Branded Interactions

+AURA: more immersion for brands

Posted on 11 September 202511 September 2025 by Katja Wenger

Brands today need more than just good messages. They need charisma—or, as Gen Z would say, aura. With our new +AURA unit, we create just that—immersive experiences that make brands tangible.

Imagine entering a room and immediately feeling the vibe of a brand—hearing its soundscape, seeing its messages in motion, feeling the atmosphere. This is precisely the experience we want to create with +AURA.

Why +AURA?

Digital formats reach their limits when it comes to real experiences. Today, brands don’t just want to be heard or seen – they want to make an impact. In a world full of stimuli, this can only be achieved if we design experiences that engage multiple senses simultaneously and anchor themselves emotionally.

At think moto, we spent years developing brand strategies and UX concepts. But at some point it became clear: We were missing the layer that makes experiences emotionally and sensually tangible. This is how +AURA was born – our new unit for immersive brand worlds.

+AURA combines strategy, design, and multisensory staging: sound, moving images, and space become an orchestrated experience that goes far beyond traditional communication. The goal is to create memorable moments—moments that are not just heard or seen, but felt.

The Team behind +AURA

+AURA is more than a project—it’s a partnership. Together with Peter Hayo and Darius Rafat, who have been working at the intersection of music, pop culture, and brands for decades, we create experiences that reach new audiences and make brands tangible.

Where the journey goes

With +AURA, we want to give brands a new expression: immersion first. We believe that brands are successful when they are not only understood, but also felt. And that’s exactly what we want to enable – at events, showrooms, in digital spaces, or hybrid formats.

+AURA is the next step in the evolution of brand communication: When strategy, creativity, and technology meet the senses, the result is a lasting experience.

Curious? More on: aura.thinkmoto.de

Tone of Voice—How a Brand Sounds and Speaks: A Successful Brand Personality Always Has a Distinctive Tone of Voice

Posted on 13 October 20239 January 2026 by Sonja Reichel

—Den Artikel gibt es hier auch auf Deutsch

Brands are successful if they are recognizable and provide outstanding user experiences at all touch points. Be it website, social media, point of sale, marketing or virtual assistant—only a clearly defined brand personality ensures a consistent and unique encounter between brand and user at all times. This always includes the tone of voice.

The tone of voice defines how we speak and write as a brand. Through the tone of voice, the brand’s personality becomes verbally tangible. So it’s not about what we say or who we talk to—but how.

Since the tone of voice is never separate from the brand, it is essential to first define the brand personality.

What would the brand be like as a person? One of the questions we ask in the discovery workshop

Uncover the Brand in the Discovery Workshop

If the brand was a person, how would it behave and be perceived by others? This is one of the crucial questions we regularly ask in our discovery workshops. Later, in the define phase, we reflect the insights gained this way by writing a prose text about the brand, assigning it the behavioral attributes contained therein.

In a next step, we group them into clusters and select the strongest attribute from each. From these key attributes, we derive the brand filters that we use to align look-and-feel, user guidance, and tone of voice. The twelve archetypes serve as further orientation because they have been linked to emotions and characteristics for generations. They are therefore useful when it comes to defining the role of a brand—in the market, towards competitors and, above all, towards customers.

Archetype Card Deck by think moto

The Linguistic Dimension

In the discovery workshop, we also have the participants define an initial framework for the tone of voice. Five dimensions serve as guiding principles for determining the respective degree of seriousness, formality, emotionality, approachability, and the level of deference to the brand or product. This framework provides an initial feel for the language style. When developing the brand strategy, we later check whether it is congruent with the brand filters and readjust if necessary.

Taking a Refined Approach

Let’s assume that a brand is primarily empowering, smart, and sophisticated as a person—how would these characteristics express themselves in writing and speaking? We specify this using the brand filters in the language principles.

For example, a sophisticated tone of voice means that we communicate eloquently, with our speech fluid and full of elegance. This way, we emphasize the premium character of the brand, but do so in such a nonchalant way that it never comes across as showy.

We then clarify how these language principles affect sentence structure and word choice in particular and illustrate this with the help of concrete examples. To do this, it is a good idea to run the customer’s existing texts through the defined language filters, rephrase them, and explain how and why something was changed.

Use the Right Tone to Add Persuasive Power to Your Corporate Identity

Linguistic principles and guidelines are an important addition to the CI portal of any brand. Along with the existing visual brand basics, they ensure that the brand acts and communicates according to its personality.

We all know about the power of words. When used cleverly and coherently, they sharpen the brand and make it both real and accessible.

Learn more about brand personalities and our branding approach in the standard work on digital brand management: “Branded Interactions. Living Brand Experiences for a New Era”.

Tone of Voice—How a Brand Sounds and Speaks

Posted on 14 December 202123 December 2024 by Sonja Reichel

Brands are successful if they are recognizable and provide outstanding user experiences at all touch points. Be it website, social media, point of sale, marketing or virtual assistant — only a clearly defined brand personality ensures a consistent and unique encounter between brand and user at all times. This always includes the tone of voice. Since the tone of voice is never separate from the brand, it is essential to first define the brand personality.

The tone of voice defines how we speak and write as a brand. Through the tone of voice, the brand’s personality becomes verbally tangible. So it’s not about what we say or who we talk to — but how.

Uncover the Brand in the Discovery Workshop

In a next step, we group them into clusters and select the strongest attribute from each. From these key attributes, we derive the brand filters that we use to align look-and-feel, user guidance, and tone of voice. The twelve archetypes serve as further orientation because they have been linked to emotions and characteristics for generations. They are therefore useful when it comes to defining the role of a brand — in the market, towards competitors and, above all, towards customers.

Three of twelve archetypes that define the role of a brand

The Linguistic Dimension

In the discovery workshop, we also have the participants define an initial framework for the tone of voice. Five dimensions serve as guiding principles for determining the respective degree of seriousness, formality, emotionality, approachability, and the level of deference to the brand or product. This framework provides an initial feel for the language style. When developing the brand strategy, we later check whether it is congruent with the brand filters and readjust if necessary.

Taking a Refined Approach

Let’s assume that a brand is primarily empowering, smart, and sophisticated as a person — how would these characteristics express themselves in writing and speaking? We specify this in the language principles by using the brand filters.

For example, a sophisticated tone of voice means that we communicate eloquently, with our speech fluid and full of elegance. This way, we emphasize the premium character of the brand, but do so in such a nonchalant way that it never comes across as showy.

Use the Right Tone to Add Persuasive Power to Your Corporate Identity

We all know about the power of words. When used cleverly and coherently, they sharpen the brand and make it both real and accessible.

Learn more about brand personalities and our branding approach in the standard work on digital brand management “Branded Interactions. Living Brand Experiences for a New Era.”