll ignore the cynics.

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