Brand Voice: A Guide to Defining Your Unique Tone and Style



The identity of a brand and its link to the audience it serves are profoundly shaped by something called “brand voice.” Whether we see a message from a brand in a social media post, on a website, or in a billboard, the right kind of message delivered with the right kind of voice ensures that it strikes the right chord and gets the point across. Today, in this hyper-competitive landscape, when there are so many more brands vying for our attention, it’s more important than ever for a brand to have a clear and consistent voice that offers no ambiguity regarding what the brand stands for.

What Is Brand Voice and Why Does It Matter?

The distinct personality and tone that a brand adopts to communicate with its audience at every touchpoint is what we call brand voice. This is way more than just words. It’s about how those words make people feel. For instance, is your brand as powerful as an ox, or as kind as Mr. Rogers? Does it command attention with confidence or approach audiences with friendliness? Is it a serious brand, a silly one, or a healthy combination of both? These traits collectively form the voice of your brand and help you create a much more recognizable identity in the digital and offline mingling spaces of a brand.

Brand Voice vs. Brand Tone

It’s worth mentioning that while interrelated, brand voice and brand tone are not the same. Brand voice defines your brand’s personality—it’s the long-term foundation of how your brand communicates. Think of it as your character. Tone, on the other hand, adapts to the situation. It’s the emotional inflection you apply depending on the context, platform, or audience. For instance, while your brand’s voice might always be “friendly,” its tone might move from casual on Instagram to professional in a customer complaint response.

Why Consistency Is Key to Brand Voice

In the competition to garner attention, a consistent brand voice can be a make-or-break factor for a business. Consistency breeds recognition and trust, ironing out relatability factors to render the business more reliable in the eyes of the consumer. It’s like interacting with a friend who might, on occasion, be a little too unpredictable for your taste but is mostly consistently relatable in personality. When you are rendering a service or pushing a product, you might not be engaging the consumer directly, but the business’s brand voice is. And it should be making a strong, reliable case for the consumer to choose your services over a rival’s. Furthermore, even if your business is simply a cloud within which you store a bunch of your own memories and the odd mixtape, beyond direct engagement, the odds are good that your business is hopping platforms—social media, email, etc.—in which case it’s engaging in a rude manner if it’s not being consistent across these platforms.

How to Create a Distinct and Consistent Brand Voice

The brand voice that speaks for and as your company is a deliberate creation that results from understanding your mission, your people, and the way you want to communicate. You may find it helpful to follow these steps to clarify your voice so that it knows what to say and to whom when it comes to reinforcing your identity as a brand.

Step 1: Align Your Voice With Your Brand Values

The voice of your brand has to rest on its mission and core values. Begin with your mission statement. What’s the essence of your purpose? Your reason for being? Are you here to give the fashion industry a jolt, bring pleasure to people, make certain that complex situations get resolved in an aboveboard manner, or send the Silicon Valley “disruptor” types back to their computers and birth another mess for somebody else to clean up? Your brand voice should reflect these principles. If it doesn’t, you’re just wasting good oxygen.

Step 2: Define Your Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Today’s world of personalized marketing requires more than just a minimalist approach to brand voice. Resonating with your audience means knowing who they are and what they hold dear. Identify with precision your target market’s demographics, psychographics, and behavioral patterns. Then move on to the crucial next step: creating detailed, richly imagined buyer personas. These are the fictional characters who stand in for your typical customers. For instance, do your personas consist of business-like adults or fun-loving youths? Do they prefer straightforward talk to cultural references and memes? Whatever the case may be, let your brand voice reflect the persona’s values and personality.

How to Research Your Audience’s Preferences

Audience preferences can be analyzed more deeply through the use of surveys, social media listening tools, and analytics platforms like Google Analytics. Use successful competitors as a yardstick for figuring out what might click with your audience, but also ensure you’re offering a unique proposition that sets you apart.

