3.1Corporate language

3.1.2 The language guidelines that brands use

We noted above that a corporate language style is often captured in guidelines that will be used in the production of its communications, and also for audit and review. In practice, and in the typical case, these descriptions of language are not sufficiently rigorous to define what linguistics might recognise as a “style” or “variety”. The following are some verbatim examples taken from actual guidelines. It is unfortunately impossible to attribute these examples for reasons of confidentiality:

–Words should obviously express the personality of the brand: passionate, pioneering, inspiring, and warm.

–Use personal language: we, us and you.

–Use simple straightforward words that “come from the heart”.

–Use conversational language and write like you speak.

–Write and speak in a natural and unforced way.

–Always talk about the key things our products and services do – their features – in ways that communicate meaningful and relevant benefits to your audience.

–Use imperative verbs. This adds energy to your writing by cutting the cumbersome language normally used to set up a point.

–Use active sentences. These sound more confident because it’s clear who’s doing what.

Directives like these are typical. They range from quite vague admonitions, through guidance on selecting content, to recommendations on specific linguistic usages. In addition to guidance like this, individual companies often have certain house style rules, such as rules for formatting dates, capitalisation and spacing of product names, preferred spellings, how to address people, etc.

In addition to language rules or principles, language guidelines for brand-image formation typically also contain examples of the kinds of language being aimed at (texts such as letters, posters or brochures given as “before” and “after” versions). The following example, with the “before” version on the left and the “after” version on the right, is from an oil exploration company’s language guidelines.

Before	After
The Group’s geotechnical and related services help provide information on soil properties at the seabed as the basis for design and operational considerations. Geophysical and related services provide information on the seabed profile and contours to facilitate construction work. These services are executed though 4 specially designed geotechnical and geophysical vessels.	In our business, everything we do is based on a detailed understanding of the seabed. Advanced information on soil properties provides a safe basis for our design and operations. Using our four state-of-the-art geotechnical and geophysical vessels, we map the seabed’s profile and contours in detail.

In this example, the original is heavy on inanimate clause subjects: “the Group’s geotechnical and related services”, the repetitive “geophysical and related services” and “these services”. The result is that the company seems to have no personal agency in these operations. Changes that have been made to achieve the “after” version include creating clauses with subjects that include possessive pronouns to give the company agency, and removing abstract and technical language in favour of “humanised” nominalisations. For example, “seabed profile” becomes “understanding of the sea-bed”, which humanises by including a mental process, and “facilitate construction work” becomes “our design and operations” which does so with a possessive.

The following “before” and “after” versions are taken from a rewrite undertaken by a British High Street bank to bring communications into line with its brand guidelines. The communication concerned is a letter explaining a price change to business customers. Pricing was moving to a different basis, so some customers would be better off and some worse off. There were variants of the letters for each customer outcome, but the introduction and justification included in each letter was the same.

Before

After

At Anybank, we strongly believe that Business Banking should be straightforward, clear and easy to manage. With this view, we constantly strive to deliver a better offering to our Business Banking customers which includes re-evaluating the pricing of our products and services from time to time. In our endeavour to deliver on the above, we are making a few changes to the pricing of our International Payments and Transfers that our Business Banking customers are making with us.

We’ve recently carried out a review of our Foreign Exchange Pricing, with a view to making our pricing clearer and fairer for all our customers. We also think it’s important to recognise in our pricing the length of time customers have been doing business with us, and the volume of transactions they put through Anybank Business. From 00 Month 2015, we’ll be changing our pricing as a result.

Unlike the previous example, the company (“we”) has a good deal of agency in the clauses in the “before” version. The rewrite has moved the focus of the argument away from the bank’s activities, explaining the changes rather in terms of how they affect customers. The language of the “before” version includes the emphaticallymodified “strongly believe” and “constantly strive” which seemed over-dramatic for this context and over-effusive about the bank’s role. Reference to the credo behind the bank’s actions has therefore been softened to an uncontroversial justification of “making our pricing clearer and fairer for customers”. In addition, the “before” version shows evidence of business register in “re-evaluating the pricing of our products and services”, “a better offering” and “endeavour to deliver on the above”. In the change to the “after” version, the aim was to make the language more like the register of everyday conversation, and again to humanise the speaker. So changes included contractions (“we’ve”, “it’s”), and the mental process verb (“we also think”).

