Most brand voice guides begin with the exact same process…
You sit down, pick a few adjectives from a list, add your “no” words and a few favorite phrases, and maybe, if you're feeling diligent, run through questions from some free template you downloaded only to land on something like: “conversational, authentic, witty."
And then you call it done.
From there, you either A) tuck it in a folder and never look at it again, or 2) hand it to a writer, a VA, a content team, or an AI tool and pray. And what comes back sounds... fine. Not wrong. Not better. Just fine. But still a little not you.
The thing is, the guide wasn't wrong. The process was.
A brand voice guide documents how your brand writes — its vocabulary, tone, and cadence — so anyone (or any AI) can sound like you. Most guides stop at a few adjectives. The ones that work include the specific patterns that make you recognizable, and the reasons behind them.
------
Why Most Brand Voice Templates Fall Short
They do a “this or that” selection from words you’d never pick, and then ask you to whittle them down to your top three.
Friendly or professional? Formal or casual? Bold or warm?
And in theory, that's helpful. Heck, even my process starts like that. Because it gives you a few answers that sound decent enough (if you don’t really know how to define yourself) — and it’s better than nothing, but…
You're choosing from someone else's vocabulary to describe something that only exists in you.
I recently ran a Brand Voice Finder Session with a founder who's been writing for years. Guy had real traction and knows his stuff. And when I asked him at the start of the call to define his voice, he said:
"I've gotten AI to pretty much sound like me, but it’s mostly because it pulls it from my old content. I just sorta feel like I backed my way into it — but I don't know how to define it."
And this right there is a problem.
Because when you don’t know what makes your voice unique, you have no way to protect it.
And three generic adjectives ain't gonna cut it.
-----
Why It's Hard to Define Your Own Brand Voice
Look, when it comes to describing your voice, the parts that make it yours don't feel distinctive to you. They just feel normal because they're how you've always talked.
The rhythm you fall into, the way you explain things, the strange analogies or humor you use… The way you add a self-deprecating joke right after you say something smart… those are the things you don’t realize are rare.
Sure, there are a handful of words you'd never use unless you want to send a signal that you were kidnapped and need help, but…
You're too fluent in your usual language to notice what's different about it.
You can't document something you can't see
It's like trying to smell your own house. You can't. It's just you.
-----
Can AI Create Your Brand Voice Guide?
OK, the fact is…
AI is getting relatively good at picking up surface-level patterns. Feed it enough of your writing and it'll mirror your sentence length, your vocabulary, and your general energy as well as any junior copywriter can. And it can approximate your style.
What it can't do is tell you which parts of your style are deliberate and why you chose them. And it doesn't know what you chose them over.
And unless you seriously think about these things, neither can you.
AI can copy what it sees — but it doesn’t know what you’re intentionally skipping
So what ends up in a AI brand voice guide is its generic default settings of: "Friendly.” “Casual.” "Human."
There are 8.2 billion humans on the planet. Pick one.
General adjectives don’t mean bupkis. And neither does an archetype.
Ya gotta find the weird, specific, unnatural-to-others quirks and details that only show up in your writing — and ya gotta get ‘em down on paper. Those are the things AI can actually use. Those are the things a writer can follow and repeat.
Rather than AI defaulting to itself, it needs to default to you.
(The way AI keeps introducing things with weird tags like: “And here’s the part I never saw coming…” Yeah, no. Just say it the way you’ve always said it.
AI doesn't sound better. It just sounds different. And it's not fooling anybody.)
If something feels off, don’t just accept it and assume it’s better. Fix it to sound like you, then think about why you’d say it differently.
(I broke down the six things AI strips out — and how to put them back in this blog post here: How to humanize AI content)
That’s the stuff DIY models skip. Heck, most agencies skip it too! There’s no deeper thinking.
-----
What Should A Good Brand Voice Guide Include?
When I create a guide, I break every voice into three layers: vocabulary (the words you use and avoid), tone (the emotion behind them), and cadence (the rhythm of your writing). A useful guide, at minimum, documents all three.
Vocabulary
- Common words and phrases: your signature sayings and “ism’s”
- No-no words: the off-limits language that you'd never say and give you the ick
- Contraction and slang rules: the boundaries to your casualness and when each shows up
Tone
- Emotional range: which emotions show up and when, and with what caliber
- Relationship to the reader: what’s your role in their life and where do you stand with them?
- Vulnerability and confidence: how much of yourself do you share and what approach do you use when doing so?
Cadence
- Sentence rhythm: the length and flow of your writing, and how you build to a point
- Structural habits: when, where, and how you emphasize key points
- Context shifts: how your sentences change from opening to CTA, or channel to channel
And the reasoning across all three
- Why you made each choice: and what you chose it over
Your guide should also include examples, plus your grammar and formatting preferences. Things like punctuation, capitalization, Oxford comma stance, and general house rules to keep your style consistent… but that’s not really your voice. Your voice is way more nuanced.
Because think about the difference between:
Playful
And:
Use direct-address humor right before saying something uncomfortable to ease people into the situation. Break the fourth wall and address the uneasiness with a movie quote from a popular comedy released between 1984-2006. If using a GIF, it should feature at least one male.
