Robert Craven and Ben Afia discuss Brand and Tone of Voice
VIDEO: 53:13 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven and Ben Afia
In this GYDA Talks, Robert interviews Ben Afia. A recognised tone of voice pioneer and global expert, Ben uses language to help companies change culture, improve performance and forge deeper connections with their customers.
As one of the first people in the world to establish and manage tone of voice, he cut his teeth with Wallgreen Alliance Boots, helping them improve relationships internally and with customers.
He then set up Afia and has since helped companies like Allianz Insurance to win more customers, BP to develop their employer brand and Google to help marketers understand digital better.
Ben’s strategic consultancy and change programmes helped Vodafone boost their customer satisfaction to its highest ever level and took E.ON on a journey to change their culture. And his claim to fame is helping Ronseal to work out what to say on the tin.
Robert and Ben discuss:
How Ben got to where he is
How words matter - internally and externally
A model for creating great briefs
The doughnut model
Books to read
How culture determines all, including brand
What’s next for Ben
To contact Ben and for some free resources on Language Strategy and the language Manifesto Click Here.
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:38
Hello, and welcome to the GYDA Talks and grow digital agency talks. And today, I am absolutely delighted to have Ben Athea with me . I've learned Athea. That's how I remember how his name is. So Ben, I mean, if you just go right in his claim to fame is helping Ronseal to work out what to say on the turn, recognise tone of voice pioneer and global experts. So this is about language and how we might make businesses tick. Hello, Ben.
Ben Afia 01:12
Good morning, Robert. Great to be here.
Robert Craven 01:13
It's lovely to have you so let's just get straight in. So briefly describe how you see what it is that you do for people?
Ben Afia 01:24
Well, I suppose my claim to fame apart from the Ronseal thing, which is quite cool, is I help organisations to be more human. And that's more human when they speak on the phone when they're connecting with customers and stores. And more human when they write. So when they're writing web pages, customer journeys, emails, texts, all of that sort of thing. So I help companies to be more human in their behaviour, and their day to day communication.
Robert Craven 01:51
Okay, so just explain to us how you got to here. How did you get to 2020? And then we can actually start exploring the idea of businesses which are more humanю
Ben Afia 02:05
Absolutely. Well, I had a bit of a lucky break. So I started my career in sales and marketing about 24 years ago. I know I don't look old enough, but so long, long time ago, sales jobs, marketing jobs, and I ended up at boots, the chemist, now part of Alliance Walgreen, and I had a really interesting role there. I landed in the design team, a team of about 80 people, 40 designers, 40 accounts, people. And my job was to look after writing. And my first thing was to build a roster of copywriters, so that was agency writers and freelance writers. And I can remember my boss saying to me go out and find the best writers in the land and bring them back to work for booths. It was a really exciting job, because I love networking, I love talking to people gathering resources. And then I got lucky. So this is about 18 years ago, and I got to work on boots first brand tone of voice, they hadn't done this before. So I worked with all of the agencies that Bruce was working with to develop a tone of voice to spread throughout the business. So that was really the way that I got into tone of voice. And it was lucky, it was a lucky timing, because that was the time that this was just emerging as an idea. So a couple of years later, when I got made redundant boots lost quite a few people. I thought, well, let's go and start an agency. And I went freelance.
Robert Craven 03:26
Right, so let's just get into this. I mean, it feels like it's blindingly obvious. Let me just start off with. Come on, mate. It feels blindingly obvious that voice and words are important. Of course they are. And that's you're talking to an audience of agency owners, who know that by AB testing, they can figure out which words are better, different colour, which one gets a better response, which one gets a better ROI. But I suspect you're talking about something a bit more than just look at your words and sort them out. I mean, what's the explain to me what the drive is behind you? You and words, what's I suspect that some passion there what's going on?
Ben Afia 04:19
Well, the really interesting thing that I noticed that boots, and then I've carried through into my work ever since is I noticed that the language was revealing things about how people felt and what people thought around the business and how different teams interacted. So whenever you're approaching a new client, you can look at their brief, you can look at their communication, look at their website, and you can get a sense of where the power lies. And in a company like boots, it's the language of the pharmacist of the legal of regulatory. And that language snuck through towards customers at times in places that weren't necessarily always appropriate. So you could have a law Only sales message. And then it's underlined by T's and C's that are a little bit abrupt and a bit terse.
Robert Craven 05:06
Okay, so I worked with an accountant once and it was like, Are you interested in growing your art? I? When you look at your p&l account, do you sometimes wonder what the fundamental components of the accounting matrix? So what you're saying is that you shouldn't be using your language, you should be using the words that your client on.
