Brand vocabulary

What brand vocabulary is

Brand vocabulary is the settled list of names for your own things: your products, your tiers and plans, your process or method, your departments, your job titles, and the stages a customer passes through while dealing with you. One agreed name for each, one agreed short description, and a note of the names it must never be given again.

It is a naming decision written down, not a writing exercise. The hard part is getting three people who each invented a name for the same thing to agree which one survives.

Three lists get confused with one another, and they do different jobs. Brand vocabulary decides what your own things are called. A list of words to use and avoid decides the general language you use about everything else: whether it is "clients" or "customers", whether you say "solution", whether you write "affordable". A style guide decides how a name is set on the page once it has been chosen: capitals, hyphens, whether it takes "the" in front of it, what it looks like in a heading. Vocabulary chooses the word. The style guide dresses it. The word list governs everything around it.

When you need one

You need one when the same offer is called different things depending on who is speaking. The website calls it a plan, the invoice calls it a package, the proposal calls it a retainer, and on the phone your longest-serving employee uses the name it had before the last rebrand. Customers ask whether they are being sold two different things, and sometimes they are right to ask.

You need one before a launch or a price change, because a new tier arriving into an unsettled vocabulary acquires an informal name within a week, and the informal name usually wins. You need one when new staff keep getting the names wrong, which nobody can help when the vocabulary has never been written down.

You do not need one if you sell a single unnamed service under your own company name. Nothing is in conflict, and the useful document is the one-page list of preferred words instead. And if the names are already agreed and the problem is only that they are typed inconsistently, that is mechanics, and the style guide handles it for less.

What goes in it

One table, one row per thing you own a name for.

• Products and services. The agreed name, the one-line description that always accompanies it, and whether it is ever shortened.
• Plans and tiers. The names, in order, with the rule for how they are referred to together. Tiers cause more confusion than products, because staff shorten them and customers repeat the shortening.
• Your method or process. Whether the way you work has a name at all, and what its stages are called. Most businesses have half-named stages that exist only in speech.
• Roles and teams. What the person a customer meets is called, in public and on the signature line. Internal and customer-facing titles need not match, but the choice should be deliberate.
• Retired names. What each thing used to be called, and the sentence to use when a customer uses the old name. This is the row people actually look up.

What you get

The vocabulary table. A spreadsheet and a one-page printed version: name, description, correct short form, retired names.

The decisions log. A short note of the naming arguments and how each was settled, so the same argument is not reopened in six months by somebody who was not in the room.

The correction list. Every place a name is used wrongly, with the page or template and the replacement. A to-do list, not a rewrite.

A forty-five-minute session. On video, with whoever writes and whoever sells. Sales staff invent most of the alternative names, so they should be in the room when the names are set.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A software company in Nova Scotia with nine staff sells a scheduling tool to trades businesses on three plans. The plans were named at launch, renamed once, and never renamed on the invoicing system. The support team is called "support" in the help pages, "the service desk" in the contract and "your account crew" in an email template left behind by a departed marketer.

Reading 41 web pages, the contract, the invoice templates and six months of sent emails turns up 19 things with more than one name, and one plan with five. The session with the owner and the two salespeople settles fifteen of the nineteen in the first half hour; the remaining four are plan names, and they take the rest of the ninety minutes. The decision is to keep the original launch names, because customers on the oldest contracts still use them, and to retire the renamed versions with a prepared sentence for anyone who asks. The correction list runs to 60 entries, most of them in the invoicing system, which turns out to be the thing every customer reads most carefully.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, what you call it, and where you already know the names disagree. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on how many named things there are.
3. Collection and reading. The site, contracts, invoices, proposal and email templates, the sales deck. Three to five working days, and the conflicts come out of it.
4. The naming session. Ninety minutes with the people who can decide, including someone who sells. Recorded, because the reasons matter later.
5. The table and the correction list. Drafted within a week of the session and reviewed by you once, then the short walkthrough with your writers and sellers. Two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, agreed in writing, and not changed without your agreement. The price depends on how many named things there are and how much material has to be read to find the conflicts. If a voice consistency audit has already been done, the reading is finished and this costs less. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works.

What happens next

The correction list gets worked through, usually by whoever owns each system, and a consistency pass over the longer documents deals with contracts and proposals in one go. If the names were unsettled because the offer itself is unsettled, the approved list of things to say sits underneath this one. Once the names are fixed, the mechanical reference records how each is set, a short job on top of a finished table. This work is complete on its own: you have one name for each thing and a list of where to change it, and nothing further is assumed.