Brand voice: definition, examples and guidelines

What is brand voice?

Brand voice is the consistent personality a company uses in everything it writes, from the website to support replies: the words it chooses, the words it avoids and the attitude it takes towards readers.

Brand voice vs tone

Voice stays the same; tone changes with the situation. A brand with a plain, confident voice will sound more careful in an outage notice and more relaxed in a launch announcement, but it should still sound like itself in both.

Brand voice examples

  • Plain and direct: short sentences, no jargon, numbers up front.
  • Warm and encouraging: second person, reassurance, generous thanks.
  • Expert and precise: exact terms, careful qualifications, evidence first.

What brand voice guidelines include

  • Three to five adjectives, each with a “this, not that” example.
  • Words and phrases to use, and banned words to avoid.
  • Who the audience is and what they already know.
  • How the tone shifts for support, marketing and incidents.

How to define your brand voice

Collect ten pieces of your best existing writing and ten you dislike, and describe the difference in plain words. Turn that into a one-page guide and test it on a real task, such as rewriting a support reply. AI Powered Content Repurposing lets you save a brand voice with its tone, audience, guidelines and banned words, so repurposed content starts from the same rules.

Last reviewed 2026-11-01.

Related terms

  • Tone register — Register is the level of formality in a piece of writing, from formal to casual; tone is the attitude it carries, such as confident, warm or urgent.
  • Readability grade — A readability grade estimates how hard a piece of text is to read, usually as the school grade or reading age needed to follow it comfortably, worked out from sentence length and word length.
  • Content repurposing — Content repurposing is turning one piece of content, such as an article, webinar or podcast episode, into several pieces shaped for other channels, rather than posting the same text in several places.

All glossary terms →