So I thought that it'd be good to do some practical exercise showing how tone and style consistency can be improved for big brands. This is how I’d solve brand voice consistency for Starbucks Instagram channel.
Starbucks brand voice is “functional and expressive”. That means they are straight to the point and make every word count. Clear — not sterile.
Expressive is explained in their guidelines as “making their audience smile” and “telling a passionate coffee story”, whenever there is space for that.
But helpfulness comes first. Audience shouldn’t wonder what a message is about, clarity should always prevail.
Studying Starbucks copy, you notice that their formats are extremely regulated.
It would definitely call not only for a separate automated writing guide for each channel, but even a few sets of guidelines per channel, that would differ a bit, depending on a purpose.
Short Audit of Instagram Messages
I'll narrow down the task to their Instagram channel for the sake of our use case. Let's review their messages and see the patterns. What do we see?
Most of their day-to-day messages consist of no more than 2 sentences.
They usually use 2 emojis in a row (unless it’s a Spice Pumpkin Latte time, and they may feel like it deserves one extra emoji 🎃🍎🦝).
They almost never use faces as emojis. But when they do, they use yellow-toned emoji faces.
The names of their drinks are always consistent, some have (R--> registered trademark) sign next to them.
The messages are, indeed, mostly all to the point. The “expressive” part of the tone comes more through photos and videos, emojis or one exclamation mark (rarely, though). Unless the message is 100% about emotion (ex.: “Feels like home”, “Cheers to family traditions”, “Something exciting is coming!”).
Their messages about deals feel like copy-paste from some kind of centralised deal compendium, I’d seriously work on that.
They ARE rather informal in their messages, using contractions and “explain it like you’d explain to a friend in 3-minutes” vibe. But not going too far, though. No too informal words or slang.
They sometimes skip a subject in a sentence (quite common for social media and sometimes blogs for many brands).
They talk about the company in the first person (we/ us/ our) and they address their audience in first person too (using “you”).
Using Writitude’s Analyzer, we get even more insights that are not so obvious at the first glance:
- 85% of the texts carry neutral emotionality
- they don’t use words of more that 4 syllables, their language is quite simple
- also rare words percentage is only 9%
- they don’t use interrogative sentences (no questions asked! :)
- the use of metaphors is very limited (about 10%)
OK, that’s quite a long list of insights. Are you still with me?!
Now, let's automate all these principles into rules with Writitude, ensuring Starbucks new writer onboarding and compliance with one click.
Ideally, there already is the brand’s core tone of voice guidelines with all the core principles and product names listed in automated glossaries.
Then, we’d just copy that guide and make our Insta guide on the top of it. But it’s not our case here, so I’ll just go on and create one from scratch.
I’m calling it “Insta Guide Starbucks would die to have”.
Adding Tone of Voice Rules
These are the parameters I am adding to this guide from a long list of 100+ style and tone rules.
Choice of Words
Control the use of long and complex words Control the use of metaphors Control the use of rare and unusual words
Forbid phrases that sound unnatural to native English speakers Forbid slang and profanity Forbid the use of skin-colored emoji Forbid urgent-sounding CTAs
Forbid words or phrases that come across as too ceremonial Forbid words regarded as marketing cliches
Forbid words that come across as ableist Forbid words that come across as ageist Forbid words that come across as homophobic Forbid words that come across as racist Forbid words that come across as sexist
Emotionality
Control the number of exclamation marks in a row Forbid words or phrases that may come across as agressive Limit overall emotionality of the text
Document Structure
Limit maximum number of sentences in document
Readability and Flow
Forbid the passive voice Forbid word repetition Limit the use of adverbs
Sentence Structure
Limit average number of words per sentence Limit maximum number of brackets per text Limit maximum number of words per sentences Require direct address to the audience Require writing about the company or brand in the first person
That’s Not a Complete List
I probably got something wrong. And the guide would benefit from a brand manager’s input.
We don’t know in this case, how’d we treat superlatives. What’s their stance on signs on unconfidence in text.
We could also experiment with an extra LLM prompt on the background, on the top of these tone rules.
We could go deeper into discussing and weeding out discriminatory language. We could talk about the control of acronyms and prepositions use.
We’re not even talking about glossaries. In Starbucks case there at least should be
- List of the products in the Require exact spelling rule. Same for the names of their stores.
- List of forbidden words (we haven’t yet encountered one company that wouldn’t have one)
Now it’s time to check if I could write copy for Starbucks social media, using Writitude automated guide. I’m very excited about this!
Let's Experiment
There’re no Starbucks cafes in Riga. And, honestly, we always wanted one (or five).
So writing a series of announcements about Starbucks opening in Riga would be a great material for our experiment testing Starbucks automated tone of voice guide.
- Starbucks opens in a new city. Anticipation is building…🧡
- The Riga Starbucks Downtown Reserve® Bar ✨ Picture perfect.
- Riga is trying on our autumn flavours. Awww ☀️
- Pumpkin Spice Late. This autumn also in Riga. 🎃🍁🍂
- Salted Maple Oatmilk Espresso Affogato-Style with a view of Riga’s dome square. Enjoy.
Tuning the Automated Tone Guide
We’ve pasted the messages above, one by one, to Writitude editor, checking the tone compliance. What did we discover?
We should re-phrase the first message, as we should talk about the brand in first person! This could soo slip without me noticing. Let’s say “We are coming to a new city” instead.
We should put “Starbucks” as an exception to the Control the use of rare and unusual words rule. As it’s definitely not an unusual word in our case.
We must get rid of the Require direct address to the audience rule. Because sometimes we don’t address our audience in the messages at all.
Same with metaphors. “Riga is trying on flavours” cannot happen in real life. We probably should change it to something more direct like “The new autumn menu:” and then list the products.
We see that our emotionality level is a bit exceeded in these messages, if checked for compliance separately. We’ll let it slip this time, as opening a new place is an emotional event. But we’ll be aware of it in the future.
For example, if we check tone of the last message separately, “Enjoy” should be taken out from the last message, as it’s too emotional. But if we run tone check of all the five messages, we’re good. And all in all, following company’s Instagram is a continuous experience.
It feels like Starbucks Instagram messages are written by different people — the messages announcing the US+Canada deals sound differently than those targeting the audience internationally. Am I right? It’s another great topic to discuss with a brand manager.
Meanwhile, we encourage you to try automating the tone of voice guidelines of your own brand. Reach out to [email protected] if you need help with that.
