Where’s your hometown?

I live in a village in Oxfordshire, England. It’s very pretty, which still catches me out. Spiritually, London always feels like ‘hometown’.

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In a few sentences, how would you describe what you do?

I run a little ‘language strategy’ studio called That Explains Things. A lot of what I do is around tone of voice: I help brands find their voice; I make Voicebox, a method to help others create brand voices. I also do a fair bit of helping clients ‘explain their things’ – those short-but-important bits of writing like about us stories, strategic narratives etc. I like having a mix of big picture stuff and in-the-sentences detail.

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What was your path to your current role? How and where did you get your start?

In the early 90s my girlfriend was studying graphic design and I taught myself to use Quark Xpress on her Mac. I used these limited skillz to blag a job laying out pages at a magazine called The Oldie where, because we ran on a shoestring, they were happy for me to write a bit of everything: news, features, interviews, ghost-writing for columnists, editing books etc – plus the stuff the proper journalists avoided, like direct mail, marketing, even copywriting for our advertisers. It was a brilliantly varied writing apprenticeship.

Then just as I was wondering how a literary publishing salary was gonna support a young family, I saw an ad for a ‘business writing trainer’ at The Writer which for some reason called to me (actually not ‘for some reason’ – the tone of the ad made it instantly clear these were my people). The Writer specialised in this thing called ‘tone of voice’ and I suddenly realised my starting point for all my writing was always what voice does this need? 

It was an amazing time. Again, I got an incredible apprenticeship – I ran literally thousands of workshops with all different types of businesses, and got to be part of leading a growing agency. Then one day I realised I was spending too much time in spreadsheet meetings, so I started my own thing and now I’m here writing this.

So – not so much a ‘career path’ as a stumbling round in a dark forest, occasionally bumping into a fallen tree of serendipity.‍

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As a seasoned consultant for both agencies and clients, do you have a process for determining when a project is a good fit?

I prefer it when projects are as much about how a voice connects to a brand’s internal culture, and how a shift in the voice can help people think differently. I also just ask myself ‘do these people seem like they’ll be fun to work with?’. 

What’s not a good fit – if I feel I might end up ‘impersonating’ a voice, rather than being able to fully ‘inhabit’ it, I’ll say no and pass on the work to someone else. It’s flattering to be asked to write cool stuff but I’m a straight white middle-aged Englishman and there some voices that need to come from your bones.

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As a consultant who works with a lot of startups, what's your biggest advice for new companies starting out today? Any thing they should focus on or avoid?

Hire a writer. Notice how everyone else in your category sounds, then don’t sound like that. Embrace the power of being able to say what you want because it won’t last forever. Hire a writer. Check: is your illustration style is Corporate Memphis? Then your words are probably bland, too. Have you hired a writer yet? 

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You've made a career of helping brands get their voice dialed in. What are your non-negotiables for a compelling brand voice?

I don’t think there are any specific ingredients. But to be compelling and continue to be compelling over time, your voice has to genuinely connect to something alive and real in your organisation – otherwise you’ll run out of inspiration to draw on. (I initially wasn’t gonna write this, as ‘be true to yourself’ seems so obvious – but I’ve literally had two Zooms this week with brands who’ve painted themselves into a corner with a campaign voice they can’t follow through on so y’know, let’s not forget the basics, eh.)

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Voicebox is brilliant. Can you explain your process in creating it and what you hope it provides people?

I’m BLUSHING. Thank you. A designer friend asked me how he could run a tone of voice workshop when I wasn’t around, which made me realise there was no useful mental model for thinking about tone of voice. I spent a year gathering examples, speaking to linguists and other specialists, and trying out different stuff on my clients.

At the heart of Voicebox I say there are ‘11 primary voices’ which you then mix and match to create any voice imaginable. It’s also a big kit of parts to help with all the stages of a project – from brainstorming and running workshops through to creating guidelines, writing in your voice etc. It’s deliberately analog (there’s cards and games) with a big emphasis on creative exploration through play.

I recently learned the Danish School of Media and Journalism use Voicebox as the foundation of their whole approach to teaching copywriting, which is very cool.

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Tone Knob is a must-read newsletter for any creative working in branding and advertising. Now that you've been running it for two years, what have you learned? And what's next for Tone Knob?

So first off is just how many great brand voices there are now. There’s bold, interesting, unexpected stuff going on in almost every sector (a scientific instrument company with a wild surfer-dude voice! An insurance company with zero small print and no legalese! The CIA!) It does feel like something of a golden age. (Perhaps there’ll be a pendulum swing and some brands will want super-normcore voices as a way of standing out from all this personality.)

