Somewhere in a shared drive, gathering digital dust between the Q3 marketing plan and a spreadsheet titled “FINAL_FINAL_v3,” lives a document that took eight weeks, four workshops, and two agency retainers to create. It’s the brand voice guide. It is fifty-seven pages long. It contains words like “empowering,” “human-centric,” and “boldly authentic.” It has been opened by three people since it was published, two of whom were looking for something else. The third was the person who wrote it, checking for typos. This is the state of brand voice in corporate communications, and it is a masterpiece of wasted potential.
The Adjective Graveyard
Every brand voice document begins with the same fatal flaw: it describes the brand using adjectives that could apply to literally any organization on earth. “We are warm, professional, and innovative.” Congratulations. So is every other company that has ever hired a branding consultant. You’ve just described the platonic ideal of a brand personality — pleasant, competent, and forward-thinking — which is to say, you’ve described nothing at all.
The problem with these adjectives is that they occupy the comfortable middle ground where no one disagrees and no one is inspired. “Warm” is safe. Nobody is going to argue that their brand should be cold. “Professional” is obvious. Nobody is pitching their brand as deliberately amateur. “Innovative” is aspirational in a way that requires no specific behavior. You can call yourself innovative while doing exactly what you did last year, as long as you add the word “reimagined” to the press release.
Real brand voice starts where comfort ends. It’s not about what you are — it’s about what you’re not. It’s about the things you’d never say, the tone you’d never take, the safe choices you’d actively reject. If your brand voice document doesn’t make at least one stakeholder uncomfortable, it’s not distinctive enough to matter. You haven’t defined a voice. You’ve defined a temperature — “lukewarm” — and called it a brand personality.
The Workshop That Produced Nothing Useful
The brand voice document typically emerges from a workshop. A room full of stakeholders — marketing, product, sales, sometimes even an actual customer if the agency is particularly adventurous — gathers for a half-day session involving sticky notes, marker pens, and the phrase “if our brand were a person, who would it be?” The answers always cluster around the same celebrities: someone who is smart but relatable, successful but humble, edgy but not offensive. The brand ends up being described as “the George Clooney of fintech” or “the Beyoncé of B2B SaaS,” which sounds inspiring in the workshop and means absolutely nothing when someone needs to write an error message for the checkout page.
The workshop fails because it asks the wrong questions. “What does our brand sound like?” is abstract to the point of uselessness. Better questions: “How would our brand apologize for a service outage?” “What would our brand say to a customer who’s about to leave for a competitor?” “How does our brand talk about its own failures?” These are the questions that produce actual voice — specific, testable, and immediately applicable. But they’re also uncomfortable, which is why they never get asked in the sticky-note session.
After the workshop, the agency retreats to produce the document. They take the sticky notes, the celebrity comparisons, and the list of aspirational adjectives, and they craft a PDF that looks beautiful and says nothing. There will be a spectrum — “We are bold, but not aggressive. Confident, but not arrogant.” These spectrums are the brand voice equivalent of saying “we like food, but not too spicy.” They’re guardrails so wide you could drive a truck through them without touching either side.
Why Nobody Uses the Guide (and What Would Actually Help)
The brand voice document fails not because the concept is wrong but because the execution is impractical. Fifty-seven pages of brand philosophy doesn’t help a social media manager who needs to respond to an angry customer in the next forty-five minutes. Theory doesn’t write tweets. Examples write tweets.
The most useful brand voice guides in the world are short — five pages maximum — and built entirely around examples. Here’s how we’d say this. Here’s how we wouldn’t. Here’s a before-and-after of a real piece of copy, transformed from generic to branded. Here’s our voice applied to an email subject line, a push notification, an apology, a celebration, and a product description. Show, don’t tell. Because telling a copywriter to “be boldly authentic” is like telling a chef to “cook deliciously.” It’s not guidance. It’s a wish.
The Fuck The Brief ethos understands this instinctively. Voice isn’t a theory — it’s a practice. It’s in the specific word choices, the sentence rhythms, the willingness to break convention when convention is boring. NoBriefs doesn’t need a fifty-seven-page guide to sound like NoBriefs. The voice lives in the work, not in a PDF.
Building a Voice That People Actually Use
If you’re responsible for brand voice, here’s a radical suggestion: kill the document. Replace it with a living resource — a Slack channel, a Notion page, a shared doc — that collects real examples of the voice in action. Every time someone writes something great, it goes in the collection. Every time someone writes something off-brand, the correction goes in too. Over time, this living library becomes infinitely more useful than any static PDF, because it reflects how the brand actually speaks, not how a consultant imagined it might speak during a Thursday workshop.
Create a “voice test” — three sentences that only your brand would say. If a competitor could say the same sentences without changing a word, they’re not distinctive enough. Push until the language is so specific to your organization that it couldn’t belong to anyone else. This is hard. This requires taste, courage, and a willingness to be imperfect. But imperfect and distinctive beats polished and generic every single time.
Train people, not just in the voice, but in the thinking behind the voice. Why do we use short sentences in our product copy? Because our users are busy and distracted. Why do we start emails with a question? Because it creates engagement. When people understand the principles, they can apply the voice to situations the guide never anticipated. And given how fast channels multiply and contexts shift, that adaptability is worth more than any spectrum of adjectives.
Finally, accept that voice evolves. The way your brand spoke three years ago might not work today. Markets shift, audiences change, cultural contexts move. The brand voice document that was “perfect” in 2023 is already aging. Build in a review cycle. Let the voice breathe. The best brands sound alive because they are — they’re constantly listening, adapting, and refining how they talk. The worst brands sound like they’re reading from a script, because they are, and the script was written by someone who left the company two years ago.
Got a brand voice guide collecting dust? At least your wardrobe can have personality. Visit nobriefsclub.com/shop — where the voice is always on-brand and never boring.