Step 3: Perform a Brand Voice Audit

Prior to establishing a new brand voice, assess your current one. Does your present communication really represent your brand’s unique personality? To get a rounded view, collect instances from all manner of speaking—social media, emails, blogs, video scripts—and judge the tone, language, and style of each. Are there any contradictions that you can see? Now look at your top content with fresh eyes and consider what makes it shine. If you see a pattern here, what’s your next move? Will you double-down on whatever tone, language, or style you’ve already got as part of your “infrastructure”? Or will you forge ahead with a newly thoughtful tone, voice, and manner?

Adjusting Without Losing Authenticity

Your audit will show you where you’re falling short and where you could do better. However, when you make changes, do them carefully—your audience can smell inauthenticity from a mile away, especially if you try to do too much and change your established character too much. If anything, you should be refining your character traits to better fit with your brand’s long-term goals and the expectations of your audience.

Step 4: Build a Brand Voice and Tone Framework

To maintain consistency, the team and outside collaborators need a clear and accessible style guide. The first order of business is to document the voice of the brand. That involves setting down in writing the adjectives that describe the voice. Most voices have four or five defining adjectives. They might include words like “witty,” “authentic,” or “trustworthy.” Then the guide goes on to discuss variations in the tone of voice depending on the context. The same brand might be lighthearted on one platform (like Instagram) and empathetic in another (like customer support emails). Some guides even get into specifics like language, phrases to avoid, and formatting. The key is to get everyone—writers, designers, even freelance contributors—on the same page.

Examples That Show—and Don’t Tell

An effective practice is to incorporate content samples that demonstrate both correct and incorrect applications of your brand voice. For example, if you prioritize “authenticity” as a brand, you should provide your team with samples of both authentic and robotic-sounding sentences that ostensibly might fulfill your definition of “writing with personality.”

Step 5: Evolve Your Brand Voice Over Time

Similar to how consumer inclinations and cultural standards change, so too should your brand voice. Conduct audits with regularity to confirm your tone and language are up to date. Ensure your “content” is relevant, especially during pivotal moments for your business. If you’re rolling out a new product or making a leap into foreign markets, now’s the time to double down on “relevance.” And use data and analytics to reveal your clearest path forward. Which content resonates? Use that as the basis for your next act.

Inspiring Examples of Successful Brand Voices

To demonstrate the strength of an effectively tailored voice, consider several brands that have mastered this craft:

Fenty Beauty: Bold and Empowering

The voice of Fenty Beauty is bold, unapologetic, and empowering. That’s a pretty good descriptor for a Rihanna brand—but it’s not exactly a traditional beauty marketing vibe. Indeed, the products, the captions, even the Instagram comments are imbued with the kind of authenticity and relatability that have turned Fenty Beauty into a “Devout Community.”

Oatly: Quirky and Lighthearted

Oatly’s offbeat nature radiates from its entire product line, including packaging, website copy, and social media. The company’s means of expression are smart and humorous, yet also gets straight to the point of what the organization is about—replacing dairy with a plant-based alternative for the sake of the environment. That emotional capital with consumers makes Oatly a potent competitor in the marketplace.

Managing Brand Voice Across Channels with Tools Like WoopSocial

For brands that run many social platforms, achieving consistency across all of them can be tough. WoopSocial helps make this process easier. You can use it to schedule and publish posts to your social platforms without worrying that your brand voice will somehow be muted on any of them. And whether it’s for Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn, WoopSocial’s got you covered. And if you’re worried about the lack of quality that you get because of the number of posts to you have to make, don’t be. WoopSocial is ideal for scaling up your social media presence without any noticeable drop in post quality.

To conclude, a clear and reliable brand voice makes your brand more human and gets more intimate with your audience; it also distinguishes you in a marketplace that’s increasingly noisy and crowded. Achieving this voice is a process, a journey even, with certain destinations along the way that are well worth your time and effort. Tools like WoopSocial can help cover some of the distance. Work with them, but don’t forget to work with your brain and your heart, too.