Ben Afia 05:35
There is. So yeah, interesting question. So, we are taught as marketers, I suppose, to use the language of our customer, aren't we, what I'm interested in doing is finding the true language of the organisation, the heart, the human heart of the organisation. And, you know, with all the clients that we work with, we realise that they're clouded with the language, the jargon of their professions. So I've worked for many years with Aviva, for example. And that's the language of the Actuary. I work with Aeon for years and years, it's the language of the engineer. So this professional language overtakes the language that consumers and business customers are likely to understand and be receptive to. So what the language is doing is it's revealing something about the power dynamics within the organisation, and about the culture. And when I realised that at booths and started trying to change that some quite interesting things happened. And one of the big parts of this was about how you develop good brief, which I'm sure all agency owners and freelancers alike will resonate with. How often do you get a really, really good brief, one of the problems that boots had at the time was that nobody had taught anybody to develop good briefs for copywriting. And this, I don't think I've ever come across an organisation that trains its people to write good briefs. The thing is, as we know, rubbish in gives rubbish out. And as agency owners on the receiving end of these briefs, we know that if we don't get good information, we can't represent the brand faithfully, can we? So there's a subtle dynamic going on, it's about how it's about the nature of the conversation inside the organisation that leads to a brief that we take as agency people, and then interpret and turn into communication into websites and so on.
Robert Craven 07:24
Okay. So there's I'm going probably down a rabbit warren, but I'm kind of thinking, NLP, neuro linguistic, linguistic programming, I'm thinking, psychotherapy, and thinking that, can we train ourselves to avoid, you know, like, can you stop someone when they see something shocking to not go? Oh, my God, or to not swear? I mean, can you just separate it out from a little bit more, because you're saying that the if I understand you rightly, that a business has a particular culture, and therefore it talks in a certain manner? So accountants talking accountant speak, pharmacists talking pharmacy speak, then trying to communicate with the outside world? And we all know that, as I tell my wife on a regular basis, communication isn't about you saying something, it's about saying in a way that the other person understands it and hears it, you haven't communicated unless they've understood your message? So are you talking about reframing? How people look at you? Are you talking about language frames? How we see ourselves this isn't? Is this an internal thing? Or is this an external? Or is it both?
Ben Afia 08:48
It is both, but my emphasis is on internal? So it's a really interesting question, because I often talk about language and tone of voice, as a form of organisational therapy, if you like, which might sound a bit overblown, but what we're doing when we're asking people to look at language in detail is that they're interrogating what's going on in the organisation. So a simple example, let's take some, let's take a customer journey that ends up on a website, for example, the customer journey will be defined by the systems and the processes that are going on within the organisation. And if those systems and processes are not as customer friendly as they could be, the communication that we receive as agencies, and the we have to produce then doesn't make as much sense that could do so. One thing I urge you know, people who are writing people who are taking briefs to do is to when they're receiving things that don't quite make sense to push them gently and to coach your client through making changes within the organisation. So to give you an example, we've been working with Aldermore bank. So they were a start off about 10 years ago, they rose out of the financial, the last financial crisis. And with all the other banks, they've had to, they've been offering mortgage payment holidays to their customers. So about a month ago, they came to us and they had a lot of people coming off the mortgage payment holidays, although that's it's been extended. And the concern was that some people weren't going to be able to pay because some people hadn't been weren't back at work, they may not have been able to be furloughed. So there were two questions here that were really interesting that they had for us. One was, can you help us to design and write this customer journey, so that every web page, landing page, email text letter is first of all clear, but second of all empathetic so that it feels like older, more are looking after you as a customer. And so that you feel that you can make an educated decision without having to pick up the phone. That then frees up the contact centre for the people who really do need help who need individual help, who maybe need to make, maybe need to make other arrangements because they're not back at work yet. So this was a matter of designing the customer journey and redesigning a process internally, and changing how things were done internally, which they had to do on the fly. And to their credit, they did incredibly proficiently but then also providing skills for the people on the phone receiving people who haven't been looked after by that customer journey and still have a question. And so it was a customer journey. But it was also some empathy training for the contact centre people and express empathy training to help them relate to people more personally. But that empathy training is based on who older more are. And the older, more that I know, is a very caring organisation that, you know, they're not a Goliath bank that doesn't really care about or doesn't appear to care about its customers. And that's one of the problems that large organisations have is they don't seem to care as much as smaller organisations do.
