ericrisco Brand Voice — How the Brand Sounds
You own the reusable voice-and-tone system: 3–5 personality traits → concrete linguistic rules → a position on the four tone dimensions → a use/avoid word bank → a tone-by-context matrix → a paste-into-the-prompt voice-DNA block. The output is a persisted document, never a finished piece of copy.
The line: brand-voice owns the reusable definition of how the brand sounds. The moment you write one finished piece against it, that is a copywriting skill — page hero/value prop/CTA is landing-copy; launch emails and channel posts are ../marketing/SKILL.md; blog and article systems are content-engine, article-writing, newsletter, social-publisher; an investor narrative is ../pitch-deck/SKILL.md; a live customer ticket is customer-support (it consumes this guide, it does not author it). The way the brand looks — logo, color, type, design tokens — is brand-identity, and layout/motion is ../design/SKILL.md.
Voice vs. tone (the load-bearing distinction)
Voice is constant; tone flexes by context. Voice is the brand's fixed personality across everything it writes. Tone is the local adjustment for the reader's emotional state and the topic's sensitivity. A frustrated user does not want a joke; a celebration screen does not read like a financial disclosure — yet both are the same voice. (Nielsen Norman Group, "The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice," pub. 2016-07-17, updated 2023-08-16.)
Why it matters: you author one voice and apply many tones. Conflate them and you get a guide that says "be playful" on a fraud-alert page — unusable. The guide locks voice once and tabulates tone per context (Step 5).
Why bother at all: consistent brand presentation correlates with revenue uplift — ~23% average, up to ~33% at the upper range across 1,800 brands in 14 industries (Lucidpress/Marq, "State of Brand Consistency"). Treat it as calibration for the effort, not a causal promise — it is a correlational study.
The flow (six steps)
1 Traits (3–5) → 2 Rules (Bad→Good) → 3 Four dimensions (ratios)
→ 4 Word bank (use/ban) → 5 Tone-by-context matrix
→ 6 AI voice-DNA block → persist + audit
Step 1 — Traits (pick 3–5)
Distill the brand to 3–5 adjectives. Fewer than 3 is not a personality; more than 5 is unmemorable and nobody applies them. (Sprout Social brand-voice guide; Inkbot Design brand-voice chart.)
Reject brand-neutral adjectives. If a competitor would never claim the opposite, the word is filler and says nothing. "Innovative," "passionate," "customer-focused," "cutting-edge" — no brand claims "stagnant" or "indifferent," so these traits exclude nothing.
Each trait gets a one-line this means / this does not mean, so it is testable:
Plain-spoken
this means: we say "we fixed it" — short Anglo-Saxon words, no hedging
this does NOT mean: dumbed-down or curt; we still explain the why
Quietly confident
this means: we state the benefit and stop; no exclamation marks
this does NOT mean: arrogant, or making claims we can't back with proof
Step 2 — Rules (each trait → 2–3 linguistic rules)
Vague directives fail, especially for an LLM: "be professional" produces nothing reproducible. Voice only transfers when quantified into linguistic rules. (Search Engine Land, "How to train in-house LLMs on brand voice," 2025; Fishtank, "Train Generative AI to Speak in Your Brand Voice," 2025.)
Per trait, write 2–3 rules across these levers — person, sentence-length ceiling, active vs. passive, contractions, jargon policy — and show one Bad→Good rewrite per cluster:
Trait: Plain-spoken
R1 Active voice. Subject does the verb.
R2 Sentence ceiling ~20 words; break anything longer.
R3 Jargon only when defined in-line on first use.
Bad : "Optimal outcomes are facilitated through the leveraging of our
platform's robust capabilities." (passive, 12-word abstraction, banned words)
Good: "Our platform does the heavy lifting so your team ships faster."
Trait: Quietly confident
R1 First person plural ("we"), second person for the reader ("you").
R2 Use contractions ("we're", "you'll") — formal-but-human, not stiff.
