Try this before you read any further. Open the last three things your business sent out: an email, a social post, an invoice reminder. Cover the logo. Now hand them to a stranger and ask who wrote them.

If the honest answer is “anyone”, you are not alone, and you are not stuck. A brand voice is the consistent personality a business expresses through its words: the vocabulary, rhythm, attitude and beliefs that make its writing recognisable without a logo, while its tone flexes to suit each reader and moment.

That is what we are after. Not a list of adjectives on a slide. A voice people would know with their eyes shut.

What is the difference between brand voice and tone?

Think of someone you know well. They sound like themselves at a wedding and at a funeral, but they do not say the same things in the same way. Voice is the person. Tone is how that person reads the room.

Mailchimp put this idea online as far back as 2011, in a public voice and tone guide that writers have borrowed from ever since. Its voice is plainspoken, genuine and dryly funny. It translates marketing jargon into everyday words.

Its tone changes with the reader’s state of mind. Someone who has just pressed send on a campaign is relieved enough to enjoy a joke. Someone stuck and asking for help wants reassurance, not wit.

Monzo, the British bank, writes its version down too: straightforward kindness everywhere, wit kept for marketing and organic social, almost none in operational messages.

One small rule says a great deal. Do not write “we’d like to apologise”. Write “we’re sorry”, once, and then explain the fix.

So your first job is to separate the things that never change from the things that should. Start with the dials.

The four dials you are already turning

Every sentence you write sits somewhere on four dials, whether you chose the setting or not.

• Formal or casual. “We regret to inform you” versus “Bad news, I’m afraid”.
• Serious or playful. Do you ever try to make people smile?
• Respectful or irreverent. Do you poke fun at your category, your rivals, yourself?
• Measured or enthusiastic. Calm facts, or exclamation marks?

Your voice is a fixed range on each dial. Your tone is where you set the needle today. A bank might sit at the measured, respectful end and never stray into irreverence. A punk water brand might live at the far end of every dial and still need to turn down the playfulness for a product recall.

Write the ranges down. Ten minutes now settles arguments that would otherwise take weeks.

Same message, three voices

Let me show you. Picture a small Singapore coffee roaster whose beans are late because of a shipping delay. This is the message most businesses send.

Dear Valued Customer, we regret to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances your order has been delayed. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Polite. Also anonymous, slightly evasive and long-winded for what it says. Nobody would know who sent it. Now try three deliberate voices.

Plain and kind: Your beans are running three days late. Our shipment from Sumatra is stuck at port, and we are sorry. You’ll get them by Friday, plus a free sample bag for the wait.

Warm and neighbourly: Bad news first: your coffee is stuck on a boat. Good news: it’s a very nice boat, and it docks on Wednesday. We’ll roast your order the same day and slip something extra in the box.

Dry and confident: Late. Three days. The ship is slow; our roasting isn’t. Friday, with an apology bag inside.

Notice what changed and what did not. Every version tells the truth, gives a date and offers something. The facts stay put; only the personality moves. That is the whole craft in miniature.

Where great voices come from

Most voice workshops skip this part. The memorable voices did not start with adjectives. They started with a belief, and the words followed.

Innocent began in 1998, when three friends sold smoothies at a London music festival and asked drinkers to drop their empties in a “yes” or “no” bin: should they quit their jobs to do this? The “yes” bin filled. You can still hear that handmade origin on labels that talk to you like a friend who is slightly too pleased to see you.

Oatly, founded in 1994 out of research at Lund University, sharpened its voice in a fight. When the Swedish dairy lobby took it to court over the line “milk, but made for humans”, Oatly published the lawsuit, and sales rose. When Arla, the Danish dairy giant, mocked it with a made-up rival called Pjölk, Oatly trademarked the name and put it on its own packaging. That is what a challenger sounds like when it believes it is picking a fight with an entire industry.

Oatly’s "Wow No Cow": a challenger voice set to music.

Liquid Death, launched in 2019, sells canned water the way heavy-metal bands sell tickets. Its tagline is “murder your thirst”, and in 2020 it turned hate comments from the internet into a death-metal album.

Liquid Death turned its hate comments into a death-metal album.

Silly, yes. Accidental, not remotely. The voice exists to make the healthiest drink in the fridge look like the most rebellious one.

And in India, the Amul girl has been commenting on the news from billboards since the 1960s, a run often cited as the longest of any ad campaign. In 2001 a cartoon about an Indian Airlines strike so annoyed the airline that it threatened to stop serving Amul butter. A voice with opinions will occasionally upset someone. That is usually how you know it is working.