Robert Craven 11:59
We're recording this in July 2020. I'd like to call it post COVID. But clearly, it's not. But we have been bombarded with everyone from Barclays, to McDonald's, to detox to domestic us all doing this, to British Rail to where, you know, oh, open piano music, children holding hands looking distantly out the window, you know, you too, and the logo is the same every time. It's like, we're in this together, we're working for you. And the fact of the matter is that people don't believe it because it's a false. It's false news, in a way. It's like, How can a big blue chip bank with 100,000 people have a purpose to be caring when it's got shareholders screaming for increased earnings per share year on year? I totally get about being purpose led and being able to use that you care if you're a smaller, independent, but I guess my point is, if everyone's saying we're here, we care. We're here, we care. And if everyone's saying to the telesales team, show people you care ,show people you care, show people you care. So how are you able to differentiate from the mass of people all out there? So we're in this together we care.
Ben Afia 13:32
I think it's extremely difficult actually. And it genuine and it really depends on a genuine sense of purpose and whether that exists or not. So if an organisation exists purely to create profit for shareholders, then it's very difficult to sort of post rationalise a purpose, although organisations are having to now because customers are far more interested than they were even five even 10 years ago, in the social purpose behind the organisation. So I've been into all sorts of different organisations over the years, and some do have a genuine sense of purpose and some don't. You can't put lipstick on a pig. That's not quite the right saying is it but it's a bit like lipstick on a pig. Because saying you have a purpose when it doesn't live and breathe throughout the organisation. If it's not embedded in the values, then it's going to sound insincere. And very few organisations successfully create a set of values that feel human feel real that aren't just corporate, trite, bland statements. And very few organisations are able to take those values and weave them throughout the everyday behaviour of the organisation. smaller organisations can do that more easily. But large organisations do try to have trouble. And the problem is that human beings are very sensitive to, when we're having the wool pulled over our eyes, we're very sensitive to truth, we're very good at detecting it. And especially now the world is so fundamentally digital. We know, we know what's going on behind the scenes, and we know what's genuine. So, I think we have to be very, very careful. Now we can express empathy, there are ways to do it. And it takes quite subtle writing. But it has to come from a source of truth, it has to come from reality, if it's made up by the comms team, or marketing or brand, so any skin deep. And as customers we can detect that can't we were sensitive to, I've had, you know, you say all the COVID comms I've been collecting. In fact, there might be a book in there. So every time I get an email from a bit from a business, as you say, saying, you know, we care about you, we're looking after your safety, yada, yada, yada. So I'm keeping those emails and at some point, I'm going to do a bit of review, because there are so many that are poor, and so few that good, so few that really connect on a human level.
Robert Craven 16:00
So what, if I can, if I understand what you're talking about this, this operates at four levels at least. So one to one individual to individual, the words you use and how you use them. Articulate where you're coming from what you're trying to do. So you need to be careful with your staff and your team that's inside the business with your client and your communication with your client. And then helping your client go to the outside world. So presumably, you've got I know you've got a couple of tools in your toolkit. Would you like to just share a really nice sort of practical one that agencies could can grab hold of in terms of, oh, we can we could use this to design our brief and we could do this, use this to work with our people?
Ben Afia 17:04
Absolutely. So I have a model called a fear tone. And it's a five step process. And that grew really out of that last sort of swell. I've been in business for 16 years now. So 16 years of training people, probably 40,000 plus people have been through this training with my team. And we've trained the trainers within organisations. And many years ago, when I first started training, I noticed something I was working with legal in general. And financial services companies have quite complex processes sometimes. And I was asking them to apply their new tone of voice to the customer letters. So this was a customer service thing and the marketing letters as well, to be fair. And I was finding that people were having very deep conversations about the content and the process. And I wanted them to get on with the writing and practice the skills, and I had a bit of an awakening, then I realised that and until people think clearly, they can't write clearly. And so clear thinking leads to clear writing. So this is where this process came from these training sessions. And so I start with so a few tone is a for audience. F is for focus, I is for Inspire. A is for a range, and tears for tone Athea tone. So, audience, if we start with audience, now, to the agency people out there, this is probably going to sound like teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. Surely we all have a deep understanding of our audiences. But how many clients do you come across that really don't, they may even have a segmentation and good customer profiling, but they might not even use it very effectively. So it's actually quite a complex area. So the first thing is to start with audience what's going on for them at the time that they're going to be receiving your communication. And the trouble is that internally within an agency within a client, it's very easy to be very focused on what we want to say. So by starting with audience, we're thinking about what the audience might be interested in hearing, and what sort of how receptive, they're going to be at the point that they're hearing it or reading it. So if they're landing on your web page, and you've got 1500 words of copy, how likely are they to take that on board? Now, it depends on the product or the service. I'm not a particular fan of long copy websites, but some of them can work very well. So starting with a deep understanding of your audience, you can then follow up by your focus. So what's your new focus? What do you want them to think or feel or do differently as a result of the thing you're communicating with? And again, how often do we come across briefs that don't have a really clear single minded focus? I've just been working on some packaging copy for a tea brand. And they're trying to get three messages into a 70 word backpack. Now that's quite a tricky thing. Need to juggle isn't there because you're trying to do storytelling at the same time. The same as for web pages, there's only so many messages we can take on board, the more single minded you are, the more effective the more likely you are to achieve that goal, that focus. The next thing is inspire the next thing and that's in the, in the process, and inspire is about what's going to inspire them. So it's not what's in our interest. It's it, what's in their interest, what's the hook, that's going to draw the person in. And then you can come to arrange and arrange is about then arranging your points. So I use the kind of the traditional upside down pyramid that journalists get talking, taught at journalist score. So your most important point first, and then descending order of importance. Then the last thing you can finally start applying your brand tone of voice. And that's the personality of your brand. So do you want to be warm? Do you want to be clear what sort of words help you to describe that? And in my ebook, cut the crap how to write so people trust you, I go into some of the techniques that you can help that can help you get there, for example, using active language using shorter sentences, and that kind of thing.
