To be effective as brand-building tools, all your verbal brand expressions have to be properly aligned with your brand's strategic intent. They should reflect your desired brand image and personality. They should be consistent with the core brand attributes and the unique brand promise captured by your brand name. And they should be communicated in an appropriate and distinctive tone of voice.
The Martha Stewart brand is a stellar example of a coherent language landscape supporting a continuously cogent brand experience. Wherever and however you encounter the Martha Stewart brand, its brand voice and vocabulary are distinctive and consistent, its universe of brand attributes relevant and coherent, and its unique brand promise perfectly clear and compelling.
Whether you are watching the television show Martha Stewart Living, listening to the daily radio program askMartha, flipping through the magazine Living, or shopping on the website marthastewart.com, one can't help but recognize and appreciate that the Martha Stewart brand is remarkable in both conception and execution -- regardless of how unrealistic the prospect of actually picking your own Easter basket grass may be.
This brand derives much of its power from the fact that all available language tools are brought to bear in a concerted and consistent verbal branding effort. Every one of the Martha Stewart brand's verbal expressions -- the product names, the language used in tables of contents, the vocabulary of advice or instructions and the tone of voice in which they are delivered -- are effectively aligned with the brand's core attributes. Approachable, optimistic, encouraging, straightforward, and quintessentially American, the Martha Stewart brand takes full advantage of the opportunities verbal branding presents to create a robust brand experience. It's a good thing.
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