Open enough brand guidelines and eventually you’ll meet the same four words: warm, human, confident and conversational. Lovely qualities, sure. Almost completely useless instructions for the poor soul who has to write the website copy on Monday morning.
The problem isn’t that brands should sound cold, robotic or difficult to understand. Of course they shouldn’t. It’s that “human” and “conversational” have become shorthand for a kind of pleasant, broadly acceptable writing that could belong to almost anyone. And that’s the opposite of what a brand voice is meant to do.
A good brand voice should help a business sound recognisably like itself. It should give the people writing on its behalf enough direction to make real decisions: how direct to be, how much personality to use, what kind of humour belongs (and doesn’t), which words feel natural, how sentences tend to come together and flow.
That takes more work than choosing a coupla familiar adjectives and calling it a day. Too harsh? Nah, feeling spicy, let’s keep going.
What kind of human, though?
“Human” covers quite a lot of ground. Nike’s voice human. Go-To Skincare’s voice is human. Duolingo’s voice is definitely human. And so is your accountant when they email to say your BAS is overdue – in this case, a helpful, yet somewhat dreadful, kinda human. None of the aforemention sound remotely alike.
The useful work starts when you get more specific. Is the brand dry or expressive? Precise or loose? Earnest or irreverent? Warm in a reassuring way or warm in a mate-at-the-pub way? Does it explain things patiently or get straight to the point? Does it use humour to charm, provoke, disarm or simply make something boring more interesting to read? Or bad news a bit more palatable?
These choices matter because voice shapes the relationship between a brand and the person on the other side of the screen. Compare Aesop and Go-To Skincare. Both sell skincare. Both appeal to design-conscious consumers. Both sit well above the bargain end of the market. Yet their verbal identities are miles (and miles, and miles) apart.
Aesop has historically leaned into restraint, intelligence and a slightly literary quality. Go-To is more playful and more knowingly informal. It makes jokes. It names products differently. It talks to customers differently. The distinction is bigger than swapping a few adjectives in the copy. Each brand has a different idea of what kind of relationship it wants with its customer.
Voice and tone are not the same thing
This is where brand voice often gets muddled. Your voice is the underlying character of the brand. Tone is how that character adjusts to the situation. People do this naturally. You are the same person at dinner with friends, in a board meeting and when telling someone their payment has failed. You don’t become a different human each time, but you do adapt and adjust your tone to suit the context. Bad news delivered with giggles and humour would be lacking in empathy and kinda unhinged. Brands need the same range.
Ryanair is a useful example. Its social media voice is famous for being chaotic, combative and very online. The community management in particular can be gloriously unhinged, because that environment rewards speed, humour and entertainment. Carry that exact tone onto the website booking flow and you’ve got a problem. When someone is choosing dates, baggage, destinations and payment options, clarity matters more than cleverness. The brand can still feel like Ryanair, but the dial gets turned down because the job of the copy has changed.
That is what good verbal identity should account for. It should tell you how the voice flexes without disappearing altogether. A playful brand does not need every error message to crack a joke. A serious brand does not need every social post to sound like a board paper. Yeah?
Writing style is where the voice becomes useful
This is the word nerd bit (and I say that as someone who feels a little bit smug about knowing when to use the Oxford commar. Ha. Grammar pedants unite).
“Confident” is a nice idea for brand voice, but what does it actually change on the page? Does confident mean short sentences? Fewer qualifiers? Clear recommendations? Strong verbs? Less corporate padding? Does the brand say “we think” or simply state the point? Does it use contractions? How much jargon does it tolerate? Does it use headings that explain or headings that entertain? How often does it use rhetorical questions? What kind of punctuation feels natural
These choices sound small. Together, they create rhythm. And rhythm is part of recognition.
Some brands write in clipped, economical sentences. Others use longer, more conversational phrasing. Some are comfortable with slang. Some should never touch it. Some use parentheses constantly. Some need cleaner prose. Some brands can get away with a swear word. For others, it would feel like your dad suddenly saying “slay”. A useful verbal identity gets into this level of detail because this is the detail that helps different writers produce work that still feels related. So there’s less bickering over syntax and more enthusiastically dusting off the Australian Style Manual to debate typesetting with the design team.
Vocabulary matters more than people think
Brands naturally develop preferences for certain words, phrases and ways of framing things. A financial brand might favour “clarity” over “control”. A health brand might choose “support” rather than “fix”. A food brand can communicate craftsmanship through how it talks about ingredients, provenance and process without using the word “craft” seventeen times.
The words you avoid matter too, particularly when entire industries develop a collective vocabulary problem. Marketing has spent years leveraging things at scale, navigating landscapes, unlocking opportunities, and optimising just about anything that will sit still long enough. Its wordmaxxing. And its gross.
AI has, of course, accelerated the enshittification of language. Notice how suddenly everything is quietly doing something. Em dashes multiplied so quickly they became an AI tell. “Not just X, but Y” negative parallelisms started popping up everywhere. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these constructions, but once everyone reaches for the same handful of words and clauses, the writing starts to feel synthetic. (side note: this isn’t a hate post on AI. It can be bluddy helpful, if you’ve got a solid verbal identity to keep things on brand).
A considered brand vocabulary helps protect against that. You might favour plain English over marketing jargon, use particular language when talking about customers, have specific names for products or services, or develop recurring phrases that become familiar over time. You might also keep a running shitlist of words nobody on the team is allowed to use unless there is genuinely no better option. Personally, I’d nominate landscape, leverage, realm and delve for immediate consideration.
A good brand voice should make writing easier
That is probably the simplest test.
If your social manager, founder, copywriter and customer service team all read the same verbal identity guidelines, and produce four completely different versions of “human and conversational” the guidelines haven’t done enough work.
A strong verbal identity should make writing easier, make the brand experience more consistent, and make marketing more effective. It gives people a shared understanding of how the brand sounds, how the application of voice changes to suit context, and what good looks like in practice.
That consistency matters because brand recognition is built through repetition. The more often people encounter the same underlying character across your website, social channels, advertising, customer service and sales material, the easier it becomes to recognise and remember you.
And that’s the job. Give people enough guidance to write well, enough flexibility to adapt, and enough structure that the brand remains consistent over time.