Robert Craven 21:07
So I get that's great. I really like that. I 100% agree with you actually. I think that most agents don't know who their audiences nevermind their clients not knowing who the audience is we make assumptions about who the audience is, by social groupings. I think very often, it should actually be around psychological profiling, how do they feel? What state of mind are they in and grouping people into that rather than Oh, they're middle class, they're white, or they're female, bla bla bla, which I think then the managing directors. So I'll just again, I'll go down a rabbit hole with you for a minute because I agree with you. So I'm a great fan of a guy called Doug Hall. Todd co wrote a book called kickstart your jumpstart your business brain. And he talks about three things that you need to be able to do in your communication in your comps. I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are. So Doug said, Doug, tried to get some science into what's going on in proposals, looks at 4000 proposals and tries to be able to predict which ones are going to work, which ones aren't going to work. And I think what you're saying is the same thing. He says three things you need, you need over business benefit, a demonstrable number. So working with us will see your revenue increased by 30%. spots will disappear within 10 days, a real reason to believe you can deliver. So that's testimonials. That's white papers. That's benchmarks and a dramatic difference. And his argument is that when he spotted all three of those in a proposal or an advert, he could pretty much guarantee that the advert would convert. And he did the numbers that each one you removed, reduced the likelihood to make the sale. So I think without an overall business benefit, you had an 18% chance of conversion with an overall business benefit that zooms up to 38%. And I guess, you're saying the same thing in a different way. If that makes sense. It's about, but you're being more clear about now who the audience is. Now what your message is, figure out whether they want more money, or more time or more relaxation, figure out what it is that's going to float their boat, and then put it together, and then layer that with your tone of voice, is that fair to say? Yes. And it's deeper than that, you know, in a sense. So when I talk about audience, you know, people listening might be thinking, well, you know, we know this. But for me, it's about truly empathising with that audience and stepping into their shoes. And there's a simple exercise that I use in training, which you can use in agencies you can use with your clients. I call it the audience exercise, but it comes out of you mentioned NLP comes out of that. It's called perceptual positions idea in NLP terms, but the audience exercise, I get people into groups around a flip chart and to imagine a person who might be receiving a communication or reading a webpage for example, or receiving an email. And I ask them to give them a name and tell me about their life. And it doesn't matter if it fits one of the company's segments. Because what we're doing is we're trying to relate to a real human being, or an imaginary real human being. So we spent half an hour doing this. So describing who this person is and what their life is like. And then I asked them to describe a day in their life. And the day in the life starts from the moment they get out of bed in the morning, make the kids breakfast and take the dog for a walk. So it's before they even get to work. Because we so often think of our work personas as being the persona. But of course, we are all humans, and working people, men, and many of us are working people as well. So we have these combined lives. And only when we understand the entirety of a person's life and their motivations, can we really step into their shoes to use the cliche, and see things from their perspective, and I find this magical thing happens. So once we've spent half an hour imagining a character, and getting out of our work heads, our business heads, I then ask people to read the communication or read it out loud, even sometimes, because that can help you to hear it. And universally people go, Well, this is horrendous. And quite often, before doing this exercise, they would have looked at it go well, that's it. You know, that sounds okay. I think yeah, that's a little bit confusing there. But this is okay. Once we've stood in our customers shoes and our audience's shoes, we start to feel how they might feel, then the sorts of words that people come up with, I feel frustrated, it's not clear. Actually, it's a bit. It's quite rude. It's legalistic, if it's making me feel angry, no, I'm not going to buy anything more from you. Thank you very much. Well, no, I'm not going to renew my insurance. So once we stand in the shoes, and feel the emotions that somebody might feel, that changes everything, and it's that pivot that I'm trying to get to that drop, if you like. And that's the point at which people can go, Ah, okay, so what is it about what we have? What is it about our proposition, about our positioning, that's going to connect with that audience in that moment? Okay, so I love that I would write to a guy called Joe Simpson, who's a real person. And I can tell you everything about the two cars and with wife, Doris, and how old kids are, what schools they go to, and his flattening malls and where you go skiing. And it was a real for me, it was a, I only