Belazu Ingredient Company

The hard-working marketing team at Belazu churn out a *lot* of copy: trade catalogues, pack labels, product descriptions, web pages, blogs, social media posts, customer emails, presentations, recipes…

Back in 2019, when they first came to us, there was a problem: they weren’t confident in Belazu’s voice. Their brand guidelines were rock solid on how the brand should look, but vague on how it should sound. Across multiple channels, this was generating a confusing mishmash of messaging and voices. They needed a single, clear voice and a carefully distilled set of messages to get them started.

Two years later, now under new owners, it was time for a freshen-up to sync with a new set of brand values, while staying true to the original Belazu spirit.

Next up, in 2022 came a bold new aesthetic for the brand. Our brief was a complete rewrite of the full range of pack copy to fit with new label formats, followed up with a full-day writing and content-planning workshop for the in-house writers, and fresh copy to fill the new website wireframes.

Our first assignment, back in 2019, was to flesh out a clear tone of voice, make it easy to use – day in, day out – then coach the team on how to apply it in practice.

We kicked off, as always, by finding out who Belazu’s customers are, what’s important to them and how they speak about the brand to inform the new Tone of Voice guide and a cutdown one-page ‘cheat sheet’. To peg it down, we then showed the team how to apply the TOV to strengthen the sales funnel, with an update of under-performing web pages and customer emails.

When it came to the reboot in 2021, it was back to the customers. Belazu customers *love* talking about Belazu, so we had a stack of up-to-date customer research to mine for voice data. We loaded up on the words and phrases that kept cropping up, and booked in a Zoom workshop with the marketing team to home in on the ones that chimed best with the new brand values.

Before we started on the new labels in 2022, we spent some quality time with our latest cheat sheet, reminding ourselves of Belazu’s TOV, before creating the Mother of All Spreadsheets to contain every piece of pack copy across eight new label formats.

We met with the Belazu team for their workshop, running through a packed schedule to nail down brand voice and messaging, how to write better with less effort, writing for different platforms, reading to write, content planning and hands-on writing practice. With the website rewrite well underway, we were able to share some of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pages as practical examples, before galloping back to 2Forks HQ to finish the wireframes in time for the website launch in March 2023.

As a Belazu’s bolt-on copy support team, we’ve worked alongside the marketing department for four years, creating the first iteration of their TOV bible, cut down into a single-page desktop reference guide, and coaching them in how to apply it. 

As the brand has evolved, we’ve dropped back in to refresh the original guidelines and cheat sheet, making sure that the voice stays in step with the direction of travel.

Once the team are happy with the paper guidelines, every TOV project ends with a workshop, to demonstrate how to use it effectively across multiple channels, but because the Belazu team generate so much copy, we’ve also led ad-hoc coaching sessions on writing and content planning. We ask in advance for current writing challenges, and address them in the session.

As experts in Belazu’s TOV, we’ve been able to take a number of standalone copy projects off the team’s to-do list: a sales funnel audit and refresh of the online e-commerce site and key customer emails (2019), new labels for 106 products (2022) and new website copy (2023).