How do you write a brand voice chart?

You do not need a 60-page manual. You need one page your team will actually open. This is how I would build it with you.

Step one: gather evidence. Pull twenty real pieces of your writing, from proposals to WhatsApp replies. Highlight the lines that sound most like you on a good day. Circle the ones that make you wince.

Step two: pick three or four traits, each with a fence. “Friendly” means nothing until you say what it is not. Write every trait as “this, not that”.

Step three: show, do not describe. Add one real before-and-after for every trait. Writers copy examples far more readily than they follow rules.

Step four: map tone to situations. Decide how far the dials move for a complaint, a price rise, a product launch and an apology.

A finished chart for our coffee roaster might look like this.

Trait	This	Not that	Before	After
Neighbourly	Warm, specific, local	Gushing or cutesy	“Thank you for your valued custom”	“Thanks for picking us again, Mei Ling”
Plain-spoken	Short words, real numbers	Jargon, vague promises	“Premium artisanal blend”	“Roasted on Tuesday, in Tai Seng”
Quietly proud	Confident about the craft	Boastful, superlatives	“The best coffee in Singapore”	“We cup every batch before it ships”

Finally, run the blindfold test from the opening on every important piece for a month. If a stranger cannot tell it is yours, something on the chart is too vague.

Should a small brand try to be funny?

A gentle warning. Humour is a tone, not a voice, and it has to be earned.

Informality builds trust for brands people already know and can damage it for brands they do not. A cheeky joke from a familiar friend is charming. From a stranger, presumptuous.

Serious categories punish chumminess hardest. A playful insurer reads as friendlier but less trustworthy, and nobody buys cover from the comedian.

Wendy’s became known on social media for sarcastic replies and roasts of rival chains. When a fan asked in April 2017 how many retweets he needed for a year of free nuggets, the brand answered “18 million”. Within about five weeks his request was the most retweeted post on the platform. Then came the imitators, many of whom simply tried too hard.

Innocent learned the same lesson secondhand. By 2011 so many brands had copied its chirpy packaging that critics coined a word for it, “wackaging”, and some blamed the copycats more than the original.

Even the bold need limits. Nando’s in South Africa built a reputation for satirical, topical ads, yet in 2011 it withdrew a spoof showing Robert Mugabe dining alone at Christmas, citing threats to its staff in Zimbabwe. Knowing where your voice stops belongs on the chart.

Two voices, one owner

Voice should follow positioning, and Singapore offers a neat proof. Singapore Airlines has long built its brand around the poise of its cabin crew. When the group launched Scoot as its low-cost airline in 2012, it did not copy the parent.

Scoot talks in a cheeky, “spunky and sassy” register aimed at travellers who want to escape the ordinary on a budget. Same owner, two promises, two voices. Each would sound absurd in the other’s mouth.

Scoot’s cheeky register is a world away from its parent’s poise.

The reverse lesson comes from Duolingo, whose green owl became famous for passive-aggressive reminders and online stunts, including a February 2025 campaign announcing Duo’s death. Months later, an announcement about using more AI met an angry response, and the company took down the videos on its TikTok and Instagram accounts. A voice amplifies how people already feel about you. It cannot talk them out of a decision they dislike.

Can AI write in your brand voice?

Yes, as a first-draft assistant, and only if you feed it a chart with real examples. Generic prompts like “friendly and professional” flatten every brand into the same polite grey. That is exactly the sound you are trying to escape.

The before-and-after pairs are what teach the machine. Paste in three of them, ask for several drafts, then read the best one aloud. If it makes you wince, trust the wince. A human who knows the voice still needs to finish the piece, and to decide when the machine has got the tone right but the facts wrong.

Before you start writing

What is the difference between brand voice and brand tone?
Brand voice is the stable personality in your writing, the part that should be recognisable everywhere. Tone is how that personality adjusts to a particular reader, channel or situation, such as an apology versus a launch.

How many traits should a brand voice have?
Three or four is plenty. Each needs a “this, not that” boundary and at least one real before-and-after example, or the team will interpret it differently.

How do I know if my brand voice is working?
Cover the logo and ask people who know your category to identify the writer. If they can, and if customers repeat your phrases back to you, the voice is doing its job.

If your words still sound like everyone else’s, our brand strategy team would be glad to help you find the voice that was there all along.