Voice and Tone
The voice and tone project stemmed from the need to define our baseline voice & tone and to ensure consistency across products.
situation
In a large company where each facet of the product is handled by a separate team, it becomes imperative to ensure consistency to build brand familiarity and trust. As a by product, standardizing the copy would mean less iterations in the design cycles when coming up with the final wording. The project is in the implementation phase.
task
The objective was to apply & roll out voice and tone to new and old products to achieve consistent player experience throughout. We decided to target a reduced design cycle by 20%.
action
Our products voice encompasses the types of words used, the way sentences are constructed, and how language flows.
We started with competitor analysis of our significant competitors who we thought had a descent voice and tone and plotted them on a range from serious to friendly. This aided us in identifying the extent to which we were comfortable to push our own voice.
Next we spent several weeks engaging with people to gather copy for the various player facing products. The copy was examined to bring in line the different products that would cater to a wider audience. So the scope was decided to include registration, banking, forgot password and responsible gaming to provide us with diversity we needed in the end to end player life-cycle.
Research and competitor analysis was completed before holding a workshop with BAs, UI and UX to find the core values we wanted our voice to convey. The workshop was also used to educate stakeholders on voice & tone and evaluate our competitors. An exercise was conducted where each person was asked to plot, on a scale from serious to friendly and brief to descriptive, our and competitors copy on the graph. Looking at the collective data, the graph where the points were close together indicated clarity in voice and tone.
Workshop exercise results
We then brainstormed on a the core tenets that we wanted our voice to convey. The leading theme that came out of the Workshop was for our voice to convey trust. As a long term industry leader we want to come across as a trustworthy and reliable brand. We grouped all the keywords related to trust and ranked their importance to us.The personality of our voice should be friendly and personable while getting the message across in a concise manner where every word counts. We should sound friendlier and less rigid than our current voice without straying into humorous/witty.
We are striving for a solid base voice which will blend well across all operators and not detract from their existing marketing voice.
We worked with external copywriters to complete the primary deliverable. We then worked with the product owners to review the copy that has been created and then completed a final pass to ensure consistency across each of these products.
The copywriter then worked on the creation of a style guide which we could use internally to ensure all copy added going forward fitted with the voice & tone we defined.
Result
We are now working to release a variant with the new voice and tone.