See the difference? Those constraints swap it from a general idea into a specific instruction.
| What most guides say | What a useful guide says | Why it matters |
| Conversational | Use contractions and PG-13 level slang early in the piece. Shift to full, grammatically correct phrasing near the CTA. Talk to the reader directly and break into parenthetical asides to express your inner monologue (because it’s dark in there) ← like that. | Shows that casual tones have a range, and where they change during the conversation |
| Authentic | Never, ever, ever manufacture fake feelings, fake stories, fake quotes, or testimonials under any circumstances. If you can’t find my exact language on something, leave a blank placeholder for me to fill in on my own. | Draws a hard line and tells AI and writers what to do instead of guessing |
| Witty | Use wordplay, puns, and alliterations for headlines and closing points. Keep explanations and instructions plain. | Says where the wit goes and where it should never get in the way |
That middle column is from my guide, BTW.
And so help me if you use the wrong humor type or try to work in something from Star Wars Episodes 1-3…
(shwoooom)
-----
The Reasoning Matters More Than the Rules
The reasoning behind your voice only surfaces when someone outside your head is watching how you think and asks questions. They press you on the exact moments to dig for the rationale and make you really think about things.
- Why did you choose one word over the other?
- The reason might be more important than the actual word itself and be part of a pattern
- What does that word remind you of?
- Because I bet it applies to something deeper
- Which words triggered an emotional response?
- And was the emotion positive or negative?
That's the stuff a template can't do.
A template doesn't push back. It doesn't notice what you mentally avoided and which word choices you nixed before you picked what you picked. It doesn't see the juxtaposition between "lighthearted" and "deep feeling" and know why those apparent contradictions are the whole damn point of the piece.
And a template doesn't make you realize that you've scrolled past 63 perfectly acceptable GIFs that didn't feel right because they were either from shows you didn't watch or featured women, but you're a dude and that matters. (Me again.)
Because maybe you’re like my client who describes his brand voice as "writing about serious things in a very non-serious way. I use myself as the joke, but never in a way that erodes my authority on the topic.”
That's not something you’d think to write in your own guide, but once someone hears it, they nod so hard their hat falls off.
It’s one thing to see the patterns — it’s something else entirely to know the reasons why they exist.
“Knocking myself down a peg keeps me relatable to the audience. I never want to position myself above them except on the one topic I’m talking about. I may be the one standing in front of the room, but I probably have mustard on my shirt.”
These elements are deeply personal. They don’t just describe what your style is, but why it matters. Once we know it, we know how to apply it.
Do you see how this is different from “use occasional humor”?
THIS is what a great guide needs.
-----
How Specific Should a Brand Voice Guide Be?
The genius of a strong voice guide is extreme specificity.
Not just words like "conversational" — but how conversational. We need the details like, do you say:
- Gotta get ‘em
- Got to get ‘em
- Gotta get them
- You’ve got to get them
- You have to get them
Or maybe you wouldn’t tell anybody that they’ve “got” to do something at all. (Who are you to know what other people need?)
And which version do you choose in what situation? (This is where content examples come in.)
These details matter because…
The goal of the guide isn’t to make you sound human. The goal is to make you sound like YOU.
(See how I repeated “The goal” in that last sentence and didn't switch to “It's”? I tried it but it violates the contraction rule from the table above.)
The specificity helps you know exactly what’s off and why… and how to fix it.
Maybe we’re using humor to get people to laugh. Maybe we’re using it as a persuasion tool. Or maybe we’re using it as a shield to diminish our authority to sound more relatable. Or maybe we don't use it at all.
And is it funny or witty? Or surreal? Or drier than a gin martini in the Mojave desert?
Those details matter more than you think if you want your voice to be consistent.
Saying you’re genuine or authentic doesn’t mean jack if you don't know what you’re being genuine or authentic to. And to find that, you’ll need to write it down as a reference for anyone creating your content.
This level of detail is almost impossible to find on your own — because you probably don't think it's important. You have no idea what actually makes you different because it’s your default programming. To you, it's just your everyday.
And that’s what makes it beautiful.
But when you’re asked to document it using someone else’s words from a dropdown list, you lose that.
-----
A great guide isn't one you fill out. It's one you build from within.
That's exactly what a Brand Voice Finder Session does. In two hours, we find the specific qualities that make your voice yours — all the traits and quirks and weird tendencies that you don't even know are weird — and we have a conversation about them.
Ultimately, it’s not so much the words you choose, but the way you think and talk about them.
That’s the good stuff.
The adjectives are just the starter. The magic that comes out are details about how you think. This is the stuff we capture — the heart.
The why behind the words. The reason for the rhythm. And the cognition for the conjunctions.
From there, you walk away with something you can use for yourself, hand to any writer, or plug into any AI to continue building as you. You set new defaults and have something to protect.
Because if you can't explain your own voice in detail… How will anyone else?
See how a Brand Voice Finder Session works
Justin Blackman is a brand voice expert who helps founders, brands, and entrepreneurs define, document, and systematize the voice that makes their brand impossible to mistake for anyone else's.
Oh, and if you're new around here, I talk a lot about brand voice. If you dig this kinda stuff, you should totes get my emails.
