Union
Apartments you'll feel a part of
Manchester’s coolest new address for young professionals is a city centre skyscraper where you rent by the room, not the flat. There’s no lease, no deposit and all bills are included. One big community of people all in the same boat. Magic.
Union is a reinvention of the professional house share. The place everyone wishes existed when they first graduated. We got cracking on their tone of voice before the building was finished. But here’s what it looks like now, inside and out.
Tone of voice
The rental market’s stuffy and formal. Full of contracts, jargon and expense. With scary stories of terrible landlords and losing deposits. At Union, it’s nothing like that. So they needed a tone of voice that made everything feel easy, fun and trustworthy. Confident but not braggy. A movement, not a campaign.
It began with a discovery session where we dug into who we were speaking to and what makes the brand special. Then we ran a one-day workshop with their brand and marketing teams.
They settled on five personality attributes: Active, Universal, Authentic, Human and Confident. And these pointed us towards three primary voices: Energizer, Warm Friend and Purposeful.
We summed Union up as…
We added to this “nutshell” voice with three sub-tones that can blend and flex across different media, and in different scenarios…
And finally we brought it to life with some sample ad headlines, website copy, introductory emails and the copy for their “resident matching” app. All to show what their voice would look like in the wild.
Ad copy
We included twenty-odd different headlines. Here’s a few.
Even though they were just samples, Union used some of these as organic social posts.
Website copy
Writing Union’s website copy wasn’t part of the project, but they liked loads of the lines we’d written in their tone of voice guidelines. And they felt confident enough to use the guidelines to help them write the rest of the copy. Here are some snippets that are part-us, part-them. All bang-on-tone.
Nice words from a happy client
Penny Langton, Head of Marketing (Residential) at Union’s parent company, Vita Group said…
“Super proud of this project and loved working with you on it. Changed the face of property copy forever in my humble opinion. If anyone needs mind blowing mad copy skills (and wants to avoid death), this is the agency for you.“