Notes / Opinions
Your brand voice is not a tone-of-voice document.
Every company I've worked with had one. A tone-of-voice document, usually slide 14 of the brand book, usually four adjectives: professional yet approachable, confident but never arrogant. Sometimes there's a matrix. "We say this, we don't say that."
Here's the test: swap your logo for a competitor's and read the document again. If it still works, you don't have a voice document, you have a horoscope. Vague enough to fit anyone, flattering enough that nobody objects.
Where voice actually lives
Voice is not adjectives. Voice is the opinions you're willing to repeat in public. The words you refuse to use. The way your founder explains the product at a birthday party, or writes a complaint reply at 23:14 because she couldn't let it sit until morning.
That material already exists in your company. It's in sales calls, in support tickets, in the Slack message that got eleven emoji reactions because it said the thing everyone thought. None of it is in the brand book, because the brand book was written to be safe, and voice is the opposite of safe.
What to build instead
Collect ten sentences only your company could have said. Not polished ones. Real ones, from real emails and real calls. If a sentence could have come from your competitor, it doesn't count.
Then make a never-list: words and constructions you ban. The never-list works harder than the say-list, because it forces decisions. "We never call ourselves passionate" does more for your voice than three paragraphs about what passion means to you.
And write down your opinions. Actual ones, with an edge. A company that believes nothing sounds like everyone.
The AI part, briefly
This matters more now, not less. Feed a language model four adjectives and you get the same text as everyone else who fed it four adjectives. Feed it twenty real sentences and a never-list, and it starts to sound like your company on a good day. The document was never the voice. The examples are the voice.
The sprinkle is yours. We just help you put it on everything.
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