Crafting a Voice for RepairPal

For many of my clients I'm the namer-in-chief. For a few others I'm in charge of what's usually called "content"--I come up with ideas, do research and interviews, and write copy. For others I'm a ghostwriter of books or speeches. And for some clients I do something that falls somewhere in between: I create a vocabulary that becomes the client's verbal brand.

Verbal branding is what I did for RepairPal, the auto-maintenance site that launched last month. The site allows users to find and rate repair shops, get accurate and unbiased estimates for repairs, look up common repair problems and issues specific to their car's make and model, read about car parts and systems, and securely store repair records online.

My work for RepairPal began just before Christmas of 2007 with a proposal I submitted for "positioning the company, creating an effective and engaging corporate voice, bringing home and landing pages into focus, and establishing a verbal brand that can be extended into other parts of the website and other communications." This sort of work is hard to describe and (usually) even harder to sell. Fortunately, in RepairPal I had a smart and receptive client. CEO David Sturtz and his management team knew they needed an outsider's perspective to clarify, simplify, and "warmify" their content.¹ David's a self-professed car buff who knows a lot about how cars work; he took for granted many of the questions his less-sophisticated audience would have. He wanted a woman's perspective, too: for most of my six-month engagement, all of RepairPal's executives and technical advisers were men, but they expected most of the site's users to be women.

So my assignment was clear--and also vague. "Voice" and "tone" in writing are notoriously difficult to define. Here's what Jack Hitt says about them in a chapter titled "Voice" in his excellent book, A Writer's Coach:

Like a singer's, a writer's voice is an elusive thing, the sum of everything that goes into his or her style of written expression. A distinctive vocabulary might contribute to it. So might a preference for particular sentence forms or syntax. Or voice might emerge from even more subtle dimensions of writing. Unique angles of approach to subjects, maybe. Or a characteristic pace or degree of formality.

Later in the chapter, Hitt identifies some of the enemies of an authentic writing voice: pomposity, trendspeak, clichés (he provides a long list), private languages, and the "elegant variation" (a tortured effort to avoid repetition, as when a writer refers to Mickey Mouse as "the Disney rodent").

Hitt is addressing journalists and essayists, but we verbal branders face the same challenge--with the added twist that we're channeling (or inventing) a corporate personality that needs to be perceived as authentic and consistent.

The draft copy RepairPal showed me of the home page and main landing pages had predictable first-draft problems. Much of the language was stilted and formal. In striving for brevity, the team had sacrificed warmth, connection, and even essential information. The copy was sprinkled with MBA-isms like "metrics," "benchmarks," and "next steps." You could hear the effort that had gone into writing it. And this was for a website that needed to sound relaxed, confident, and friendly--like a repair pal.

(A note about the name: it had already been chosen and registered by the time I signed on. At my first meeting I mentioned my concerns about conflicts with PayPal--would customers think RepairPal was a subsidiary? Would PayPal sue?--and was told that trademark lawyers had already looked into those issues and given a green light.)

Many of my recommendations had to do with consistency: on the home page, each of the three "action" boxes now has a headline that starts with an imperative verb. Consistency leads to clarity, and clarity builds confidence. I also recommended using "you" and "your" as often as possible: strange as it seems, that direct connection with the user had been missing. I also came up with the home page's main headline, "We take the mystery out of auto repair!" We went through a lot of rounds on that single line. Should it be "mystery", "headache," or "guesswork"? Did we really need the exclamation point? (I said yes.) At one point the line was going to be "Take the despair out of auto repair," which has the cute rhyme and that touch of darkness I personally find appealing. But it was a tad too dark for many other folks.

I did a lot of work on the tagline, too. In the end, David Sturtz chose a line he'd been working on himself: Car Care Confidence. (For several weeks it was Confident Car Care, which I preferred. What do you think?)

