So try this: go and quickly read your company’s last three blog posts.
Now: immediately go read your closest competitor’s last three blog posts.
Do you see the issue? More importantly, do you see a difference?
If the answer is “not really” — or worse, if you would have to check the URL to be sure — you have a voice problem. It’s not because your writers aren’t talented or your editor isn’t doing their job, it’s because nobody ever made the deliberate decisions about what your brand actually sounds like.
Which isn’t unusual — like most of the problems we talk about on this blog, it’s basically industry standard.
Where Generic Content Comes From
Nobody sets out to sound generic, it’s more of a slow accumulation.
The founder writes the first few posts. Then a freelancer comes on. Then maybe you hire an agency. Then someone in-house. Every person brings their own defaults — their sense of what “professional” sounds like, the level of formality and empathy that are appropriate. How much personality is too much.
Without a clear editorial standard holding it together, your brand voice is just the average of everyone who’s ever contributed to it.
An average isn’t a voice. It’s a blur. A coherent brand voice strategy is what transforms that average into something specific and owned.
What Generic Sounds Like
We know it when we read it.
You open with a statistic from a study nobody asked for, that uses the word leverage as a verb more than once. You drop in a section or a sidebar of “Key Takeaways”.
Increasingly, you or the robot tell us about how in “today’s fast-paced digital landscape,” this or that concept has never been more important.
This is technically competent. It is also forgettable. Completely.
It’s not even wrong! The information is fine, structure’s reasonable. It just sounds like it was written by nobody in particular, for nobody in particular, about some stuff nobody really cares about. Every industry has a dominant content voice that everyone defaults to — and defaulting to it is the fastest route to invisibility.
That’s the voice problem in its purest form: Content that exists without a reason to exist.
It Matters More Than Probably You Think
Voice is not a cosmetic concern, and it’s not about personality for personality’s sake. We tend to file voice into that squishy area of our otherwise data-focused concepting and architecting that’s reserved for vibes: voice, tone, intent, persona. All the squishy stuff that actually requires our thought and engagement, so we back away from it and label it UX. That’s not the right call.
Your brand voice is the mechanism by which someone who has never heard of you decides whether or not to trust you. It happens in the first hundred words. Sometimes the first ten. That’s not squishy and it’s not vibes, it’s dollars.
A distinctive voice signals there’s a real person — or a real organization, with a real point of view — behind what you’re publishing. It says you’ve thought about this, you have something to say and a reason to say it. You’re not just filling a calendar or laying down turf for more SEO density. It’s a sales tool that looks like an art object.
Generic content doesn’t just fail to build trust. It actively erodes it. You already know this, you just need to live it. Even when you’ve got a million other things to do.
When everything sounds the same, we learn not to pay attention. We skim, we bounce, we forget who you are and why we were reading your blog. We close the tab, you go out like a candle.
You’ve trained us to treat your content as background noise — which is to say you’ve trained us to treat you as background noise. Your brand is just one among many, not the one true voice that’s going to get your customer or client on track.
This is a very hard thing to undo. You cannot go from human to generic and back to human again without strategy, care, and an editorial viewpoint.
The Usual Fixes, Which Will Not Fix It
1. A good old brand voice guide.
Most companies, when they finally decide to address this, produce a Google Doc, which lives in a Google Drive, and has sections about tone (“approachable but authoritative”) and a list of words the brand does and doesn’t use. It gets shared with contributors once and never looked at again.
This is not a voice, it’s the opposite of a voice. It’s a description of a possible voice that nobody has ever actually heard.
2. Even More guidelines.
Same problem, with more verbiage. A voice that requires ten pages of instruction to approximate is not a voice, it’s a compliance exercise. These documents are usually lovely and really creative, with a lot of good ideas. But they’re not getting it done.
The writers producing the content don’t feel the brand from the inside, so they approximate it from the outside — and just like that, you’re back to the blur.
3. A whole new style.
Sometimes brands decide the problem is aesthetic — the wrong fonts, format, length. Something is wrong with the zag and so they need to zig. They redesign the blog, change their SEO briefs to say 2000+ words where 1000 was already pushing it.
The content then sounds exactly the same — just wearing new clothes. None of these get to the actual problem:
brand voice isn’t a document and it’s not a design decision. It’s a commitment to a point of view.
What a Real Brand Voice Actually Is
Your brand voice is what’s left when you strip away everything you could have written about anything.
It’s the specific things you notice, point out, get into. The comparisons you reach for. The things that annoy you and things that genuinely excite you. The rhythm of your sentences, the jokes you crack and the ones you would never make. The line you won’t cross and the line you’ll push every time.
It’s opinion. It’s taste. It’s perspective. These are not UX, they are the heart of writing. They are what we are all here for.
And it has to be real — meaning it has to come from somewhere actual. The best brand voices are extensions of a person’s sensibility, or an organization’s genuine culture, not a committee decision about who we want to seem most like.
The brands with voices you recognize across any format, any medium, any writer — they didn’t get there by sharing a Google Doc about branding language. They got there because someone decided, clearly and specifically, what their brand actually believes. Here’s what that looks like from the inside — when a brand has actually achieved it.
And then they held that line, consistently, across everything. No matter what.
How to Find Your actual brand voice
Start with what you are not.
It sounds backwards, but it’s actually the fastest way in.
Look at your competitors. Look at the industry’s default register. Name it precisely — not just “corporate” or “dry,” but specifically.
What assumptions are they making? What are they always careful not to say? What do they never joke about? What do they treat as settled that you actually find worth questioning?
The space between you and that is where your voice lives.
Find the sentence you’d never see on a competitor’s site. Say it.
Now write ten more like that. It’s a voice exercise, and it’s more useful than any guidelines document. It’s about muscle memory, emotionally speaking. It’s about feeling the brand from the inside and knowing what it wants, fears, loves, prizes.
What the brand wants is also what it is. Use that.
Look at your best content.
Not your most-trafficked, mind you: your best. The piece you’re most proud of. The one that got the response that reminded you why you do this. What does it do that your average piece doesn’t?
Whatever it is, that’s your voice trying to get out.
Get someone in the room who can hold it.
Voice doesn’t maintain itself. It needs an editorial hand — someone reading everything, not just for quality but for fit. Someone who can say this doesn’t sound like us and mean something specific by it. That’s not a junior function. It’s one of the most senior editorial jobs there is.
The Hard Truth is also really good news
You already know what your brand sounds like at its best.
There’s a version of your content that’s unmistakably yours — sharper, specific, more interesting than the average. You’ve produced it before. The problem is just that you haven’t made it the standard. You let it sit there like a jewel in your crown instead of letting it drive the whole kingdom.
That’s an eminently fixable problem. It doesn’t get fixed by publishing more, creating better briefs, or even finding better freelancers — although all those things can probably help.
It gets fixed by deciding — clearly, specifically, with real conviction — what you actually sound like, then building the editorial infrastructure to hold it.
That’s the real, valuable work of brand voice. It’s what I do.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.