What Is Brand Voice (And Why Most Brands Get It Wrong)

Brand voice is not your logo. It's not your color palette. It's not even your tagline.

It's the way your brand sounds when it opens its mouth. Every email, every social post, every caption on every photo. The cumulative effect of all those words, read together, is your brand voice. And most brands either don't have one, or have one they've never thought about.

Both problems are fixable. But first you have to understand what you're actually dealing with.

Voice vs. tone. They're not the same thing.

This is where most brands get tangled up.

Voice is consistent. It's your brand's personality, the through-line that shows up whether you're announcing a new product or responding to a complaint. Tone shifts. It's how you apply that personality to a specific moment. A brand can be warm and direct by nature but still know when to flatten the warmth and just state the facts.

Think of it this way. You have a personality. It doesn't change depending on who's in the room. But your tone does. You talk to your best friend differently than you talk to your boss. That's not inconsistency. That's range.

A strong brand voice has both. A fixed personality and the range to apply it well.

Why so many brands sound like everyone else

Two reasons. And they usually work together.

The first is category default. Every industry has a gravitational pull toward a certain kind of language. Financial services brands default to "trustworthy and approachable." Wellness brands default to "clean and empowering." Tech brands default to "innovative and human-centered." None of it is wrong, exactly. But none of it is distinctive either. When everyone in your category sounds the same, you stop being a brand and start being a commodity.

The second is compliance drift. This one is especially common in regulated industries. Legal review is necessary. But when every piece of copy goes through the same red pen with no voice framework to protect it, what comes out the other side sounds like a disclosure. Technically accurate. Completely forgettable. The fix isn't to fight compliance. It's to build the voice guardrails before anyone picks up that red pen. That's exactly what brand voice development is designed to do.

What brand voice development actually looks like

I worked with Nala's Ranch, a dog boarding and training company out of Spring Hill, on exactly this. They weren't a brand-new business. But they were new enough that they had never stopped to think about how they sounded. They had a personality. They just hadn't named it yet.

We started where I always start: listening. Not to what they wanted to say, but to what their customers were already saying about them. We went deep on their reviews. And something interesting happened. The words their clients were using, warm, trustworthy, like leaving your dog with family, lined up almost exactly with what Nala's Ranch wanted their brand to feel like.

That's the moment it clicked. Not when I showed them a voice guide. When they heard the gap between what they sounded like and what they wanted to sound like, and realized it was smaller than they thought. That kind of momentum is hard to manufacture. But when it's real, it makes every piece of downstream work easier. The campaign concepting, the social media copywriting, the email copywriting. All of it.

The brands that get it right

They treat voice as infrastructure, not decoration.

A strong brand voice framework means your social media manager, your email copywriter, and your front desk team are all working from the same playbook. It means when you bring in outside help, a freelancer, an agency, a contractor, they can get up to speed without a six-week onboarding. It means your brand sounds like itself, consistently, across every channel and every format.

That consistency is what builds recognition. And recognition is what builds trust. And trust is what builds customers who stay.

How to find out if you have a brand voice problem

Read three pieces of your own content out loud. A recent email, a social post, and something from your website. Do they sound like the same brand? Does that brand sound like anyone in particular, or could those words have come from any of your competitors?

If the answer is uncomfortable, that's useful information. It means there's work to do. And the work is worth doing.

Brand voice development is where I spend a lot of my time. If your brand is ready to stop sounding like everyone else in your category, let's talk.

What AI Writing Gets Wrong (And How to Spot It)

I use AI every day. Claude helps me outline, draft, pressure-test ideas, and move faster than I could alone. I'm not here to tell you AI is bad.

But I can spot AI writing from the second paragraph. And if I can, your readers can too, even if they can't name what's bothering them. They just know something feels off. A little too smooth. A little too everything.

Here's what to look for.

The em dash problem

This one is almost unfair at this point. AI loves an em dash. The way a nervous writer loves a semicolon. If you open a piece of content and em dashes are showing up every other sentence, a human did not write that. Or if they did, they didn't edit it.

One em dash in a piece? Fine. Three? You've got a draft, not a finished product.

The thesaurus word that sticks out

Good writing has a consistent register. The vocabulary feels like it belongs to one person. AI writing occasionally drops in a word that's technically correct but tonally wrong. "Endeavor" in a sentence full of plain English. "Utilize" when "use" was right there the whole time.

It's the equivalent of wearing a tuxedo jacket with jeans. You notice it immediately. You can't not notice it.

"Excited" and its relatives

AI defaults to performed enthusiasm. We're excited to share. This is a remarkable opportunity. We're thrilled to announce. Real humans writing real things don't write like that, at least not without irony.

