Table of contents
The Role Of Tone And Style In Video Branding
Strategies For Aligning Video Tone With Brand Personality
Analyzing Audience Demographics To Tailor Your Content Style
Incorporating Brand Elements Into Your Videos For Consistent Branding
Secret Hack - Make People Love Your Logo
How To Evolve Your Brand's Video Tone And Style Without Losing Identity
People connect with brands that move them, so marketers and brands managers have to inject personality in their content. Enhancing Brand Personality through Video Content Tone and Style is a modern marketing objective. But it works on timeless principles of value, reciprocity, pleasure and pain.
In this resource, you will learn how to leverage these psychological concepts to create content that moves people. You will also discover little known ways to give character to your content and brand personality your audience finds compelling.
The Role Of Tone And Style In Video Branding
Think about a content creator you love. What do you like about their personality? You might love that they’re generous like MrBeast or that they’re introspective like Jay Shetty. But how do we know that MrBeast is generous and Shetty is introspective? Through their content.
Your video content is representative of your personality. Each piece of content you put out into the world is your brand ambassador. The tone of your videos dictate how you are remembered. Creators who make overwhelmingly negative videos are viewed as cynics and pessimists. Those who make positive content are seen more positively.
In light of that, you can see why video marketers must mind their videos' tone. If your brand is inspiring, you cannot make "cringe reaction" content because it does not align with the non-judgemental nature of an inspiring brand.
The opposite is also true. If you have a brand built on biting humor and wit, you cannot shy away from ridiculing people. It isn’t that one tone of content is objectively better than the other. It is just that certain tones work better for certain creators.
Strategies For Aligning Video Tone With Brand Personality
When you set the tone for your content, you should prioritize alignment with your brand values. The following exercise will help you gain clarity regarding your brand’s personality.
If you could describe your brand as a person, what characteristics would you give it? What would it feel like to have a conversation with your brand? What makes your brand different from you?
By focusing on these questions, you will develop a sense of your brand as a character. Embodying this character, you can take the Big 5 Personality Test. Answer not as yourself but as your brand, and you will get a detailed character sketch of it.
You can work with your Big 5 Personality Test results or a simple character description you have written on a piece of paper. As long as you have an idea about your brand as a character, you’re ready to work on your video’s tone.
All characters can be reduced to a set of choices. It is people’s choices that define who they are. So, what choices would your brand make?
A conscientious brand cannot be built with lazy editing. A spontaneous brand cannot be built with over-polished content. You have to remove contradictions and create alignment in every aspect of your video. The table below will help you make those choices.
| Video Aspect | Aspect Definition | Potential Choices |
| Production Quality | How well-recorded and well-edited is your video? | Super-polished, semi-polished, or raw and real. |
| Scriptedness | How scripted your content feels. | You can script content to look spontaneous or edit spontaneous content to look scripted. |
| Recency / Currency | How timely is your content? Is it trendy, or is it ever-green? | Make trending content or choose ever-green topics. |
| Humor | Do your videos make people laugh? | Add humor to your videos or make videos without overt funny moments. |
| Subject Matter | The topic of your videos. | Make videos within a specific niche or make videos about a wider range of topics. |
| Creativity | How experimental and out-of-the-box your videos are. | Make videos with a set format or make out-of-the-box content. |
| Upload Frequency | How often do you publish videos? | You can make one post a week or make multiple posts per day. |
As you can see, there are so many choices that you can make regarding your videos that communicate different things about your brand's character.
You can also analyze your competitors' content with a critical eye. Do not simply consume content. See what choices the creator has made and what they make you think.
Streamers have a daily broadcasting schedule. Their upload frequency is higher than video essay creators. As a result, the essay creators are seen as making “high effort” content while streamers are seen as friends to the masses. Both those reputations are valuable, albeit to different people.
A streamer doesn’t want to look like he works hard to put out content. His perceived spontaneity is his main selling point. He is the modern reality TV star. A documentary creator cannot be seen as “winging” his content. So if he uploads too often, people can start seeing his content as low value. He has to post less often and script his words more carefully.
Why is that the case, though? Why do streamers need to be nonchalant? Why do documentary content creators need to be more informative? And why do reaction content creators need to exaggerate their reactions? All of these questions have one answer: because that's what their audience wants.