write to Joe, because I recognise Joe from 100 yards wherever I go. And my assumption is, Joe, we'll get it 100%, because I'm actually writing to Joe. And people like Joe will get it. Seth Godin people like us buy from people like us, but he won't like Joe, I probably shouldn't be talking to in any case, and it probably shouldn't be talking to me, because we're probably not quite on the same wavelength. But if they're willing to. So I get that. What I'm just trying to pick out of you is, how would a digital agency use this technique? Would this be a technique that you would use for right, talking to your staff? In other words, you're saying, slow down and think about what it feels like to be Jamie, sitting on\a bed in a bedsit with a ironing board in front of you working from home trying to do the work? Or is this about an activity that you use for talking to clients? Where do you get them?
Ben Afia 28:25
All of the above, all of the above. And so to give you a good example. So going back to Aldermore bank that I mentioned earlier, I was working with the mortgage team. And one of the things one of the briefs that came along very early on was that they had a sales presenter or a kind of a sales brochure to produce. And they asked I helped with the writing. So I asked them for an a few brief. So I need to know who's the audience? Who's the focus? What's the focus? How are you going to inspire them? How you going to write what are your points, and then the tone of voice I knew because I'd written it. So I asked my clients, the marketer, marketing team, what's your what's the APR brief? And they didn't have that detail yet. So like I said, so if you can go back to sales and ask them those questions, then come back to me, and then we can have a clear, then we have a clear focus for something. At the moment, the brief is to Willie, and I don't have anything to go by, and I'm not sure they actually need it. So marketing, went back to sales, ask these questions. And guess what sales didn't reply. Now, I use this briefing process to weasel out true requests that matter. And what was clear was that the sales presenter was something that had always been done because it had always been done. And when we asked what do you want people to think, feel and do differently as a result of it? The reason they didn't have an answer was because it turned out well, as far as I can tell, the salespeople weren't actually using it. So you have some stuff being created. And I bet you know, in agencies, we have this all the time, don't we stuff that's created that actually doesn't have a clear focus. So what I'm helping my client to do is to weed out the work that they should be doing. And if they can reduce their workload by 70%, then that 70%, we can do really, really well. And so I'm helping my clients to convey more to have more authority around the business, and to act more like internal consultants. And it's working a year later, it's giving them more influence around the business, it's helping them consult with the business and produce better quality work. And that's the kind of thing that really like sets me on fire ready.
Robert Craven 30:37
Okay, so what you're saying is, everything we do is human based, you have to apologise me, because everyone knows my I don't understand this EQ thing. I do numbers, and I do strategy, but people aren't on my strong spots I'm going to put on my size 12. Well, it's by being more human centred by being more human might be a better phrase, because human centred sounds a bit a bit hippie dippie. Were able to do what? Well I believe is we start talking about engagement. So we go from being a supplier, can you do this too, we need to talk about how you do this, to let me get into the boardroom, and let's discuss what you should be doing and why you should be doing it. So we're moving away from being a supplier towards trusted advisor, we're looking for engagement, rather than relationships. And then as a result of that, we're then going down that route of not pitching for work, the Blair ends kind of approach, which is we want to be with the client understanding, having conversations, so that when the client has a want need, heard it, scratch, that you're there, and you're the natural, trusted adviser, and you have a conversation about what the best way of doing it, and no one else even gets a snippet the invitation to tender. And if they do get a sniff to do an invitation send to you write the invitation to tender. And how do you write at UVA for your tone to write it? So it's actually playing towards you in every sense?
Ben Afia 32:33
Absolutely. Yeah. It's the trusted adviser positioning. But as you know, I'm a fairer fan of Blair ends and the win without pitching a manifesto. If anybody out there hasn't read the wind without pitching a manifesto, you should. Yeah, as well as pricing creativity, his recent book on pricing. It's about positioning, and the quality of your questions helps define your positioning in the mind of your client. So if you can ask and persist with difficult questions, and sit with those difficult questions, and to keep probing gently in a coaching style, not an aggressive style, but in a coaching manner, then you're helping your client to do their thinking. And actually, many years ago, when I started freelancing, I very quickly came. This idea came to mind that actually, quite often I'm helping my client to think, because quite often, they haven't got time.
