Every brand has a voice. Not every brand knows what it is.
almost no brand has built a system for transmitting it.
This is the root of most brand voice problems I have encountered — not that the voice is bad, but that it is not visible, not documented in any useful way, and not deliberately passed from the people who naturally embody it to the people who are responsible for producing content.
The result is content that’s technically on-brand — it does not violate any explicit guidelines, it uses the right vocabulary, it avoids prohibited phrases — but does not in fact sound like it belongs to anyone in particular.
This is because it doesn’t. It belongs to the guidelines, which are an abstraction of the voice rather than the voice itself.
Where Voice Actually Lives
I have a practice at the start of every brand voice engagement:
find me the three things your company has produced that you are proudest of. Not the best traffic, Not the most shares. things you read and thought: yes, that is us, that is exactly what we sound like when we are at our best.
Then I ask: who made those?
Nine out of ten, it’s the same small group — often one person. The founder sometimes. The head of customer experience, who has been with the company since the beginning. The salesperson who writes their own follow-ups. Her response rate is anomalous. The person who handles the company’s social presence, for long enough to have developed an instinct for it.
These people are not special, in the sense of being uniquely talented. They are something better: special in the sense of being close to something real.
They are close to it — the actual identity of the organization, its genuine character, the way it thinks about its customers and work — and that proximity gives their content a quality guidelines-based content does not, cannot, will not ever, have.
Voice is proximity to the real thing. The challenge is finding the real thing and getting everyone else closer to it.
Why the Style Guide
Doesn’t Do It
A style guide can tell you what not to do: It can tell you the words to avoid, the tone to maintain, the register appropriate to eac channel. These are useful constraints.
What a style guide cannot tell you is what to say or how to think — which is the place where voice actually lives.
Voice is not vocabulary. It is a perspective, an attitude toward the reader, a consistent orientation to the subject matter.
Voice is the sum of countless small decisions about what to emphasize and what to elide, what to find interesting, what to trust the reader to understand without explanation.
These decisions just can’t be captured in a document. They can only be transmitted through example, feedback, close reading of the work that embodies them.
How to Find It
Step one: collect the real examples.
Not the polished brand content — the unpolished.
The founder’s customer emails. Slacks from the team member who consistently communicates most clearly. The deal-closing sales follow-ups. customer service responses that make complainers into advocates.
This material is where the voice lives in its natural state, before it gets processed by the content production system.
Step two: analyze what you have.
What patterns emerge? What does your organization consistently notice that others don’t? What does it find funny, important, beneath comment altogether? How does it relate to its audience — as peer, authority, or friend? How long does it take to get to the point? What metaphors does it reach for? What does it assume about its reader and what they know?
This analysis produces a voice profile that’s both specific and observable. Not “We are warm and approachable,” not the style guide answer, but “We tend to open with the problem before the solution, we assume a smart reader, we find industry jargon worth making fun of, we are willing to say it when something is hard” or ugly, or complicated.
Step three: build the transmission system.
The voice profile is only useful if it gets transmitted to everyone who produces content. This means examples — lots of them, annotated — and feedback referencing the profile specifically.
no “this doesn’t feel right”/”like us” but “this is more formal than our voice — look how we handled this in that customer service example from last March.”
The transmission system is the part brands skip. They find the voice, document it, and then expect writers to intuit it from this documentation.
Writers cannot do that.
They need models and feedback.
So give them both.
The Audit Question
This is the question I ask when I want to know whether a brand has solved its voice problem.
Could a regular reader of your content pick a new piece out of a lineup as yours, if it had no byline and no logo?
If the answer is no — if the content could have come from anywhere, could have been written by any competent content team for any brand in your category — you have not found and transmitted your voice.
If the answer is yes, you have done the hard thing. Most brands have not done this. Start now.
I write about content strategy, brand voice, and the editorial infrastructure that makes good content possible.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative