Why do people buy one product over another that does the same job? What separates the companies everyone can name from the ones doing similar work nobody's heard of? Marketing, and more specifically, branding.
Branding used to be something that happened to soft drinks and trainers. Now it applies to services and to individuals, and that includes a voice over business, which is a service delivered by an individual. Your brand is your reputation, made deliberate. It's the picture of you that forms in a client's mind, and it's what makes you memorable in an industry with a lot of good voices in it.
Why bother?
The line-up
Because the alternative is being generic. Picture a line-up of voice actors, all competent, all with decent demos. Who gets noticed first: the one presenting a general skill and a general image, or the one who's clearly chosen to be a particular thing, done well?
Successful voice actors have carved out a clear, well defined brand. They're the ones clients think of first for a certain kind of read. They're front runners, not job seekers. And the brand is what gets them there, because it's the thing a busy producer can remember at four o'clock on a Friday when they need "that warm, dry, slightly amused British guy" and they need him now.
What a brand actually is
Your brand is how you describe yourself and how other people perceive you. It's in your words, your actions, your track record, your strengths and your values, and above all in your voice and how you perform. It's your promise: this is what you get when you book me, every time. It's the thing that sets you apart from your peers, and it should be true, because a brand that isn't true falls apart the first time a client hears you in the booth.
Brand, reputation, style: three different things
People use these interchangeably and they aren't the same, which is why "just do good work" isn't a complete answer. Your style is how you sound: warm, dry, quick, unhurried. Your reputation is what people say after working with you: reliable, easy, late, difficult. Your brand is the deliberate combination of both, packaged so a stranger can remember it. Style is a fact, reputation is earned, brand is chosen.
What a chosen brand sounds like, in one sentence each. These are made up, but every working actor you admire could write theirs this easily:
- "The calm one"A low, unhurried British voice for tech and finance explainers that need to sound like they've thought this through.
- "The friendly expert"Warm, American, mid-thirties, for e-learning and medical narration where the listener has to trust the voice for forty minutes.
- "The one with the grin"Quick, wry, a little Australian, for retail and food commercials that want a smile you can hear.
If you don't brand yourself, other people will do it for you. And they won't be as careful.
Leave it undefined and clients will define you anyway, by whatever they happened to hear first. "The one who did that phone system." "The cheap one." "The one who was late." A brand is you deciding what the sentence says.
A management writer put it well decades ago: regardless of age, position or the business we're in, each of us is the chief executive of our own company, and it's called Me. You're not defined by a job title, and you're not confined by a job description. For a voice actor, that's not a metaphor. It's the org chart.
Convinced? Good. The next read is the practical part: how to shape your voice over brand, and after that, how to manage it.
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