Ask five people on your team to describe your brand’s tone, and you’ll get five answers. At least three will say “pleasant but professional,” because it’s on a slide somewhere and nobody remembers what it was supposed to mean.
Your team isn’t being careless. The guidelines are too vague to follow. Most brand voice docs describe a feeling rather than set rules, which leaves nothing to verify against and makes drift easy.
Why brand voice guidelines don’t hold up
A typical brand guide says something like “Our voice is confident, warm, and friendly.” That’s a reasonable starting point, but a writer can’t do much with it. Hand “confident” to three writers and you’ll get three interpretations.
The guide usually lives somewhere nobody goes. Think of the PDF from a rebrand two years ago, sitting in a shared drive, opened maybe once since the launch party. New hires never see it and freelancers definitely don’t. Nobody checks finished content against it before it goes out.
So the blog sounds one way, the social posts another, and the sales emails a third. Each piece is fine by itself. Read them together, and they don’t sound like the same company.
Turn adjectives into rules
A voice becomes enforceable once you translate the adjectives into decisions. That comes down to three pieces of work.
1. Pick 3-5 voice pillars and give each single a “we sound like this, not that” pair.
Instead of “confident,” write: “We state things directly. We don’t hedge with ‘we think’ or ‘maybe.'” Instead of “warm,” write: “We use ‘you’ and ‘your.’ We don’t talk about the customer in the third person.”
2. Build a word bank.
List the words and phrases you use and the ones you avoid, with a reason wherever it isn’t obvious. For example: “We say ‘clients’ rather than ‘customers’ because our users manage client relationships.” Of everything here, the word bank helps outside writers most, including freelancers and AI tools.
3. Write two or three real before/after examples.
Take an actual sentence from your product or marketing and show it on-voice and off-voice, side by side. People forget abstract rules. They remember examples.
Rolling it out
- Draft the pillars with your leadership or founding team. They usually know instinctively what sounds right, even if they’ve never written it down.
- Keep the word bank in a living document. Adding a newly banned phrase or approved term should take ten seconds, which rules out a static PDF.
- Put it where people write, meaning your CMS, your email tool, and your project briefs. If nobody opens a guideline, it may as well not exist.
- Spot-check output regularly. Once a month, pull five recent pieces (a couple of social posts, an email, some ad copy) and check them against the word bank and pillars. Do it more often if your team is large or junior.
- Give it an owner who updates the voice guide as the brand changes and speaks up when they notice drift.
A small team may only need a shared doc and a monthly review. Once you’re managing voice across several writers, several clients, or a steady stream of AI-drafted copy, spot-checking becomes the bottleneck, since one person can only read so much. That’s usually when teams bring in brand compliance software to run tone checks, much like spell-check handles typos.
Software or no software, the job is to write rules someone can check a draft against. Adjectives on a slide won’t do that.
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