Fred Perry: It’s not about the price tag

Have you noticed how many products look the same on e-commerce sites?

John Flynn, CEO of Fred Perry, did. He knew he had to make it easier for shoppers to be able to appreciate the differences between a shirt from the Authentic range and a similarly-styled shirt from the more expensive Laurel Wreath range. He asked us how brand language could help.

The role of brand language online

In research and carefully-constructed interviews with senior team members, we discovered that price isn’t the only thing shoppers think about when they’re choosing which range to buy from. Instead, it is also about how much ‘backstory’ they want to invest in: simple and iconic, or something with a more detailed design story.

From this insight, we recommended creating a single narrative to position the whole brand, but with different message structures for each range, along with subtly different tones of voice.

Brand language is more than tone of voice

To help writers write more easily, our brand guidelines also included humanistic definitions of the different customer motivations, along with key phrases and words to use/not use for each label.

We also embarked on a training programme for writers and non-writers.

Better than we can say it

Mr Flynn’s comments, below, say more than we could

Verbal Identity’s work has helped us not only with our writing, but with our design thinking as well.

John Flynn, CEO, Fred Perry