brand protection
silos and style
These samples reflect my approach to style guide creation, organizational alignment, and documentation.
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understanding team context
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documenting context-specific guidelines
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socializing guidelines and how-to content
internal alignment
documentation
brand voice
tone mapping
operational content style
This project bridged the gaps between Brand and Marketing content, and product and regulatory content for greater alignment.
meet ContentLand
the problem
Out of my content audit of WestJet.com and content samples of product copy, it was clear there was no unified voice in the content created outside the marketing team. This was a significant issue, as the WestJet brand was well known in Western Canada, and the inconsistencies could damage the brand's integrity and erode customer confidence.
my hypothesis
We needed to adapt the overarching brand attributes for digital content requirements and create an easily adoptable style guide; otherwise low-quality, confusing, and unhelpful content would continue to proliferate the web and product experiences.
my approach
The first thing was to collect all existing writing guides so my team would only create what was missing the fill the gaps.
My collaborators worked on problems like classifying content into categories based on jobs to be done, inclusive writing recommendations, and which format (ISO) for the date and time we would adopt.
I worked on codifying standards for progressive headings, writing alt-text for images, button labels, and in-text links, and optimizing a webpage page for search, plain language and readability.
the solution
We created a page on the intranet to house the standards, and I started a monthly newsletter that I sent to all the content contributors in the company. The newsletter was anchored by a blog article I wrote exploring one of the concepts we included in our style guide in detail. I called it Contentland:
the outcome
More than anything, I think this exercise in style guide creation and adoption helped the content team raise our profile as subject matter experts. People on other teams started asking to be added to my distribution list for the newsletter, and we started getting more questions about how best to communicate a topic.
donation request style
This project gave content reviewers a framework to ensure donation appeals were brand voice aligned and contextually appropriate.
read more about this project
the problem
The product content team at created donation appeals to support crises (like natural disasters) and social awareness dates. The content was often inconsistent with the overarching brand voice and frequently took an imperialist lens when talking about events in the Global South.
As a brand with international inclinations, being able to create content that appealed to global audiences was very important.
my hypothesis
Improving the consistency in voice and tone, inclusiveness, and making appeals without sensationalizing the event or infantilizing the people would increase donation volume, and ultimately, platform revenue.
my approach
I started with stakeholder interviews, gathering feedback from marketing, client success, and brand teams. I was able to draw on inclusive language guidelines that already existed in the design system and expand the brand architecture to account for the specificity of writing donation appeals for natural disasters.
the solution
I created a writing checklist that a content creator could refer to when developing content for an appeal. It covered technical writing and self-examination questions such as:
- who is my audience? Have I used the right localized spelling?
- did I use any serial commas?
- have I adapted the brand attributes of sincerity, passion, trustworthiness, and vision in my writing?
- have I adopted the point of view of the dominant culture without examination?
- am I using the terms that this group would use to describe themselves?
- have I privileged one perspective over others? Does that perspective so happen to match my own?
the outcome
Truthfully, I got much resistance to adapting the brand voice for product content from the team. This style guide is in use, but for peer reviewers who have lived experience with the topics the content team published appeals on. It's been a helpful guide, as most of the peer reviewers aren't writers, but it doesn't solve the initial problem of increasing the content creator's alignment with the brand.
As an aside, I pushed for compensation for peer reviewers as editing content of this type is emotional labour (and usually not the job of the reviewer). Now, when a Black employee edits a Black History Month content piece for the team, they get donation credit to give to their favourite charity.
in summary
Every interaction a customer has with a brand is an opportunity to reinforce their positive perceptions. Well thought-out, documented, and socialized style guides are our best tool to ensure any content contributor to published content can produce consistent, situationally appropriate content.