Brand Voice Guide Writing

Brand Voice Guide Writing

Authoring craft for the brand voice guide as an artifact. The output is a document other writers will open, reference, and apply.

Overview

A brand voice guide answers four questions for every writer who opens it:

  1. Who do we sound like? (Voice — the constant.)
  2. How do we shift in different situations? (Tone — the variable.)
  3. Which words do we use, and which do we never use? (Vocabulary.)
  4. What does this look like in practice? (Examples — usually do/don’t pairs.)

If a guide doesn’t make these four questions answerable in under 10 minutes of reading, it will be ignored.

Core Concepts

1. The four-section skeleton

  1. Voice — three to five attributes that describe the constant personality. State each as “We are X. We are not Y.” (Bloomstein’s BrandSort framing: include the not.)
  2. Tone — a matrix showing how voice flexes by situation.
  3. Vocabulary — preferred words, banned words, and grammar/style decisions specific to the brand.
  4. Examples — at least 5 do/don’t pairs spanning the highest-traffic surfaces.

2. Voice attributes — the “we are X, we are not Y” pattern

The canonical format:

Confident, not arrogant. We make declarative claims when we know we’re right. We don’t oversell, hedge with weasel words, or talk down to readers who know less than us.

Warm, not saccharine. We sound like a competent colleague who likes their job. We don’t use exclamation marks to perform enthusiasm or call readers “friend.”

Three to five attributes is the sweet spot.

3. The brand-voice spectrum chart (typically 3 axes)

The Nielsen Norman Group axes: formal↔casual, serious↔funny, respectful↔irreverent, enthusiastic↔matter-of-fact.

Formal        |---------------●---|        Casual
Serious       |---●---------------|        Playful
Matter-of-fact|---------●---------|        Enthusiastic

Anti-pattern: Putting all markers in the middle. “Moderately formal, moderately serious, moderately enthusiastic” is no voice.

4. The tone-shifts matrix

Situation Tone shift Example
User succeeded (deploy passed) Brief, warm, low-key “Deployed in 47s. You’re live.”
User failed (deploy errored) Direct, calm, no blame “Deploy failed at build step. Logs below.”
Onboarding (first-run) Patient, encouraging, no jargon “First time? We’ll walk you through it.”
Marketing (new feature) Confident, specific, no hype “Indexes now rebuild without a write pause.”
Legal / policy update Plain, precise, no marketing “We updated our privacy policy on May 1.”

5. Do/don’t pairs (the “this but not that” convention)

Do: “We paused your build. Resume it when ready.” Don’t: “Oops! Looks like your build got paused. No worries — just click Resume whenever you’d like to keep going! 🚀”

The don’t side teaches more than the do side. Pick don’ts from real drafts your team has actually shipped.

6. Vocabulary section: preferred, banned, and decisions

7. Dating and versioning discipline

Every voice guide should display:

Anti-Patterns

  1. No “we are not.” Lists three positive attributes with no opposites.
  2. Spectrum markers all centered. “Moderately formal” is no guidance.
  3. Don’t-side strawmen. Don’t pairs that are obviously bad teach nothing.
  4. No date, no owner. Writers won’t trust an undated guide.
  5. 30+ page voice guide. Anything past 10 pages won’t be read.
  6. Banning words without preferring others. “Don’t say leverage” without “say use” leaves writers stuck.
  7. No tone matrix. Writers can match personality but not situation.

References