Marketing With Purpose Kit: Purpose in the Brand’s Tone and Voice

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast series, Marketing With Purpose, where we explore how to embed purpose into every level of your marketing. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and Mike Liwski. Hey, guys.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:33)
Hey, excited for today's show.

**Mike Liwski** (0:35)
Yeah, exactly. That's a good one.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:38)
All right. Today, we're diving into a topic that's often overlooked when people think about purpose, and that's tone and voice. It's not always just what you say, it's how you say it. Every word, every sentence, every interaction is a chance to communicate your intentions and beliefs.
So why does this matter? So tone and voice are the personality of your brand. If your purpose is your heart, and your tone and your voice are the way it speaks to the world, and they can reinforce trust, inspire loyalty, and make your purpose feel real, or they can break the connection completely. So sustainably focused brand that sounds cold and corporate, that sounds like mixed signals, right? So a health care brand with a caring mission, but a condescending tone will undermine its own credibility, and purpose and tone have to move in lockstep.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:41)
This reminds me of this idea of when you are training a dog, right? They understand tone. So you could say the nastiest thing to the dog, but you could say it sweetly to them, and they'll respond in a positive way. Or you can say the sweetest things, but you could say it with a mean voice, and they'll be scared. So the key is your purpose can't just live on a poster in your conference room. It needs to be infused in everything you do, from your ad copy to your chat bot responses to the way your front desk greets visitors. Tone is how your purpose shows up in your micro interactions, like in an email. Are you direct but human? Your customer service team, are they empathetic and solution focused? And in your social media campaigns, are you using language your audience uses or are you using corporate jargon? So if your purpose is, for example, about empowerment, your voice should make people feel capable and supported. If it's about innovation, your tone should inspire curiosity and possibility.

**Mike Liwski** (2:45)
So at this point, you're probably curious about some examples, and we'd love to, on the R show, really give you real life examples. So why don't we start off with a brand that all of us have gotten accustomed to. They do a great job. It's Liquid Death, right? On the surface, it's not just canned mountain water, right? But their purpose is about breaking the mold of the same boring hydration and bringing eco-consciousness to a younger, edgier audience. So what's their tone, right? It's kind of like punk rock meets stand-up comedy, right? They use over-the-top metal-inspired branding. So we've all seen the skulls and the flames and kind of like the mock horror ads to really essentially make sustainability feel like rebelliousness, right? Instead of just kind of this preachy tone. And that sharpens the tone, right? It works for them because it's consistent across every ad, across the packaging, even some of the elements that Tullio mentioned in his list, every customer email, right? It's all consistent. And so it doesn't become just a look at that point, but it starts to take on the personality for the company. And then it ends up inviting people into that tribe.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:05)
Exactly. And then there's Mailchimp. I mean, their purpose is to help small businesses grow on their own term. Pretty powerful way to grow on your own term. Their tone is witty, it's approachable, and always just a little playful. They really make an effort to avoid corporate jargon completely. Instead, they use quirky illustration, spoken in language that feels human and inclusive. Even their error messages have personality. The tone says, we're in this together, which perfectly aligns with their purpose of empowering the underestimated.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:45)
Yeah. Another example is Tom's. Their purpose is social impact, so improving lives through business. Originally, they're famous for their one-for-one model. That evolved into giving a third of their profits to grassroots causes. Their tone is optimistic, it's compassionate and hopeful. Whether it's a product page or a social post, the language invites you to be part of something bigger. It's never a hard sell, it's an open hand kind of thing.

**Mike Liwski** (5:20)
Another brand that is doing a great job of this as well is Oatly. They're the Swedish oat milk brand. Their purpose is essentially to make plant-based living mainstream and reducing essentially the environmental impact of dairy. They've taken what could have been just another milk alternative, and really has turned that into a whole cultural movement. They've done that because their tone is casual, they're a little bit cheeky, and they're also very self-aware. It's like they're literally talking to you directly from the carton. They'll bring things like, wow, no cow or have the entire paragraphs of humorous banter on their packaging. Then here's the magic really.