Robert Craven 33:24
We've just pushed back on an invitation to tender for a big piece of work. And it's all this work they want us to do. And it's like, all you put in front of us can be automated. And what we need to do is do half dozen loom videos. And we get rid of, you know, 300 or 400 hours of work, and they went sorry. So when you want us to do all this talking to people and measuring before, during after blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, give us a morning and we can record, you know, eight or 10 loom videos explaining what we want people to do. Put it up on a Google Drive. And then and then it's our help yourself DIY thing where you're not paying for our time. It's more efficient for them. They're not waste everyone benefits. Oh, but that reduces the size of the budget. Yeah, but it makes it more effective for everyone. It makes it more effective for us because when we're dealing with your people, we're not going through this turgid stuff you want us to go through, it makes it more effective for them because they can do it when they want to. And they don't have to pretend to be interested. They can just tick the boxes. You get what you want. We get what we want. And it's like I Right. And it's kind of like so you've reduced the budget. Yeah, but as we've increased, we've actually increased our profitability because we're selling whatever it is 20 hours of consultancy rather than a 100 hours of coaching, whatever the blend is, and we have more impact so that when they come to us next time, they say, tell us how else we should be working together. And the other thing is, they're not talking to anyone else, because we've kind of stolen the invitation to tender. Love it, love it. I mean, I love that, that approach to work. So presumably you can not only your way of looking at the world is at a tone, which is quite tactical and quite specific. But also, there's a strategic piece because, you know, one of the few things I learned on my MBA was, you know, strategy, determines structure determines culture, determines strategy determines culture determines, you know, so you're in this interesting place, where culture and strategy kind of interface because the words are the embodiment also. After cursor cash, I remember that I would say is helping your thinking, the words you use and how you think it based by the words, you use that kind of piece there just to talk about that model of human business at that higher level.
Ben Afia 36:35
Yeah. It's interesting. I did the CRM, postgraduate diploma many years early in my career marketing. And it was very much top down strategy was very much a top down planning thing, wasn't it? I didn't learn it as a cycle. But what I've come to understand it as a cycle. And there are four things that weave together that work themselves together, and that I've noticed that language ties together because you know, we all use language, and we all use words, words are in your strategy. In your reporting. They're in your job descriptions, your performance contracts, it's in your internal comms, it's in your external comms is in your day to day conversations. So language actually binds the organisation together. So if you don't take that view of it, holding everything together, you're missing something. And there are four things that work together for me. So the first it starts with culture. Culture is really the starting point, but it's not the end. And culture then feeds into brand. Now, this might sound slightly odd, because our traditional marketing approach to brand is to do customer insights, identify a need and develop a proposition that fulfils that need. That's traditional marketing. I think that long term sustainable differentiation only really comes from culture. That's the one thing that makes you very different from your customer from your competitors that can't be copied. So if you start your differentiation from culture, you've got a very deep and sustainable starting point. So if your culture leads into brand, your brand lead leads to your communication, which is what we're mostly working on at an agency level, but it leads back into behaviour. So culture, brand communication and behaviour, and it's like a cycle. So if we start by understanding our culture and what we're like at our best, so I use an approach called appreciative inquiry, which is trying to turn the inbuilt human negativity bias. You know, when you're walking down the street, you're scanning for dog poo, because you don't want to step in dog poo, it's not pleasant. As as prehistoric humans growing up on the savannas or in the ice age, we were scanning for Sabre toothed tigers, or whatever the equivalent was at the time. So we are tuned in to look for problems and to diagnose and solve those problems. Appreciative Inquiry turns that on its head by saying let's look at what's already working, what are we like when we're really at our best. So what I find is if I start brand strategy by looking at what we're like at our best within the culture, you then have a brand that is reflected in behaviour. And that means that your communication to customers is the same as the behaviour in customer service or in stores. So it's all lined up. So insight is useful, but more useful for me is understanding culture and how that then leads to a brand that's truly different. Brand leads into your communications and that backs into behaviour, which is of course, your culture. As a flywheel, it is in a way yes. But you can also expand that flywheel and it gives you some gives you a process. So a couple of years ago, I worked for a financial services business that did kind of backup back office systems stuff for 75% of the footsie 100 pension schemes. So they have millions and millions of customers, millions of data points, quite a complex business. And the head of customer experience, who came to me said, Ben, I need to see the whole of this process, I need to know what I'm in for before I get started here. I know I have a problem with communication, but I need I want a proper fix and a deep fix. And so we started with culture, and the process there that the step there is to review and engage. So to understand what's going on to look at the communication, look at the behaviour, and how that's impacting on people internally and on customers. So review and engage, once you've reviewed and started to engage the organisation, then you can start developing your new brand, and testing that. So brand, strategy, brand personality, brand tone of voice brand language. Once you've defined your new brand, you can then go into planning and preparing. So the communication part where you're designing training, and you're designing communication internally, and how that's going to launch externally. And only then do you get to the behaviour part, the final part of the cycle where you start training people internally and launching your communication externally.