However, some vestiges of the business register survive: “a review of”; “the volume of transactions they put through Anybank Business” were the subject of discussion with the client, who preferred this formulation to our suggested “a look at” and “the way you bank with us” or “the number of transactions you put through your account”. In studying this and perhaps any genre of discourse, it is important to remember that the final result is not usually what any party thinks of as perfection – it is just the best that could be done at the time, given the need to satisfy the needs and preferences of different parties within available timescales.

Finally, my third example is from the guidelines of a Government Department, another project of which I have personal knowledge. The aim here was to achieve a kinder, more human tone, as well as to improve clarity. The first change is therefore to move from the more complex logical relationship (“x if not y”) to the simpler and positively-framed “if x, y”. The language moves from an imperative “You must. . .” to a request (“Please. . .”) with positive encouragement rather than a negative sanction to motivate compliance. As in the previous examples, there is personification of the organisation with “we”, rather than the passive “your claim will end” with no explicit human agent.

Before	After

Although the original is very clear, we felt it was pedantic to use a bulleted display for “have changed” and “haven’t changed”. To be more helpful, the number to call and the deadline have been placed in the initial request, so that the letter is more direct. This content has also been included in the letter title, rather than the more generic “what you must do now”. This not only makes the letter clearer, it breaks down the unequal power relationship between writer and reader. In practice, this power relationship (between a government department and benefit claimants) is controversial and always in the news, but our guidelines focused on introducing more of the ordinary rules of polite discourse into the Tone of Voice – hence “please” and “we need you to do this so that” – giving reasons for requests.

Do language guidelines work? Certainly, the examples contained in language guidelines are often reported to be valuable to corporate writers. Yet there is no formal research on how effective they are, on whether what the guidelines contain is optimal, or on whether explicit language knowledge (as opposed to the examples provided, or a “feel” for the brand) is instrumental in bringing a writer’s style closer to the recommended brand language. One informal study, undertaken by one of our clients, did show that written communications were becoming closer to the recommended style two years after training on Tone of Voice. However, this training and general awareness raising also encompassed visual design, brand awareness and much more, and the assessment was far from scientific.

Also relevant for this chapter is the need to understand customers’ affective responses to communications, and to establish whether the kind of values or “personality” these evoke among readers are really those intended by brand strategists. I do not know of any research that focuses effectively on this question. We will look into some research approaches that might give some insight in Section 4.

3.2Corporate design

Corporate design is a set of agreed design ingredients – including some or all of typefaces, sizes and weights, colour palette, photographic style, illustration style – laid out and positioned in agreed ways. For example, there may be a set of layouts for webpages, brochures, factsheets and headed paper, indeed for all kinds of communications that customers and others might encounter. As with branded language, the idea is to create a consistent identity for the brand, one that is recognisable and will evoke a set of assumptions and associations in its audiences each time they encounter it.

Design guidelines usually take the lion’s share of what is contained within an overall “brand book”, covering visual identity and often including specific guidelines for layout, design, typography, colours, and photography style. (The language guidelines will often be a chapter within the same book.) The brand book is a reference item for many within the business and outside it: for example, external agencies such as design companies who will have been assigned to create communications on behalf of the brand. The rules for visual identity and the rules for Tone of Voice together form the framework within which corporate communications must be created.

3.3Creating corporate communications

By the time a piece of communication is finished and released, it has usually been through multiple rounds of review by many actors within the company including some or all of the following.

In addition, senior stakeholders may have expressed personal opinions about how the item looks and reads. Moreover, it may, additionally, have been through one or more rounds of research, of which more in the next section. The writers and designers (often in an external agency) must respond to all the comments and changes, and modify the communication in successive versions until everyone is satisfied.

It is not accurate, therefore, to say that any corporate communication57 (from a shampoo bottle and its label to a letter from the bank) is the work of a single author or designer. All such communications are jointly produced, collaborative texts, and are always the result of many iterations of editing. It is worth bearing this in mind when analysing corporate discourse. Practically speaking, multiple authorship can create unevenness, which is quite important when considering how to select a representative sample of communications from a given brand. It also suggests interesting questions about authorial intention. Typically, the groups listed above would have a wide range of aims and concerns, so that to each one of them what counts as “success” may be different. As a result, a communication is often the result of a large number of compromises. It is not anybody’s ideal result but rather the result of what has been possible to do on time, within budget, and subject to a large number of constraints.