Then there were all the brandable elements: What should we call the huge parts-and-service database, the estimating function, the record-storage section? And there were questions about whether certain terms--including car make--were too jargon-y for a general audience. I said most people--yes, even women--knew what make meant. The word went in. We went back and forth on such seemingly trivial points as whether the record-storage section (a nifty and valuable feature of the site) should be called MyCar or My Car. I said the closed-up version looked too artificial. The space went in.

It may seem mind-boggling that this sort of work can occupy six months, on and off, but the RepairPal guys, to their credit, take language very seriously. The site is still in beta, and I'm sure much will change. Still, I'm pleased that I could give RepairPal many of its first public words. Take the site for a test drive (sorry; couldn't resist) and let me know what you think. The really impressive section is the one for which I did no consulting at all: the auto repair encyclopedia. An army of auto experts shared their collective wisdom to create it (and a professional copyeditor helped smooth out the language). It's a beautiful thing.

Read what the press has been saying about RepairPal.

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¹ I discovered "warmify" on Picasa, the photo storage and editing site: it's one of the effects you can apply to your pictures. I've been using the word in other contexts ever since.

Comments

[John Russell]

A brilliant idea Nancy, and well executed.

I have in the past written a lot of scripts for vehicle maintenance training videos - though usually aimed at dealership mechanics. I found there is always a danger in over-simplifying, so a technique I fell in to (I'm not claiming I thought about it as much as you would) was putting a phrase in jargon (because that's what the audience expected) and then immediately providing a simple explanation. So a typical sentence might say something like, "The reverse detent -- the small spring-loaded ball-bearing that locates the shaft -- can be removed by..." etc.

[BTW, 'detent' is a good word you might want to explore, as I find outside of engineers most people haven't heard if it.]

The other thing that I note is much-loved by Americans is the 'My' syndrome (as in 'My Computer'... 'My Car'). You wouldn't believe how twee this sounds to we Brits. It's reminiscent of 'My First Picture Book' and I always find myself thinking, "No Bill, it's not your f***ing computer -- it's John Russell's".

Still, you can ignore all these comments because I'm sure you know your audience a lot better than I do!

[John Russell]

BTW: doesn't 'warmify' mean 'warm'? You Americans are incorrigibilificious.

...I'm off to warmify myself by the fire.

[Nancy Friedman]

@John Russell: Thanks for the kind words and the insights! And yes, "warm" is of course a verb. But context is all, and in a list of suggested actions I'm supposing it could be seen as an adjective, which would be confusing. The coined "warmify" is unambiguously a verb that says "warm this sucker up a bit, OK?" It's a relatively new thing, this ability computers have given us to change the color spectrum. So some changes to the language are to be expected--and even welcomed.

[John Russell]

Re 'warmify'.

Ever since colour film was invented, scenes could be lit 'cold' (that is, tending towards being blue) or 'warm' (tending towards red or orange). The precise cast would be dictated either by coloured gels in front of the lights, by using a coloured filter in front of the lens or by a mixture of the two. Alternatively the colour balance could be set scene by scene in the lab, a process known as 'grading' (with digital video, now performed on a computer by a 'colourist'). The director or DOP will say 'warm it up a bit' or 'I want it looking colder' (to achieve the particular look he/she is after). You can't have 'warmify' without 'coolify', can you?

Frankly, after 60 years or more, I can't see why we need new, lengthier, words when everyone in the business knows exactly what 'cool' and 'warm' mean. If we'd ever have needed 'warmify', or 'coolify', we'd have invented the words long before oomputers appeared on the scene.

[Nancy Friedman]

@John: This is just conjecture, but here goes: At one time, only professionals such as the ones you mention had the skills and technology to make color changes and other image alterations. Now digital cameras and computer tools have brought this ability to the general public. So perhaps Picasa felt a need for a word that brought a formerly arcane technique down to the layperson's level.

[Subaru Cars]

It is no doubt difficult to write a script for any venture such as this, but to do so without overtly injecting voice only compounds the problem. You did a great job of staying formal and informative. Great work.