A few months ago, a potential client asked to see examples of our work. Fair enough, it’s a reasonable thing to ask before you hire someone. But when I went to pull together some brand voice documents to show them, I stopped.
I couldn’t do it.
Not because the work wasn’t good. It’s because a brand voice document isn’t a portfolio piece. It’s a strategic roadmap: their persona, their customer personas, the exact phrases a business should and shouldn’t use, the reasoning behind every choice. Handing that to a prospective client would mean handing over another business’s marketing strategy, in full, to someone who has no business seeing it.
That moment made me realise a lot of people ask us for ‘a brand voice’ without really knowing what they’re asking for.
It’s not a tone. It’s a decision making system.
The easy version of brand voice is ‘friendly but professional’ or ‘confident and approachable.’ That’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s not useful either. Every brand wants to sound friendly and confident. Vague adjectives don’t help anyone write an email, an ad, or an awkward customer response at 4pm on a Friday.
A real brand voice document gives a business a repeatable way to decide what to say, and how to say it, in situations nobody’s thought of yet. That means it usually includes:
A brand persona. Not a tagline, an actual character. We build these as if we’re casting someone: who would this business be, if it were a person? One client’s brand sounds like a straight-talking friend who happens to be excellent at their job. Another sounds like a calm, evidence-led senior advisor who’s seen every version of this problem before and never needs to raise their voice to be taken seriously. Sometimes the persona takes an unexpected shape. For one property management client, we landed on a dog archetype: loyal, protective, unflashy, exactly the qualities their tenants and owners wanted from a manager. For others, we sketch the persona as a blend of familiar characters, part Iron Man (making complicated things sound exciting and accessible) and part Atticus Finch (calm, principled, never budging on what’s right). It sounds playful, but it gives everyone writing for that brand an instant gut check: would this character say that?
Customer personas. A voice doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in conversation with specific people. A business selling to an overwhelmed small business owner needs a different register than the same business talking to an ambitious CEO scaling fast, even if it’s the same underlying brand. Good brand voice work maps out who’s listening, what they’re anxious about, and what makes them tune out. For some clients, we take this further and bring in a research partner to interview the clients you’d want more of, the ones you like working with most, to find out what they’re looking for and where they get stuck. That way the writing isn’t just guessing at what will land, it’s built on what real people in your ideal customer base have told us matters to them.
Writing principles with real examples. This is where it gets useful. Not ‘be clear,’ but: instead of writing ‘we’re reaching out to see if there’s any interest in re-engaging with our services,’ write ‘we haven’t heard from you in a while, are you still looking for help with this?’ Side by side, before and after. The kind of thing you can apply on a Tuesday morning when you’re drafting a client email and don’t have time to think philosophically about brand.
Tone by channel. The same message often needs to show up differently depending on where it lands. Announcing a new service on LinkedIn might read: ‘We’re expanding our offering to include X, built for businesses tackling Y.’ The same news on Facebook might read: ‘Exciting news, we’ve added X to what we do, because so many of you have been asking for help with Y.’ Same substance, different register, because a LinkedIn audience and a Facebook audience are showing up for different reasons.
It’s also what makes AI tools worth using
More businesses are using AI to help draft content now, and a documented brand voice is exactly what stops that content sounding like everyone else’s AI writing. A one-line prompt gets you a generic result, because the AI has nothing to work from except the internet’s average tone. A brand voice document gives it something real to work from: the persona, the principles, the actual examples of how this business writes and doesn’t write. The difference between ‘write me a LinkedIn post’ and handing over a proper brief built from your brand voice document, is the difference between content that sounds like it came from anywhere, and content that sounds like it came from you.
Why your voice is what separates you from the rest
Without a documented brand voice, a business doesn’t not have a voice. It has a dozen slightly different ones. The person writing the website copy sounds a bit different from the person answering emails, who sounds different again from whoever’s doing the social media that week. Customers absorb all of it, and what they’re left with is a blurry, inconsistent impression instead of a sharp one.
A brand voice document fixes that, not by making everyone sound robotic and identical, but by giving everyone the same starting point. The same character to write from. The same instinct about what this business would and wouldn’t say.
It also makes a business’s marketing faster to produce and easier to trust. Once the voice is documented, you’re not reinventing tone every time you sit down to write. You’re applying a framework someone already thought through properly, which is a big part of why, when clients ask us to show them ‘an example,’ we have to say no. The document is the whole strategic thinking behind how a business shows up, distilled into something usable. Showing it to a competitor, or even an unrelated business in a similar space, would mean giving away exactly how that client wins.
What we can show you instead
We can’t show you someone else’s brand voice document. But we can walk you through how we build one: the process, the thinking, the kinds of questions we ask to get from ‘we want to sound more professional’ to a document a whole team can write from. If a past client is happy to have a conversation about their experience, we can usually arrange that too.
If you’ve been putting off getting your own brand voice properly documented because you weren’t sure what you’d get for it, hopefully this makes it a bit less abstract. It’s not a mood board. It’s not a paragraph of adjectives. It’s the thing that makes every piece of writing your business puts into the world sound unmistakably like you, on purpose, not by accident.