Analyzing Audience Demographics To Tailor Your Content Style
Live streamers are followed by kids and tweens. Documentary creators are followed by people in their mid-twenties. Teen girls follow gossip content, while a large section of young men is more interested in bodybuilding content.
As a content creator, you must analyze your audience demographics and understand your viewership. As much as your brand’s character defines the choices you make as a creator, the final decision should be up to your audience.
Your brand is not what you wish people thought of you. It is what people most likely think about you. Imagine how you would feel if Walmart started selling luxury products. How confused would you be if McDonald’s insisted on you having a reservation?
Even though McDonald's has billions of dollars, it cannot force a perception of exclusivity around its brand. The further you are in your journey, the more likely it is that you already have a brand. Your audience already expects certain things from you. You will get much further delivering on those expectations than you will trying to forge new ones.
If your brand is in its infancy, you can make more decisions regarding how you want to be perceived. But once you have an audience, no matter how small, you have to deliver what it expects.
Below are some examples of how audience demographics can affect the tone of videos published by a brand.
Age
This is one of the strongest determining factors for a creator’s tone. Younger audiences seek higher stimulation and exaggerated mannerisms. If you make content for older individuals, you need to be less over the top and more introspective.
Different platforms are preferred by different age groups. That means, your content’s tone is also dependent on where you primarily post it. Most creators repurpose their content for all major social media platforms. But their primary platform dictates their tone.
If you make videos on TikTok and then repurpose them for Facebook and YouTube, you'll need to be more animated. Because TikTok is the public sphere for Gen-Z. As long as Gen-Z is relatively young, it will have an appetite for overstimulating content.
Education
A demographic that many creators ignore is the education level of their audience. It might not be obvious in your social media analytics, but it is still a determining factor in your content's tone.
Graduates prefer more educational content, while those who skip college are less likely to find academic videos interesting. Be mindful of your audience's education level when you determine the topic of your next video.
Income
Income is yet another factor that social media analytics do not disclose. However, it is definitely a determining factor in your content’s tone. Here, you need to have radical empathy so you can put yourself in the shoes of your audience regardless of your own income.
Those with a higher income are less likely to be chronically online, so they are more selective about the content they consume. What they are after is value. So your tone needs to be more formal, and your material needs to be unique, if you're trying to engage with the upper-income class viewers.
People who work multiple jobs might passively consume a lot of content, so their priority is mood. They are after company. So, your personality needs to be more jovial and bearable if you're trying to connect with lower-income class viewers.
Gender
Gender-specific content decisions are becoming less relevant by the day. Men have watched the Barbie Movie while women have gotten more interested in Star Wars. It is becoming culturally acceptable for people to pick their interests regardless of their gender.
Still, some content types get an overwhelming influx of male viewership while others attract more female viewers.
True Crime - This genre of content has more female consumers.
Young Adult Fiction - Women consume YA content more often than men.
Personal Development - Men are more likely to gravitate towards personal development videos.
Fitness/Bodybuilding - Bodybuilding content has a predominantly male audience.
Ethnicity
Ethnicity can affect content consumption decisions, but it is mostly due to culture. Some cultures are more social than others. In some countries, over-the-top personalities are seen as low-status.
These differences affect what attracts people from these countries. Again, radical empathy will help you determine the tone of your content in relation to the ethnicity of your audience.
Religion
Religion can affect tone preferences of content consumers. This depends on the values of the specific religion. For instance, if a religion is big on social generosity, then its followers will be more open to kindness influencers. Similarly, religions that promote hard work and earning by the sweat of one’s brow might have followers who consume personal development content.
This is interesting to know but not very useful unless you are making religious content. Age, education level, and income are much more relevant demographics for tone-setting.
