Brand Strategy
Tone of
Voice
Your brand voice is how you sound across every touchpoint — website, emails, social media, even invoices. This guide covers how to define it, document it, and keep it consistent.
9 min readTL;DR
Tone of voice is the personality of your brand expressed through language. A good voice framework uses dimensions (e.g. formal vs casual, serious vs playful) rather than vague adjectives, includes practical dos and don'ts with real examples, and flexes across contexts without losing its core character.
Voice vs tone
People use "voice" and "tone" interchangeably, but they're different things — and the distinction matters when you're building a framework your team can actually use.
Voice is who you are. It's consistent. It's the personality traits that come through in everything you write — whether that's a homepage headline, a support email, or an Instagram caption. If your brand were a person, voice is their character.
Tone is how you adapt to context. It's variable. You speak differently at a funeral than at a barbecue, but you're still you. Your brand works the same way. The tone you use for a crisis communication should be different from a product launch announcement — but the underlying voice stays recognisable.
Think about how you talk to your boss versus your best mate. The words change, the formality shifts, maybe the humour dials up or down. But your personality — the way you think, what you find funny, how you explain things — that stays the same. That's the voice-tone relationship.
Getting this distinction right means your team can adapt to any situation without sounding like a different brand every time they write something.
Voice dimensions
Single adjectives don't work. Telling your team "be friendly" is too vague — friendly like a children's TV presenter or friendly like a trusted adviser? Spectrums give your voice shape by showing where you sit between two extremes. They're precise, they're visual, and they leave much less room for interpretation.
Formal ↔ Casual
How structured is your language? A law firm sits toward formal. A surf school sits toward casual. Most brands land somewhere in between — professional but approachable. Plot where you sit and define what that actually looks like in practice.
"We lean casual — contractions are fine, first names are default, but we never use slang that could confuse."
Serious ↔ Playful
How much levity do you bring? This dimension shapes whether you crack jokes in your 404 page or keep it straight. Note: serious doesn't mean humourless — it means the subject matter leads, not the personality.
"We're serious about the work but not about ourselves. Dry wit is welcome; puns are not."
Respectful ↔ Irreverent
How much do you challenge convention? A healthcare brand probably leans respectful. A creative agency might lean irreverent. This dimension is particularly important for understanding where your brand sits on tradition vs disruption.
"We respect our audience's intelligence but we're not afraid to challenge industry norms."
Matter-of-fact ↔ Enthusiastic
How much energy do you bring to the page? Some brands let the work speak for itself with understated confidence. Others lead with excitement and energy. Neither is wrong — but you need to know which one you are.
"We're confident, not hype. We state things clearly and let the reader draw their own conclusions."
The power of dimensions is that they create a space your brand occupies — not a single point, but a range. Different team members can write in slightly different ways and still sound like the same brand, because the boundaries are clear.
Practical application
A voice framework that only exists in theory is useless. The real test is whether your team can open the guide and immediately know how to write for a specific context. That means showing the same voice applied across different situations — same personality, different register.
The dos and don'ts format is the most practical tool in any voice guide. Not because it's clever, but because it's fast. A busy copywriter, customer service rep, or social media manager doesn't have time to interpret brand philosophy. They need to see "write this, not that" and get on with it.
Same message, different contexts
Website homepage
"We design training that people actually want to complete. Evidence-based, beautifully crafted, and built around how adults really learn."
Error message
"Something went wrong on our end. We're looking into it — try again in a moment, or get in touch if it keeps happening."
Customer complaint response
"Thank you for letting us know — that's not the experience we want for you. I've looked into this and here's what we're doing to fix it."
Social media caption
"New module just shipped. Scenario-based, mobile-friendly, and built to actually stick. Here's how we approached it."
Notice how the personality stays consistent across all four — confident, clear, human — but the formality and energy shift to match the situation. The complaint response is warmer and more empathetic. The social caption is punchier. The error message is calm and helpful. Same voice, four different tones.
Your voice guide should include examples like these for every major context your team writes in. The more specific, the more useful.
Common pitfalls
Being too vague
"Friendly and professional" could describe a bank, a dentist, or a dog groomer. If your voice descriptors could belong to any brand in any industry, they're not specific enough. Define what friendly means for you — and what it doesn't mean.
Writing guidelines nobody reads
A 40-page tone of voice document is a trophy, not a tool. The best voice guides fit on a single page with clear examples. If someone can't absorb it in five minutes, they won't absorb it at all. Brevity is a feature, not a limitation.
Not including what you don't sound like
Exclusions are as useful as inclusions. Knowing that "we never use jargon without explaining it" or "we don't use exclamation marks in formal comms" gives your team clear guardrails. What you reject defines the brand just as much as what you embrace.
Forgetting the hard contexts
Every brand sounds great in a product launch. The real test is harder moments. How do you sound when apologising? When delivering bad news? When saying no to a request? If your voice guide only covers the easy stuff, your team will improvise when it matters most — and that's where brands break.
My Approach
How I develop tone of voice
A tone of voice guide should be the most-used page in your brand toolkit — not the one gathering dust in a shared drive. I build voice frameworks that are practical, specific, and designed to be referenced daily.
01
Discovery
Audit existing communications across channels — website, emails, social media, internal docs. Interview stakeholders about how they want to sound and how they think they currently sound. The gap between those two answers is where the work starts.
02
Strategy
Define voice dimensions based on research and brand positioning. Create example copy for different contexts — the easy ones and the hard ones. Test the framework against real scenarios before finalising.
03
Delivery
One-page voice guide with dos and don'ts and real examples your team can reference daily. Not a manifesto — a practical tool that answers "how should I write this?" in under a minute.
Related resources
Brand Foundations
Purpose, vision, values, and positioning — the strategic bedrock that everything else builds on.
Brand StrategyBrand Components
The elements of a brand system: visual, verbal, and experiential identity.
Instructional DesignWhat is Instructional Design?
The discipline explained for non-specialists.
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The best tone of voice guides are ones your team actually uses. Let's build one that fits on a single page and actually gets referenced.
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