This “constraint satisfaction” model of document creation was set out by Waller (1987). Waller does not go into detail about the multiple agencies involved in creating a communication. Instead, he looks at the graphical and typographical resources used to achieve its aims. These visual (and verbal) resources are manipulated and iteratively modified as the item moves towards its final form. The process of making branded communications is therefore a multi-layered, complex one – a fact that should inform our analysis of what brands are “trying to do” in any given instance.

4.1Is research always necessary?

How do we know if a communication is going to be fit for its purpose? Not all commercial communications are researched by the companies that produce them, who may not see this as a priority. Time may be short before the communication must be ready, or the budget may not stretch to research. Alternatively, the communication may be small-scale, or uncontroversial, or follow a template or pattern that is already well-established and trusted. Waller (2011: 11) provides a useful overview of the place of research in the design process, from a practitioner’s point of view.

Designers alternate between creative and evaluative phases. Even at the simplest level, we draw a line, then consider whether it is in the right place before moving on to the next one. At a higher level, evaluation is a distinct stage at which we show our work to colleagues, clients or users, or we come back to it ourselves after a period of reflection in which we can become distanced and therefore more objective about it. I believe this solution-evaluation cycle goes on all the time, silently as we work. In other words, during what appears outwardly to be the solution stage (when the designer is working individually by him- or herself), internalised solution-evaluation cycles are happening inside the designer’s head. Both the solutions and evaluations are informed by the designer’s knowledge, experience and empathy.

Waller goes on to suggest that this does not mean designers never require external validation through research, but that the solution-evaluation cycle may equally be external or internal. Figure 27.1 shows this principle at work.

It is plausible to suggest that the cycle it depicts does not apply exclusively to design, but also to writing. Ideally, writing and design are carried out not separately but simultaneously, through the collaboration of different individuals and groups. The aim is to achieve the best way of communicating the message, verbally and visually.

As long as the designer/writer and the rest of the stakeholder group are satisfied that their goals for a communication have been met, the result is usually that it is approved for use. But unanswered questions may remain: Will it be effective? Is it any good? And what does “good” actually mean?

4.2Which techniques yield the most insight?

What approaches could give corporate communicators useful insights into the quality of their communications? We might attempt to test one of several aspects of the communication:

There is a large literature on comprehension and how to test for it (see, for example, Pashler and Medin 2004; Israel and Duffy 2014). I would like to concentrate here on emotional or affective responses to communication, and on how we might tap into them.

Most market research on communications, whatever the method, takes place using complete, or nearly complete communications as stimuli. There might be alternative versions (for example, testing a brochure using different photography, or different layout) to test for preference. An insightful researcher will work with the stakeholder group to elicit its concerns and priorities for testing, and work those into the questioning by means of a “discussion guide” which the questioner follows. This has the aim not so much of acting as a script, but of ensuring that the structure and content of the sessions are reasonably uniform, and therefore comparable, and checking that all the topics are covered in each interview.

Testing whole communications commercially, however, means that we are not always sure of the role played by different visual and verbal factors. Photography, layout, typography, spacing, and even paper quality may influence a receiver’s perception of the message either positively or negatively. For example, if we write a letter at the same time as updating its layout, we cannot know whether participants like it because it is well spaced or colourful, or the type size is nice and large, rather than because they like the tone and style of the language. The only way to separate these factors out is to use multiple versions and randomize them across groups. Yet this can have implications for the number of respondents required, and starts to look like quantitative, rather than qualitative, research. Most corporate research on communications is a compromise between numbers, time and cost. So, for example, we may only talk to 16 people, rather than hundreds, but we would show them multiple versions of the communication (perhaps up to 5, but probably no more, to avoid fatigue) and ask them to sort them, making observations about everything from layout to language style.

