Thursday 20 June 2019

Anna Pickard: How to Make Brands Sound Human

In this insightful, funny 99U talk, Slack’s director of brand communications Anna Pickard explains her approach to giving the workplace chat app its voice, endearing it to millions of users. From finding unlikely places (like error messages) to show authenticity, to the significance of naming product features, Anna shows us why words matter in product design, and how to choose your moments to wield them.

About Anna Pickard: Anna Pickard makes up voices for a living, then teaches other people how to use them. As the first writer at Slack and holder of the voice and tone, she’s been in editorial, marketing, product, design, customer experience, brand, and communications. Because who knows where the gravitational center of writing belongs? Anyway. She now works across them all as Head of Brand Communications at Slack, working out how to create a community of practice across a distributed cross-functional writing team, in an industry and a time when people expect brands to deliver a consistent quality and voice … and to sound authentically human while doing it.

Before Slack, Anna worked in education and in games, writing dialog for pigs, trees, and evil prime numbers. Before that, she worked in advertising, where she gave voice to polydactyl cats and “the concept of butter” on social media; in journalism, where she live blogged cultural milestones for the Guardian newspaper. She trained as an actress and holds an MPhil in Dramaturgy, which everyone said could never turn into a successful career. Turns out they were only partially correct.



via Adobe 99UAdobe 99U https://adobe.ly/2ItGJo7

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