a brand voice that survives a team.
three adjectives are not a voice. dials, examples and a banned list are.
replace adjectives with dials, show a rewritten before-and-after for each, and list the words you never use. a voice document should be usable by a freelancer on day one.
almost every brand has a voice document and almost none of them change what gets published. the reason is consistent: they describe a personality rather than specifying decisions. "confident, friendly, professional" tells a writer nothing they can act on, because nobody sets out to write timid, hostile and amateur copy.
a usable voice document does three things instead — it places the brand on a small number of dials, it shows the same sentence written well and badly, and it names the words you never use.
the test of whether yours works is simple: could a competent freelancer produce something publishable from it on their first afternoon, without a call? if not, the document is a description of an aspiration rather than a working tool, and the voice will keep drifting with whoever happens to be writing.
— 01replace adjectives with dials.
pick four or five spectrums and mark where you sit. formal to casual. plain to technical. warm to detached. playful to serious. brief to expansive. a mark on a line is a decision; an adjective is a hope.
the value shows up at the edges. saying "we are at seven out of ten casual" tells a writer they can use contractions and short sentences but not slang. saying "friendly" produces both, from different writers, in the same week.
be specific about where the dials move by context. most brands are more formal in a proposal than in a story reply, and more technical on a product page than in a reel caption. document the two or three contexts you actually publish in rather than pretending one setting covers everything.
keep it to five dials. a document with twelve becomes a reference nobody consults, which is functionally the same as not having one. the constraint is the point: five decisions that people remember beat twelve that live in a folder.
| dial | where we sit | what that permits |
|---|---|---|
| formal ←→ casual | 7 / 10 casual | contractions and short sentences; no slang |
| plain ←→ technical | 3 / 10 technical | explain the mechanism, skip the jargon |
| warm ←→ detached | 6 / 10 warm | address the reader directly; no gushing |
| playful ←→ serious | 4 / 10 playful | dry humour allowed; never at a customer's expense |
| brief ←→ expansive | 8 / 10 brief | cut the wind-up; one idea per paragraph |
— 02show, do not describe.
for each dial, include one real example rewritten three ways — too far one way, too far the other, and correct. this is the single most useful page in any voice document, and it is the page most brands skip because it takes an afternoon of actual writing.
use your own copy, including copy you no longer like. a before-and-after from your own website is more persuasive to your team than an invented example, and it settles arguments about whether the new direction is really different.
include the awkward cases: how you apologise, how you say no, how you announce a price rise, how you reply to criticism. those moments are when voice matters most and when people default to corporate language, so they need a worked example more than the easy cases do.
if the founder is the voice — which is common in this region — record them talking about the business for twenty minutes and transcribe it. the phrasing in that transcript is the voice, more accurately than anything written deliberately, and it gives you real sentences to build the examples from.
— 03the banned list.
a list of words and constructions you never use does more for consistency than any amount of positive description. it is unambiguous, it is easy to check, and it is the fastest way to make a new writer sound like you.
typical entries: industry clichés, the phrases your competitors overuse, filler intensifiers, and any word your founder physically dislikes. include the reason briefly — a banned list without reasons gets argued with, and a banned list with reasons teaches the underlying judgment.
then add the small mechanical decisions that make copy look consistent: capitalisation, whether you use exclamation marks, how you write numbers and prices, whether you use emoji and where. these are trivial individually and they are what makes a feed look designed rather than assembled.
our own playbook work puts the banned list on the first page for exactly that reason — it is the section people read.
— 04making it survive contact with people.
a voice document is only real if it is used at the moment of writing. that means it needs to be one page, in the same place as the calendar, and short enough to reread in two minutes.
then test it: give the document and a brief to someone who has never written for you and see what comes back. if it does not sound like you, the document is at fault rather than the writer. that test takes a day and it is the only honest way to know whether the thing works.
review it annually, and after any significant change — a new market, a new price point, a founder handing over the writing. voice drifts slowly and nobody notices until an old post reads like a different company. a brand system that includes voice is easier to hold steady than one that treats it as a separate document nobody owns.