Before we move forward to the brand elements section, here's a cheat sheet regarding demographics.
| Demographic | Personality Preference | Tone Preference | Content Decisions |
| Age - 13 to 18 | Over the top | Exaggerated and Animated | Pick stimulating topics. Deliver content with maximal editing and over-the-top delivery. |
| Age - 18 to 25 | Lively but introspective | Animated but not over the top | Create insightful content and vary your pitch and tone throughout the video. |
| Age - 25 to 40 | Laidback | Casual | Leave in intentional pauses. Do not incorporate too many cuts in your video editing. |
| Age - 40+ | The storyteller archetype | Suspenseful | Use hooks and decently-paced storytelling to engage middle-aged and older individuals. |
| Income - Low | Kind | Empathetic | Make content that appeals to emotions. |
| Income - Median | The mentor archetype | Educational | Make videos that help people improve their circumstances. |
| Income - High | The value-bearer archetype | Value-first content | Have a unique point and get to it quickly. |
| Education Level - High | High-brow and cerebral | Educational but not patronizing. | Make insightful videos. |
| Education Level - Median | Charming and Empathetic | Open and honest | Create content that is easy to consume passively. |
| Education Level - Low | Over the top | Overstimulating. | Make videos that offer escapism. |
Incorporating Brand Elements Into Your Videos For Consistent Branding
Once you have determined the type of character you want to portray with your videos, you need to get to the part that matters the most: making videos.
Overthinking your brand personality will not do as much for your brand as simply putting out content. In fact, even if you don’t have your brand personality down, simply making content that resonates with you, will lead to your brand character being built anyway.
People will build their opinions of you based on the kind of content you make. Your job is to associate those opinions with your brand elements. Below are a few elements that can act as anchors for your brand.
Name
Think about Kevin Hart or the Rock. You do not need to see their logos to know what to expect from their content. Kevin Hart is funny, and the Rock is hypermasculine. Their names have become synonymous with these traits because of the volume of content they produce.
The Rock posts a lot of Bodybuilding content, while Hart posts Stand-up clips. Both of these personalities have their respective teams. How can you post so much content without having a team? Use ContentFries to multiply your long-form videos into thousands of TikToks and Reels. The platform is free to try.
Logo
WorldStar HipHop is a major content distribution brand. Its logo sets the expectation for the type of content one's about to watch. You, too, can feature your logo in all your videos using ContentFries' brand kit features.
Incorporate your logo into a template so that when you make hundreds of clips using ContentFries, all of them have the same logo.
Font
Another visual element that can remind people of your brand is the font you use. Whether it is for subtitles or your content headline, your font choice gets associated with your brand. You can upload your own font to ContentFries and make it a part of your brand kit. This ensures consistency across your long-form and short-form content.
Color Scheme
Color psychology can help you pick colors that reflect your brand’s personality. You can incorporate these colors into your content templates so that everything you publish has the aura you want to build around your brand.
Secret Hack - Make People Love Your Logo
You can make your logo appear in your videos at just the right time so it gets associated with a specific feeling. For example, if you are a comedian, you can make your logo pop up on the screen just after a punchline.
And if you're an educator, you can make your logo appear just after you drop a really insightful tidbit. Over time, people will associate your logo with the happiness they feel during those moments.
If you use ContentFries, making your logo or the "subscribe" button appear at certain moments is super easy. Users can highlight text in subtitles and add an overlay that shows up at the exact time when the highlighted words are spoken.
How To Evolve Your Brand's Video Tone And Style Without Losing Identity
As mentioned earlier, your brand’s personality is not exactly your own personality. Your brand is a character you create. And this character can evolve. In fact, it needs to evolve.
Your viewers might want overstimulating content now but may shift towards slower-paced content as they grow up. Or they may prefer slower content but get bored of it eventually.
So, how do you change with the times without losing your identity? Slowly.
MrBeast set the pace for over-the-top content. His editing was overstimulating all throughout his run as YouTube's biggest solo creator. But in 2024, MrBeast announced that it was time to put an end to overstimulating content.
However, MrBeast did not immediately start posting raw, unedited videos like Dry Creek Wrangler School. He simply reduced his cuts per minute without changing much else. Sam Sulek is another example of evolving slowly. His initial videos featured him talking while driving. There was zero editing involved. But as Sulek blew up, he started adding minor edits.
In one of his workout videos, he takes out his phone to play a game. The screen recording of that game is overlaid on the video. This is not MrBeast's type of over-editing, but it still involves more editing than the initial Sam Sulek videos.
Final Thoughts
Your video tone is determined by your brand's personality. And the kind of personality you want to engineer for your brand depends on your audience. So, know your audience and have radical empathy for them. Once you put yourself in their shoes, you'll know exactly the type of personality your brand must have and the tone your content needs to embody.