A brand voice you can actually use

Most brand voice documents are unusable, and they fail in the same way: they list adjectives. Friendly, professional, approachable, authentic. Nobody has ever written a better sentence because a document told them to be authentic.

A usable voice guide contains decisions, not adjectives. It tells you what to write when you have a specific thing to say, which is the only moment the question ever comes up.

What to put in it instead

1. 01Pairs of sentences. The same message written two ways, with one marked as yours. Ten of these teach a voice better than any description, including to somebody writing on your behalf.
2. 02Words you use and words you do not. Do you say customers or clients, buy or invest, problem or challenge. These are small and they are the whole texture.
3. 03How formal the greeting and the sign-off are, decided once.
4. 04Whether you use contractions, which decides half of how a sentence sounds before you have chosen any words.
5. 05What you do with bad news. The genuine test of a voice, and the thing no adjective list covers.

Illustratively, a pair for a delayed order. Not this: we apologise for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your patience during this time. This: your order is going to be four days late. The supplier missed a delivery and I did not check in time. Here is the new date, and here is a refund of the postage.

The second is not friendlier or more professional. It is specific, it takes responsibility, and it says what happens next. Those three properties are a voice. The adjectives were never doing any work.

Where the voice actually appears

Almost never in the places people write voice guides for. The homepage headline gets a week of thought and is read once. The sentences a customer actually meets you in are these.

• The order confirmation and the dispatch note.
• The reply to a question that was answered on the website.
• The refusal: the thing you do not do, the date you cannot make, the discount you will not give.
• The error message, which is where somebody is already slightly annoyed.
• The reminder that a payment failed.

Writing those five well is worth more than any amount of work on the headline, because they arrive at the moments when the customer is deciding what you are like.

The failure modes

• Corporate neutrality. Grammatically fine, says nothing, and is what writing defaults to when nobody has decided anything.
• Relentless enthusiasm. Exclamation marks and excitement about an invoice. Exhausting on the third email and impossible to maintain when something goes wrong.
• Borrowed irreverence. A joke register copied from a larger company, which works for them because it is consistent with everything else they do and reads as odd attached to a plumbing service.
• Inconsistency between channels. Formal on the website, chatty in email, and the customer cannot tell which one is you.

Writing it so somebody else can use it

The point at which a voice guide earns its existence is when you are not the one writing. A freelancer, an assistant, a support person, or a model drafting replies. All four fail in the same way if handed adjectives, and all four do well with examples.

1. 01Give them the ten sentence pairs rather than a description. Somebody can match a pattern they can see and cannot match a feeling.
2. 02Give them the five standard messages as actual text to start from, not as a brief.
3. 03Tell them what to do when they are unsure, which should be to ask rather than to guess, because a guessed voice is where drift begins.
4. 04Read the first twenty things they write, properly. This is the training, and skipping it is why delegated writing ends up sounding like nobody.

The same applies to drafting with a model. It cannot infer your register from a word like friendly, and it will reproduce a pattern from examples quite accurately. The examples are the instruction; the adjectives are decoration on it.