Brand Voice Guidelines: How to Develop Your Company’s Signature Communication Style

How would you describe your closest friend? Confident? Thoughtful? Witty? Serious? When you know someone well, their personality is familiar. You expect them to behave in specific ways and notice when they act out of character.

Successful brands have personalities, too—distinctive qualities that customers relate to on a personal level. This emotional connection drives brand loyalty and increases customer lifetime value. It’s extremely common for brands to create visual identities that codify aesthetic elements such as color, typography, and iconography and represent the company’s distinct personality. But visual identities only tell half the story.

What Is Brand Voice?

Brand voice is how a company “sounds” when communicating with its target audience or the general public through a variety of marketing channels. They include the following:

• Company websites
• Social media posts
• Marketing campaigns
• Blog articles
• Newsletters

Regardless of the specific communication channels a company uses to speak to the public, a consistent brand voice is crucial to building trust, which is the bedrock of emotional connection.

Failure to establish brand voice guidelines can make user experiences muddled and alienating, especially when companies and products scale. Worse, brands without voice guidelines struggle to connect with their target audience.

How to Create a Brand Voice

There are five main steps in the process of creating a strong brand voice:

1. Describe the Audience

A company’s voice depends on its existing and potential customers. What’s their demographic? What are their goals and pain points? How do they speak? Qualitative user research methods are helpful here. Pore over buyer personas, user interviews, and focus group transcripts. Read online reviews and social media posts. Analyze customer support calls.

The point isn’t to always mirror customers’ speech patterns (though this can be a good strategy for some brands). The goal is to define the relationship between the brand, its core values, and its customers. Do customers need an experienced advisor? A patient teacher? A like-minded friend? When the relationship is clear, it’s easier to define a brand’s personality traits and, consequently, its voice.

2. Talk to Stakeholders and Review Company Literature

Even without documentation, a company is likely to have a sense of its core values. However, it takes investigation to uncover its personality and voice.

Start by speaking to founders and senior staff: What are their insights? Review brand values and mission statements: What does the company stand for? A company’s brand voice won’t feel authentic if it doesn’t connect to its values.

Review company content such as websites, white papers, and marketing collateral. Highlight aspects that are unique to the brand, and discard anything that describes a competitor.

3. Draft the Brand Voice Guidelines

After researching customers, interviewing stakeholders, and reviewing company literature, it’s time to write a first draft of the voice guidelines. I recommend doing three exercises to help you draft the guidelines, and I dive into each one in the next section of this article:

• Map out your brand’s personality traits using a voice chart.
• Describe the brand as if it were a person.
• Organize traits and voice guidelines into a user-friendly table.

4. Test the Brand Voice With Real Users

Just because executives and marketers think a brand voice sounds good and feels authentic doesn’t mean customers will agree. Measure the effectiveness of voice guidelines by testing copy on actual customers. User interviews and surveys provide the best insights, especially when they include questions that elicit emotional responses to brands and products. Quantitative methods, such as web analytics, reveal less about user perception but show if copy has a measurable impact on the bottom line.

5. Circulate and Promote the Brand Voice Guidelines

Once the written guidelines are final, ensure that anyone who works on brand content has access and understands them, including writers, designers, agencies, engineers, support teams, and other content creators. Make guidelines easy to share, and add them to the brand’s design system and content style guide. If there are approval workflows for publishing content, embed the voice guidelines to help maintain consistency.

How to Write Brand Voice Guidelines

These three exercises will help you clearly define and describe your company’s brand voice. Do them in the order listed below:

1. Define Voice Dimensions With a Voice Chart

A voice chart or matrix is a way to visualize where your brand falls on a spectrum of four primary voice dimensions:

• Serious to Funny: Think about your customers and where you will talk to them. Does your core demographic appreciate a dose of light-hearted banter or humor? Or, does the context your product or service is used in require a serious approach no matter what?

• Formal to Casual: What type of product or service do you offer? A financial services firm must convey trustworthiness and confidence, but a new canned beverage startup can take a warmer approach.

• Respectful to Irreverent: What are the demographics of your target market? Research suggests that Gen Z customers tend to respond well to irreverent and innovative marketing, for example, but Gen Xers prefer a more straightforward approach.

• Matter-of-fact to Enthusiastic: Nielsen Norman Group research suggests that users respond better to an enthusiastic tone of voice than they do to plain, emotionless language. But context matters.

2. Describe the Brand As If It Were a Person

With voice dimensions defined, explore the brand’s personality traits further. Use customer and company research findings to compile a list of words and phrases that describe the brand as if it were human. Then, group similar words into a single trait. For example, “transparent, honest, and uncomplicated” could be categorized as “clear.” Aim for three to five voice traits.

3. Organize Traits and Guidelines in a Voice Table

Once voice traits are determined, add further detail, structure, and guidelines with a table or voice template. Copy guidelines should be straightforward rules that help writers express voice traits.

To make copy guidelines even more user-friendly for writers, designers, and marketers at your company, consider repackaging them in a visual format or slide deck. A do’s and don’ts structure is easily understood, especially when paired with examples:

Brand Voice Guideline Examples

A compelling brand voice makes a brand stand out and helps it connect with the right people. For example, Uber’s voice is bold, direct, and passionate—personality traits well-suited for a global brand focused on efficiency and safety.

Shopify, the e-commerce giant is, in its own words, “a company built by real people who understand this business and care about helping others succeed.” The company’s voice is real, proactive, dynamic, and helpful, and the Shopify user experience feels like a chat with a collegial business partner.

Friendliness and warmth are major traits associated with Coca-Cola’s brand voice. Coke’s marketing campaigns, ads, and other messaging regularly feature examples of happy times with loved ones—and the values of fun and togetherness are underscored by famous taglines like “Share a Coke” or “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.”

Finding Your Brand Voice

Consistency is key when it comes to customer trust. Once you establish and enact your company’s new brand voice guidelines, review them regularly and update them when necessary. It’s a good idea to appoint an owner who maintains guidelines for the long term and evaluates soon-to-be-published content for voice consistency. The same person can determine if legacy content, such as old blog posts, landing pages, or marketing materials align with the company’s voice.

Without clear brand voice guidelines, your company’s communications are bound to be unfocused and unremarkable. Companies with clear guidelines are better equipped for consistent interactions across the ever-expanding spectrum of customer touch points. Ultimately, it’s consistency that cultivates trust, increases loyalty, and yields lasting engagement.