It began with a carousel of screenshots. Suddenly, I was privy to a personal iMessage conversation—a vivid back-and-forth between a friend of mine and his new acquaintance. I pored over the blocks of text, smiling at the volley of heart-reacts.
“Does she seem mad at me?” my friend asked.
I paused, perplexed. I quickly thumbed through the conversation again, the blue bubbles blurring together in spectacular motion.
“Look at the period at the end of her second message,” he clarified.
There it was. “Okay, possibly.”
That, of course, is style—not what you say, but how you say it. In its laughable (and pressing) urgency, that speck-sized punctuation mark metamorphosed into an elephantine weight. The cultural idiosyncrasies of digital dialogue—all lowercase (zoomer), periods after every sentence (boomer), and so on—are inescapable, even for the uninitiated.
In the same vein, style gives your brand message meaning. It transforms the way you’re seen and understood. And if you get it right, you’ll bring your product or service to life—beginning with your very first word.
That’s one reason we wrote Galvanize, our guide to humanized copywriting. This ebook dives into four key communication themes:
- Audience: Which brands are creating connections and making people feel seen?
- Messaging: What points of view break past defenses to create resonance?
- Style: Which voices express the most magnetic personalities?
- Innovation: How are brands using the written word to stand out from the pack?
In our last two Galvanize posts (here and here), we discussed the audience and messaging themes. Now, let’s break down the third: style.
Say what you really mean
It’s one thing to just say it. It’s quite another to say it how you mean it. And when you accomplish the latter, your audience reacts accordingly—by seeing your product or service with startling clarity, just as you intended it. At last, their answer—the one—emerges from a sea of almosts and not quites.
Speaking of the one, I recently discovered an old ad campaign for Hinge, a popular dating app. In partnership with the creative agency Barton F. Graf, Hinge installed a series of out-of-home ads (in this case, giant murals of text) outside buildings in New York City. Sheer size was eclipsed by the real head-turner: the text itself, presented as stream-of-consciousness-style ruminations on serendipity. In other words, all the maybes and what ifs of dating—what makes it all worth it (or a compelling topic at dinner parties, if nothing else).
What might happen right here, at the brewpub to your left? Devoid of punctuation until the very end, the ad paints you a picture with near-child-like earnestness. Here and nowhere else, you’ll step into something special, a story that’s uniquely yours. In your head, pleeease no karaoke plays on repeat: any less stress on the first syllable, and the whole memory loses its footing. There’s a quiet melody in the way she says it, you realize. You begin to hear it in everything.
Of course, this isn’t your story. But what if it were? Style-wise, the ad is refreshingly bare-faced and authentic—as casual as a text message, and as unrehearsed as spoken conversation. It’s long and meandering and easygoing, like a good talk with a good friend. It’s how people tell their favorite stories: that time they ate the best pasta ever, or that other time they fell in love. And we—the audience—listen closely. In fact, we can’t look away.
When it comes to style, the right risks pay off
Long-form text ads are already unusual. Outside—on the billboards and brick walls of our built environment—that’s doubly true.
Molly Wilkof and Zoe Kessler—the campaign’s copywriter and art director, respectively—were willing to try something different.
“The first rule of [out of home ads] is ‘8 words or less,’” they said. “But we wanted this campaign to show everyone that Hinge is different. This dating app has serious depth. [And] our long, winding love stories were perfect for a city like New York, where we’re mostly talking to foot traffic.”
In devising an unconventional style strategy, the campaign team prioritized Hinge’s fundamental brand ethos: intention and authenticity. Unlike swipe-based dating apps like Tinder, Wilkof and Kessler explained, Hinge requires each user to answer three prompts. (Options include “a shower thought I recently had…” and “my most irrational fear…,” among many thought-provoking others.) How a user answers these prompts—and even the choice of the prompts themselves—reveals some facet of their personality. (That’s the goal, at least.)
Likewise, the stories on the campaign ads felt real and natural, brought to life by details that could’ve been plucked from any random Hinge profile. And the stylistic choices—the lack of punctuation, the informal on and on that drives each story forward, the length of the ads themselves—make those details especially meaningful.
That’s the power of style: you’ll know it when you see it.
Imbue your brand story with style
When you say something new, people listen. When you say that something with meaning—that is, the way you mean it—people can’t stop listening.
“I’ll pick the first part of the date; you pick the second,” one Hinge prompt reads. In translation: I’ll imagine the beginning; you come up with the ending. Or, even better: I’ll think of the beginning, and then you can think of the beginning after that one. The moment never ends.
I imagine flowers and picnic baskets and wine glasses. And then I think of something better, much simpler: I say what I want to say; the other listens and understands. We take turns writing beginnings. We tell this story to our audience for the rest of our lives.
Searching for a style to call your brand’s own? Let’s find it together.
Moved by our message? Download Galvanize.