Robert Craven 41:24
So if I've got you right, because I'm just trying to, because you've talked about loads today who've been fascinating, it's great. There's two distinct things which I'm seeing here. One is quite corporate are for what better phrase sort of grown up piece around strategy structure culture. And how we present ourselves. It's kind of almost like a deep voice, footsie 500 type conversation. But I can see that coming all the way down into mid sized and all the way down into larger small businesses, I could see a 15 or 25 person business, really benefiting from nailing art, that's our culture are so if that's our if those and then you're also talking about a very tactical piece of work, which is this a few tone? A few tones. So there's a few tones, which is really specific. And I really like it, it's gonna go up on my wall next to my daily activity, and how will it help the reader? What will they be able to do? Is it faster and more efficient, cheaper and more profitable or better, which I've got written up just up there? Because I love it. So I can see that work that you do working with anyone? Because anyone is like the opening to? How do you get more business? You communicate more effectively? How do you communicate more effectively? Here you go. So you've got an audience here of people from one person businesses up to 200 - 300 people, digital agencies, marketing agencies, typically independently owned. I'm not meaning for you to plug yourself but this is your opportunity. Is that right? You work with larger organisations are out around strategy, culture and focused you work and you work with any type of business around tactically being more effective.
Ben Afia 43:26
Yeah, absolutely. So just to give you two examples of either extreme perhaps so I've worked with Vodafone, on and off, they've been one of my longest standing clients, 15 years or so. About eight years ago, I worked on the brand strategy, the brand personality and tone of voice and then getting that out into the culture. More recently, I've been working with the Indian contact centres, helping them to have greater empathy in web chat for with British clients. So it spans quite a right wide spectrum. But then to bring it down to our kind of agency level, I have a client Oxford, SM, who are a sales and marketing or sales, marketing and capability strategy, a consultancy. They have backgrounds like p&g, and Unilever kind of classical marketing and sales backgrounds. And I've worked with them for years to work out what their messages are going to be how to define their personality, their culture, how to then express that and how to turn that into content into lead magnets into web pages into a new website, and so on. So the same principles apply, regardless of how big an organisation is a large organisation like Vodafone, or Google who I've worked with as well with the digital Academy. Obviously, they have lots of moving parts, like many, many people representing the brands, so that's quite a complex cultural picture. At an agency level, it's still difficult. I had a larger agency before I realised that it was making me poorer and unhappy. And even having a small agency of 5 employees and 20 freelancers Keeping a scent, maintaining a sense of that culture is quite difficult. And so beyond one or two people, you do need to think about it and try and define that. We defined ours as lucid, lively and likeable. And we try to come back to that every time. So although yes, we've got the grand strategic sort of perspective, a few tones helps us ground ourselves. So we're trying to develop a new website at the moment, which is going very slowly. And I have to keep coming back to audience keep coming back to focus, keep coming back to insights. And those day to day reminders are fundamental to keep your work on track.
Robert Craven 45:36
Logger, one of the reasons I love it is because my interminable question that I asked everyone all the time is why should people love to buy from me when they can buy from the competition? What makes you different from the rest? And kind of part of my search is around, you know, finding a quantifiable value proposition finding an elevator pitch finding a sense that an agency doesn't look like all the other bloody agencies, pulling ropes, climbing trees, and what makes us different is we really care about the customers because we offer a value for money offering, they're all the bloody same. And all our culture is what makes us different. Well, what's your culture? Look at our beanbags. And our ping pong table. I mean, that's not culture in the same way, your logo is not a brand. And I think what you're doing is you're going into that space, which I really like. And you're and you're rattling things up and just kind of irritating things in a very, very nice, very, very civilised way.