One drawback in asking about language is that people find it hard to pinpoint how their feelings about a text are related to particular elements of the language. Some will comment on common bugbears (grammatical usages they do not like, for example), but most make remarks like the following:58

These are valuable judgements, albeit not couched in linguistic terms. The participants comment on social distance, on the relevance of the explanation, on too much directiveness. They comment on the level of technicality and on whether they find it appropriate. They comment on the length and detail of the communication, and on the clarity of its rhetoric: in other words, on how the parts of the document, or argument, fit together, and how good a job the writers have done in establishing the relevance of the content to its readers.

As linguists, we can identify candidate grammatical and lexical choices that might be causing certain reactions, make changes and re-test. We can change the degree to which we explain and request, rather than issuing directives to the reader. We can create greater, or lesser, social distance by adjusting the language. We can signpost the document better, and make it obvious why the reader should care about the information. We can certainly – in most cases – change the level of technical lexis, remove unnecessary verbiage and make the text more concise.

In many instances, we can also ask people to narrow down their judgements on language style further by showing alternative ways of saying the same thing. Below is an example illustrating different variations of wording in a warning about overdraft charges.

These examples get more formal from (a) to (e), although they say largely the same thing. Questioning regarding both understanding of and liking for each style, however linguistically inexplicit, can give good guidance on the kinds of language customers expect from your brand – be it a bank or an anti-ageing moisturiser. It is possible, though, to look more deeply into these reactions. The next two sections look more closely at how linguistic knowledge, in one case, and insights from product engineering in another, can add to our understanding of audience reactions to communications.

4.3Wilson’s application of Appraisal Theory to market research interviews

As implied above, many commercial research methods begin with a qualitative interview: individuals, pairs or groups speak to a facilitator who records (either electronically or in note form) what they say. While it is possible simply to accept statements of attitude elicited during the course of a qualitative interview, a trained linguist can gain more access to the depth and strength of people’s feelings through understanding the unconscious choices in their language. Wilson (2011) has shown how the analytical framework offered by Systemic Functional Grammar (e.g., Martin 2003; Martin and White 2005) and Appraisal Theory (Hunston and Thompson 2003) can facilitate this. He developed a detailed framework for ranking the strength of feeling behind utterances in a focus-group setting by looking at evaluative language and its place in conversation. His subject matter was market-research groups conducted by a large food and household-product company, and, in particular, sessions in which participants were asked to discuss their preferences for various container shapes for men’s anti-perspirant. While this may seem limited in scope, the framework itself is widely applicable to qualitative research groups in general, from product and communication evaluation to political attitude.

Wilson (2011: 96) suggests the following categorisations of attitude:

However, an important point of Wilson’s research is that not all utterances come complete with some kind of obvious (i.e., lexically marked) evaluation. In most, the evaluative content is much less overt. For example, the following example could be a case of appreciation (“impact in terms of form, appearance and aesthetics”), but it is not easy to see whether the force is positive or negative.

Here, it is necessary to look at the surrounding context, where the speaker says:

The framework also allows for strengthening or weakening of the evaluation, indicating what Wilson terms degree of engagement. Here, we show a weakened evaluation followed by a strengthened one:

As well as examining the gravity and status of evaluations of a wide variety of kinds, the framework goes further to expose how far an evaluation’s context strengthens or weakens it as an indication of speaker attitude. This is because Wilson also takes account of an evaluation’s role in conversational structures by using research on turn-taking and preferences for the forms that turns will take (e.g., Pomerantz 1984; Brown and Levinson’s 1987 Politeness Theory, and the work of many researchers following them). His framework thus acknowledges that utterances are not made in a void: instead, they are heavily conditioned by the need to maintain agreement between speakers as far as possible, to follow predicted turn sequences, and to avoid threatening the other speaker’s (or the interviewer’s) “face”. This leads Wilson (2011: 66) to suggest that “more importance can be placed on some evaluations than others, based on the difficulty or cost associated with making that evaluation [sic]”. Thus, for example, the interview might contain a turn such as the following between speaker A and B (discussing bottle shape):

Although speaker B is hedging their evaluation (“Yeah”, “I was going to say”, “I quite like”), in terms of Wilson’s framework both speakers are making relatively strong evaluations. Speaker A is informing speaker B of their opinion, possibly in response to the interviewer’s prompt, but the opinion is “out of the blue” in that it is not predictable from any previous utterance. Speaker B, according to Pomerantz (1984), is strongly obliged both to respond and to agree. However, while the hedging and the first part of the turn indicate that they clearly understand that obligation, they then offer liking for the “style of the grips” rather than the expected agreement, which is therefore not preferred behaviour. That means speaker B’s evaluation, too, is a strong one and a reliable indicator of their feelings.