There’s huge power in unpolished writing. From Palace Skateboards ‘can’t be arsed’ product descriptions to the Inner Beauty salon saying exactly what’s on its mind about intimate waxing – there’s a type of unfiltered, un-copywritten voice that absolutely kills it. Also, by definition ‘being your weird human self’ is something AI will never be able to do. I hope we see more of it.

Related – I think what counts as ‘bad writing’ is changing. The challenge often used to be cutting through corporate jargon and formality by being more human. And generally speaking, businesses have made that shift. There is a lot less corporate-speak around. But the underlying issue hasn’t gone away – business-speak is just morphing into a different kind of word salad: a mash-up of agile-tech-jargon, self-empowerment talk and wellbeing-wash that has more of the markers of ‘human-like’ language (it uses words we’d use in speech! It talks about feelings! There’s contractions!) but is just as dead behind the eyes. We always have to remember that the aim isn’t merely to sound human, it’s to make a genuine connection.

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What are some skills beyond good writing that makes biggest difference in your work?

Hmm. Probably things I don’t realise I’m doing. Let’s see if I can come up with three things:

I’ve got a magpie mind. I’m interested in pretty much everything. This vastly increases the chances of making non-obvious connections. (I think most writers are like this.)

The skill I’m drawing on with Voicebox and Tone Knob – sifting things to find the underlying patterns – that must definitely help. 

Also – I have good conversations! Ha, I’ve never said that about myself before. I don’t mean in the Samuel Johnson conversationalist-eloquently-holding-forth sense. Clients often tell me our conversations help them think better. I’ve been talking (!) about this with a friend of mine, Robert Poynton, who’s been writing a book about conversation. I think I’ve under-estimated just how central good conversations are to my creative process. (There’s a chap called Michael Dila who says that conversation is a distinct form of thinking in its own right, an ’emergent intelligence’ we create between us when we’re in conversation. That feels absolutely true to my experience).

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What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced so in your career? How did it work out and what did you learn from it?

For a looong time, I suffered terrible anxiety. Though ‘suffered’ isn’t quite right – I just had all these feels, which I now know was my adrenaline system jammed in overdrive. It got worse, I finally started to understand what was going on, I worked with it, and now it’s fine. I am over-simplifying quite a lot. What did I learn? We’re frequently unknowable to ourselves, and kindness is everything. 

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You have a popular newsletter, a book, a comprehensive tone of voice guide and a roster of clients. How do you continue to find inspiration for the work you do?

Oh the usual – I read loads, visit galleries and museums, etc. I like having friends of all different ages and life-stages. My kids are teenagers, so five minutes with them and my head’s buzzing with new stuff. 

I’m always learning a new something. Playing the harmonica. Sailing a dinghy. Learning Spanish. I got really into origami in lockdown. Small stuff, too – like learning how to do a proper wheelie or whistling with my fingers. Beginner’s mind and all that.

There’s a particular kind of ‘solitude with others’ that I need. Robert Poynton (see above) organises these ‘reading weekends’ where he gathers small groups for a few days in an old house. You read in silence during the day, then talk in the evenings. (I notice people often think a ‘reading weekend’ sound kinda weird. Yet a ‘golfing weekend’ is totally normal? Go figure.)

Oh, the other big thing for me is singing and playing music. I have no talent for it (singing was one of the things I learned from scratch a few years ago) but it makes me feel more alive than almost anything else. 

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What piece of advice would you give young creatives just starting their career?

Hmm. So, all the platitudes are true: Be yourself. Be reliable. (if ‘yourself’ isn’t reliable, sort that one out). Choose curiosity over coolness. Do stuff in the real world. Learn big lessons from small mistakes. Laugh at yourself and the ridiculousness of being human. 

It radiates from your work and your life, it compounds massively, and it attracts serendipity. I saw it time and again when I was hiring and running teams of young creatives. And what is ‘being a good creative’ anyway if not just a mix of empathy, new connections, and your own uniqueness?

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Where can Subtext readers keep up with you?

• Tone Knob is my Substack about great brand voices. It’s monthly-ish.

• There’s Voicebox, if you want a method to help you create great brand voices.

• The 11 Primary Voices is also available separately, as a short online thing.

• ‘On Reading’ (in the UK) (in the US) is a little book I wrote about how to become a freer, more curious, reader.• The Notices is a more personal newsletter that I’m regenerating at the moment. (It used to be a weekly hotch-potch of links and randomness. It’ll be something else in due course.

• For everything else, there’s nickparker.co.uk