Ben Afia 46:42
So here's an interesting example, actually. So Oxford SM, who I mentioned, I don't think they'll mind me telling you this. I've been talking to them over the last sort of six months or so about their positioning and what makes them different. And I've been talking to them for a long time about having a stance. I think Wally Olins said a brand that wants to be differentiated has to take a stance. And Oxford's stance is that they stand shoulder to shoulder with their customer, and they coach them through a process. They don't bring content, they bring methods, and an approach, but they help a customer to get a client to get where they want to. But they don't bring the content, they don't bring an opinion. And my answer to this was, that is an opinion, that is your stance, your stance is that you stand shoulder to shoulder and you don't bring content that you coach them through the process, so that your client owns the result. That's a stance, that is a strong positioning, that is what makes them different to everybody else in their market. And they are very special culture. So that's what I get very excited about. Delving into is uncovering what's true about that culture, describing it in a way that is non bullshitty. And that people connect with that resonates with people, and that they can use practically not just corporate speak.
Robert Craven 47:58
Brilliant. So I just love the content. I love the models. I love the ebook, this is great stuff. At the end, people will be able to see how they can get hold of all that material. Two questions finally, first one is: What's next for you? What projects are you working on are hoping to work up? I got you've got some training modules, you want all the relief on the world. After that. The second question is your what would your top tips be for agency owners? So firstly, what next? What next for you and for the business?
Ben Afia 48:32
Well, as all digital agencies will appreciate, you know, refreshing your website is always a priority and always get so slipped to the back. So I'm on a journey to develop a new website that's properly responsive. My current site isn't it was supposed to be that was the brief and it didn't end up there. But let's not go there. I'm also building two online courses. So one is about getting a good brief. And I'm going to be giving that away for free because I spend a lot of time talking to my clients about how to give me a good brief. So I thought let's package it up, make it into a course and give it away. And then I'm also building an online course based on my cut the crap book as well. So that goes through the filtering process and gives the tone of voice techniques. And by the way, with the links attached to the podcast, you'll be able to download that eBook for free as well. So that's projects.
Robert Craven 49:19
So top tips for agency owners, you've been in a pub, if you can imagine what being in a pub, like these days, you walk out to the pub at 11 o'clock at night with a couple of mates who run digital agencies. You're walking your finger doing your if I was you? Well, maybe you don't and if I was your conversation, but if I was you, I mean what's your kind of advice to this undifferentiated mass of digital agencies we're referring to?
Ben Afia 49:48
I suppose there might be three things. So the first would be to spend time getting to the heart of who you are as a brand who you are as a personality. What's different about your culture. It really is worth spending time on because you can then write about it, you can make video about it, you can make landing pages about it, you can sell with it. So it helps you to tell your story. And it helps your people to tell your story more consistently when they're talking to your clients or prospects. The second thing would be to take the a fear, tone approach and train people to take good briefs, to write good briefs internally and to take better briefs from clients, you'll improve the quality of your work, no, and if you do, and it's something that we don't get taught, it should be on CRM, it should be in an MBA, but for some reason it's not. And the third thing would be to really pay attention to language, to get interested in language, to know to start noticing what language does. And I've worked with a consultant over the last couple of years. On a where he was working on brand strategy, I was doing the language part. We kind of worked in tandem on it. And he said to me, there was a moment of awakening about language, where he realised that this was such a powerful tool for the work he does with his clients. Just by seeing an abrupt sign on a door saying, No entry without prior authorization, on the door to a student counselling room, can you believe when he started to see what that language was conveying to customers, to the students there to the people around the organisation, he woke up to a whole world of possibility. And he's actually now starting to align his business with mine, we're working quite closely together on various projects. Just by noticing the language, you have a tool that you can use to give your clients more value, and to be more effective internally as well.
Robert Craven 51:43
Brilliant, I'll go to horrible feeling that I'm gonna have a little post it next to my poster that says what have I done in the last 15 minutes to help grow the business? There's gonna be another post it just over there. That goes, Dan is watching you. Because I think this is I mean, you know, because we're both speakers that you have this thing when you talk to somebody say what do you do, and they say, Oh, I'm a I'm an image consultant, just as you go on stage, or they say on a voice coach, just as you go on stage, you know, and you're really, really conscious of what you're wearing, or how you talk or how you present yourself. And I think there's a language thing, but that kind of wears off really, really quickly. It's kind of like, this is not for Christmas, I think is the point for me because it's kind of I can feel it rattling things quite deep in our organisation already in terms of the language although I think we've worked really hard at it. You've kind of project it lots of different things. And that will also be the case for people listening and watching. Ben, thank you. loads for sharing to brilliant models for sharing an approach to growing your agency and explaining exactly what you do has been an absolute pleasure for you to be our guest Thank you very much.
Ben Afia 53:00
Pleasure is all mine. It's been really good fun. Thank you, Robert.