Because it allows for the difference between completely spontaneous evaluations and those prompted by previous context, the application of turn-taking and conversation structure analysis controls for two issues in focus group or interview situations. These are, first, the impact of the moderator’s questions on subsequent turns and participants’ willingness to take the floor (Myers 2007: 81), and, second, the relationship between more and less dominant speakers in a group.

However, as Myers (2004) points out, an obvious drawback of applying a framework such as Wilson advocates is that in realistic market research there is often little understanding of the need to fully transcribe interview or focus group data or to analyse it in detail – even if there were time to do so. This means that a great deal of the detail upon which the framework relies is lost unless the budget and timeframe allows for close transcription. However, Wilson’s research does indicate that, given sufficient care, focus groups and interviews can yield richer insights through linguistic analysis – which might perhaps support their reputation as a research approach.

4.4Kansei engineering for assessing emotional responses to document design

A second approach to exposing people’s feelings about stimuli has its origins in product engineering. Kansei Engineering (Nagamachi 1995) has been applied to products as diverse as footwear (Solves et al. 2006) and cars (Nagamachi 1999). The core of the method is a semantic differential experiment where participants are asked to rate candidate designs against a series of bipolar adjectives (e.g., attractive/ not attractive, traditional/not traditional) chosen for the purpose. Figure 27.2 shows an example of such a set of adjectives.

Statistical analysis then tells the researchers which design features correlate with positive reactions from the participants. Because corporate language and design, as we have seen, combine to create “designed artefacts” from websites to utility bills, this method of design evaluation could be applied to a wide range of communication types, or to samples of language alone.

Delin et al. (2007) discuss how to improve the Kansei method by making the choice of adjectives to be used in testing more principled and more useful. Here it is important to note, first, that the “adjectives” could be adjectival phrases or even clauses, so that the concepts it is possible to test are not limited by what is lexicalised as a single word in the language. The choice of adjectives or phrases is constrained in other ways, however. It is important to avoid ambiguous adjectives, for example, as different participants may choose different meanings to react to, causing a split score for that adjective. Adjectives must be well spread across a spectrum of meanings to avoid giving too much weight to one “semantic cluster” of document attributes. And there are adjectives that can confuse participants in a particular context; for example, in one study, the adjective “oppressive”, translated into English from Japanese, was presented to participants asked to judge the design of a wristwatch.

Delin et al.’s revisiting of the Kansei method applied linguistic principles to the selection of adjectives for evaluating laundry-product packaging. They isolated the importance of testing three areas, all of which are relevant not just for packaging, but for the design of communications:

Initially, examination of brand materials and discussion, including talks with brand owners about their ambitions for the communication in terms of brand qualities, yield a first set of words. These can then be used as “seed” words to generate other candidate words and phrases from a corpus. As Delin et al. describe, the selection of further words for testing is based on the hypothesis that words with similar meanings will be distributionally similar, that is, they will share a significant number of other words occurring in their context. Each seed word is input into the British National Corpus (or, if preferred, another relevant corpus) to identify other adjectives that have similar lexical behaviour in naturally occurring language. The method then produces a list of the most significant collocations for each sufficiently frequent word from the corpus chosen. The method can be used with any relevant corpus, such as a Web-derived representative corpus (Sharoff 2006). It can be also employed to conduct a study across different locales by using test adjectives in different languages that are generated from scratch, rather than by translating existing Kansei test materials, which may not be suitable for the purpose.

Each seed word results in 10−20 significantly related words, a list that can then be reduced by removing duplicates, and by editing down with the help of the brand owner. Stimuli can be tested against the final set of adjectives (for example, clear/not clear, friendly/not friendly, bright/not bright, warm/not warm, etc.) by asking participants to rank each communication on the appropriate number of scales. This yields a statistically analysable set of results (assuming a sufficient number of participants), thus turning qualitative evaluation into quantitative data. Ranking the criteria for importance can further help the researcher to order the “winning” documents or samples.