We’ve always known that a distinctive tone of voice can improve how a product does in testing.
So we teamed up with Nielsen and one of our FMCG clients to prove it.
The mission: find proof good writing increases sales
We wanted to see if good copywriting, and distinctive tone of voice, could improve a product concept’s performance in testing.
We got our hands on one product concept each for two well-known FMCG brands, let’s call them Soothe and Sport. They’d already run the concepts through testing and both had got the worst possible result: ‘probable failure’.
We rewrote them both in three ways: one neutral, one in the Soothe tone of voice, one in the Sport tone of voice.
Six things we learned about brand tone of voice impact
- Good writing makes a disproportionately big difference. Our best-performing concept doubled the overall result of the previous version. (And each concept took us about 20 minutes to rewrite).
- Loyal customers prefer writing that’s in the brand’s tone of voice. The concept in the Soothe tone of voice was most popular with Soothe buyers.
- Clear writing beats concise writing. Our best-performing concept was actually a little longer than the original. And a version we chopped right down ended up failing the clarity part of the test.
- Simile works. As part of the testing, people had to click anything they particularly liked. The phrase that got the most love was this: “The clay inside acts like a sponge”.
- People need to know what ingredients are for. The original Soothe concept talked about moisturising cream and vitamin B3, but left it there. In our rewrites, we gave the benefits attached to those ingredients, and took the result for the ‘credibility’ scale from bottom marks to top marks.
- You can explain away people’s worries. The Sport product contains clay. After the original test, people were worried it would stain their clothes and clog their pores. In our versions, we named those worries and explained why they were unfounded. Nobody had any worries about the clay.
