Inside Wolff Olins: Katherine Pisarro-Grant on Verbal Identities

Hey Katherine! Can you tell us about your day-to-day role at Wolff Olins and what it involves?

Hello! I sit within the strategy team and in my daily work, I create elements that help brands make the most of their words – through the way they speak (voice), the story they tell (messaging), and how they name themselves and the things they offer.

Apart from those deliverables, though, I work to shape the verbal practice overall at Wolff Olins. Verbal sort of straddles strategy and creative, so from the middle of that venn diagram, I zoom in on language to help with everything from crafting the story of a pitch to distilling an idea into the right words. Personally, my brain is a lexical heap. I’m always writing, reading, translating, studying language and how it works.

How would you define verbal identity, and what is the first question a brand has to answer to establish their own?

Verbal identity is the design of a brand’s whole ecosystem of language – but it’s never in a vacuum. Stepping back, the first question is: what are you trying to accomplish for your audiences? Are your customers not feeling supported enough? Are your employees craving more connection to purpose? Does the public not understand something about your offer or your industry?

All of these things come down to the conversation you’re having and how you can harness all the real estate of your words to shift it. Communicating is connecting – verbal identity helps you do that deliberately.

What is the key to creating and maintaining a strong voice within a brand and ensuring it aligns with visual output?

Creating voice usually starts from the brand’s personality, which is innately connected to the visual identity. So the voice should have a clear connection to design, whether the two are more in harmony or more juxtaposed. A strong voice feels true to the brand and is simple enough for writers and communicators to remember, but nuanced enough to feel flexible and usable.

That’s where maintaining it comes in – you need a lot of people to understand it and feel capable of applying it. There’s a difficult thing about voice – it can feel intuitive to people in a way that, say, design doesn’t, because we all make language every day. But it can also feel heady or abstract, because language is both the thought and the container for the thought. Words on words. A strong voice, then, I think is one that people can hear, and that sticks with them – whether that’s with a really clear persona or a vivid set of traits.

How does a brand know if their verbal design is speaking to their consumers, and how can impact be measured?

I think it starts from the way you frame it. As a verbal team, we’ve been talking about how messaging should be this bridge between what a brand wants to own and what their audiences care about. And voice is all about helping to modulate how you want people to feel at different points in interacting with your brand.

Measuring impact goes back to that starting point of what are you trying to accomplish? You might use internal surveys, hiring numbers, customer satisfaction, social engagement, email opens, etc. Or it might be bigger-picture – measuring how a brand has succeeded to tap into a new market or audience. Sometimes voice or story are harder to pull out, because they should be pretty inextricable from design, experience, etc. – and that’s not a bad thing.

In your opinion, what is a brand that has a great verbal identity, and why?

Recently, I’ve been inspired by brands like Letterboxd and Discogs, whose verbal identity supports them as community platforms and celebrates their respective nerddoms (movies and music). They both accomplish this trick of making you feel like you’re among your peers and like you’re delighted to be surrounded by people smarter than you at whatever the niche is.

I think that comes from balancing a clear, minimal voice in the experience, letting the voices of the users shine, and having a tuned-in, editorial approach to content. Like, Letterboxd made a “highest risers” list of the movies whose ratings had increased the most, and wrote a thoughtful piece breaking down the trends: “It’s remarkable how practically all 50 titles fit into one or more of five sub-genres we’ve identified: overlooked Black cinema, the queer female experience, teenage-girl fun, joyful musicals and unsung rom-coms.” Sharp, thought-provoking, and community-reflective.

Where do you see the world of verbal going in the years to come? Do you see tech impacting this future?

Of course, tech is already having an impact. AI is informing everything from chatbots to inclusive language checkers, and it can definitely have a role in testing how people interpret voice or messaging guides. The social side brings questions like: how do you account for voice in an era with so many people talking on behalf of, or just in the broader sphere of, a brand? Maybe the future is one where people embrace more polyphonic brand voices.

Beyond tech, though – what’s the role of verbal identity in an era of climate change? Maybe it can be an asset to help brands be more accountable and transparent, excising fluff and speaking honestly. Language change can respond to cultural change, but it can force it, too.