It’s difficult to define but ultimately it’s jovial, natural and accessible to people both into adventure and those that are more new to it. It’s one of the things that defines our brand and sets us apart from the others. Our tone of voice is a significant part of all that. It’s a really important part of representing and protecting our standards as we grow. It also helps us put our community first, encourages best practice and creates much better content and engagement all round. It’s the link between what our community needs and fulfilling those needs in the most effective and impactful way. It includes words we like (such as ‘adventure’), and those we really don’t (like ‘tour’). It covers aspects from grammar and language to formatting and tone – all the things needed to compose and present content – or simply speak to customers. While we’re peeking behind the curtain here, we, like many brands, have a bespoke style guide – a set of content guidelines that helps us keep things consistent. Our language decisions help us accurately convey the kind of people we are, what an adventure with us will be like and what our values as an organisation are. Be it our trip titles, collections or marketing prose, the words we use are often scrutinised to the nth degree before publication, sometimes painstakingly so. A regard for the power and intricacies of language is a trait true of everyone who works here. It was interesting to read The Guardian’s recently published article explaining a change in the phrases they would be using going forward to describe climate change – now ‘climate crisis’ – and I totally get it.
That’s why this week we’ve spent some time updating quite a few trip titles across our site. A hiker stands on top of a mountain rock, taking in the far-reaching views.Īs the son of two passionate English professors, I was forced from a young age to be sensitive to and interested in etymology, and so working out how we communicate as Much Better Adventures is definitely one of the (many) joys of the job. Language evolves over time and as a brand, the words we choose to use need to move with the times too.