If the emotional temperature of a piece feels higher than the situation warrants, that's a tell. Nobody is excited about a policy update. Nobody is thrilled about a deadline reminder. This is especially true in internal communications, where employees have a finely tuned radar for hollow warmth. Write the actual feeling, or don't write a feeling at all.

The structure is too perfect

AI produces beautifully balanced content. Every section roughly the same length. Every paragraph with a clear topic sentence and a tidy close. Three examples, every time. It reads like a content template, because essentially it is.

Real writing is messier. Some sections are longer because the idea needed more room. Some paragraphs are one sentence because that's all it needed. The structure serves the content. Not the other way around.

Nothing is actually said

This is the hardest one to explain and the easiest to feel. AI writing can cover a topic thoroughly without saying anything specific, opinionated, or true about it. It presents information. It rarely takes a position.

Read a piece and ask: what does the writer actually believe here? If you can't find a real answer, you're probably reading something that was generated rather than written. This is where brand voice matters most. A strong voice has a point of view baked in. Without it, there's nothing for AI to replicate, and nothing for readers to connect with.

So what do you do about it?

Use AI. Seriously. It's a legitimate tool and pretending otherwise is a waste of your time. But treat the output as a first draft, not a finished product. The draft is research. Your job is to go in and make it sound like a person with opinions wrote it.

That means cutting the em dashes. Flattening the vocabulary back to your register. Replacing "we're excited to announce" with whatever you actually mean. Breaking the perfect structure where a real thought needs more room. And adding the one thing AI genuinely cannot supply: a point of view.

That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing.

If your brand's content is coming out of the AI pipeline and going straight to publish, it's worth a conversation. Find out how I work, or take a look at what a finished product actually looks like. When you're ready, let's talk.

Internal Communications and Marketing Are the Same Job

Most organizations treat internal communications and marketing like two completely different disciplines. Different teams, different budgets, different skill sets. One talks to customers. One talks to employees. Never the twain shall meet.

That's a mistake. And it's costing you.

The truth is that internal communications and marketing flex exactly the same muscle. The craft is the same. The strategy is the same. The best practitioners can do both. And the organizations that figure that out get better work from both functions.

The audience changes. The job doesn't.

At its core, marketing is about getting the right message to the right person at the right moment, in a way that makes them think, feel or do something specific. That's it. Strip away the channels, the budgets, the campaign briefs. That's the whole job.

Now read that back and tell me it doesn't describe internal communications perfectly.

Your employees are an audience. They have competing priorities, limited attention spans and a very low tolerance for content that doesn't feel relevant to them. Sound familiar? It should. That's every marketing brief you've ever written.

The mistake leaders make is assuming that because the audience is internal, the standards can be lower. That a town hall invitation doesn't need a compelling subject line. That a SharePoint page doesn't need a clear hierarchy. That an all-hands recap doesn't need an editor.

It does. They all do.

A marketing brain changes how you write internal communications

Here's a concrete example. Writing an invitation to a town hall or employee engagement event sounds simple. It's not. Most internal comms writers treat it like an announcement. They state the date, the time, the topic and move on.

A marketing brain treats it like a conversion problem. What's going to make someone actually show up? What's the hook? What do they get out of it that they can't get from reading the recap later? A well-written town hall invitation with a strong CTA gets people in the room. A weak one gets a half-empty auditorium and a leader wondering why no one showed up.

That's not an engagement problem. That's a copywriting problem.

And an internal comms brain makes your marketing stronger

The other side is just as true. Internal comms practitioners are experts at writing for audiences who didn't ask to hear from you, on topics they may not care about, in an environment full of distractions. That's a hard brief. And it builds a specific kind of discipline that makes everything else sharper.

The campaign thinking that good internal comms requires is indistinguishable from marketing campaign thinking. When I'm running an internal communications campaign — say, a multi-touch rollout of a new policy or a culture initiative — I'm thinking in exactly the same terms as a product marketer. What does the audience already believe? What do I need them to believe instead? How do I weave a consistent thread through every email, every SharePoint page, every manager talking point so it all feels like one coherent story rather than a series of disconnected blasts?

That's brand thinking. That's campaign thinking. It just happens to live inside the firewall.

What this means if you're hiring

If you're building a communications function and treating internal comms and marketing as completely separate skill sets, you're limiting yourself unnecessarily. The best communications professionals move fluidly between both. They know how to write a subject line that gets opened and a leadership message that doesn't make people's eyes glaze over at paragraph two.

Look for the muscle, not the job title. Someone who has written externally facing campaigns and internal communications has seen both sides of the same coin. That perspective is rare and genuinely useful.

The org chart can stay. But the silos? Those can go.

If you're looking for a creative strategist who has spent 20+ years doing exactly this, let's talk.