Finding a brand voice without a workshop or a mood board

Brand voice work has a reputation for producing beautiful PDFs nobody opens again. Ours fits on one page and people actually use it, because we build it from how you already talk instead of adjectives on a slide.

Why voice beats style guides

A style guide says 'friendly but professional.' Nobody knows what that sentence does to a paragraph. A voice guide says: we write like we talk to a regular at the counter, we never say 'delve', contractions always, one joke per page maximum. That second version a freelancer can follow on day one.

The exercise, step by step

Book 30 minutes. Bring one person who answers customer emails and one who knows the product cold. Answer out loud, we record it (with permission) because the transcript is the raw material.

1. Explain your most misunderstood product feature like the customer is a smart 12-year-old.
2. Write the reply to an angry review in your normal voice, right now, on the call.
3. Name three words your customers use that your industry does not.
4. Name one thing every competitor says that makes you wince.

The three lists

From the transcript we pull three lists: words you actually say, words you never say, and sentence habits (short punchy ones, parenthetical asides, whatever the recording shows). That goes on one page. It is the voice guide. Total cost of materials: half an hour and honesty.

Testing it on real copy

The test is a paragraph anyone on the team writes cold. Read it aloud. If it sounds like a different company, it fails, find which list it broke. Our copy clients get this guide before the first draft, which is why most pieces land in one round.

Keeping the voice alive

Pin the page wherever drafts happen. Update it when the business changes, yearly is enough. If nobody writes for you in-house, this is the single deliverable we would still recommend paying for, because every future writer starts from it. The strategy sprint includes it as standard.

Your brand voice already exists. It is in the emails you wrote last Tuesday.

Liam Gallagher Senior copywriter

Has billed for 1.2 million words and deleted twice that. Believes semicolons are a cry for help.