R3 Zero exclamation marks; the claim carries the energy.
Bad : "We are SO excited to announce our amazing new feature!!!"
Good: "New: branch previews ship with every PR. No config."
Step 3 — Plot the four dimensions (decision table)
Tone of voice is measurable on four sliding scales, not switches. (Nielsen Norman Group, same article.) Pick a position on each as a ratio, not "somewhere in the middle" — a ratio forces a defensible choice. (Sprinklr / Bigeye brand-voice frameworks, 2025.) A financial brand might run 80/20 formal; a fitness app 30/70 serious-vs-playful.
This branches per brand, so the table earns its place:
| Dimension | Position (ratio) | Why this brand sits here |
|---|---|---|
| Formal ↔ Casual | 65 / 35 casual | Buyers are technical and busy; warmth without slang. |
| Serious ↔ Funny | 80 / 20 serious | We handle money/data; humor only in low-stakes moments. |
| Respectful ↔ Irreverent | 70 / 30 respectful | We challenge category clichés, never the reader. |
| Matter-of-fact ↔ Enthusiastic | 60 / 40 matter-of-fact | Proof over hype; energy lives in verbs, not adjectives. |
Fill the ratios from the traits, not from taste. If a ratio contradicts a trait, one of them is wrong — reconcile before moving on.
Step 4 — Word bank
Two lists. Power words and a ban list. (Oxford College of Marketing, "AI Brand Voice Guidelines," 2025-08-04.)
- Power words (15–20): the vocabulary the brand leans on, derived from the traits. "Plain-spoken + confident" → ship, fix, build, fast, clear, done, plain, real, works. Not a thesaurus dump — words a human would recognize as this brand.
- Ban list (the drift killer): corporate filler and AI tells. This list is what stops off-brand drift and the generated-by-a-bot smell. Starter set:
leverage,seamless,elevate,delve,robust,unlock,game-changer,in today's fast-paced world,revolutionize,synergy,cutting-edge,best-in-class. Add brand-specific bans (e.g. never say "users," say "teams").
The full starter ban list and the method for deriving power words from traits live in references/word-bank.md.
Step 5 — Tone-by-context matrix
Voice stays fixed (the row content proves it); tone shifts per context. Build the matrix so writers and the LLM know which dial to turn where:
| Context | Voice (constant) | Tone shift | Example line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | plain-spoken, confident | warm, encouraging | "You're in. Let's connect your first repo." |
| Error / failure | plain-spoken, confident | plain, reassuring, zero humor | "That upload failed. Your data is safe — try again." |
| Success / celebration | plain-spoken, confident | a little warmth, still no hype | "Done. Your preview is live." |
| Billing / account | plain-spoken, confident | precise, calm, no jokes | "Your plan renews June 30. Cancel anytime, no fees." |
| Legal / security notice | plain-spoken, confident | formal, exact, literal | "We encrypt data in transit and at rest. See our DPA." |
The voice column never changes line to line — that is the whole point. Only the tone column moves.
Step 6 — The AI voice-DNA block
Assemble the guide into one paste-into-a-system-prompt block so an LLM (or any writer) reproduces the brand. Concrete rules + lexicon, never adjectives alone:
VOICE DNA — <brand>
Traits: plain-spoken, quietly confident, technical-but-human.
Rules: active voice; sentences <=20 words; use contractions; first person
plural "we", reader as "you"; no exclamation marks; jargon only if defined.
Dimensions: 65/35 casual, 80/20 serious, 70/30 respectful, 60/40 matter-of-fact.
Use: ship, fix, build, fast, clear, real, works, plain.
Never use: leverage, seamless, elevate, delve, robust, unlock, game-changer,
"in today's fast-paced world", revolutionize, synergy, best-in-class.
Tone by context: error=plain+reassuring, no humor;
success=light warmth, no hype; billing=precise+calm; legal=formal+exact.
Persist it. Write the compiled guide under 02-DOCS/wiki/brand/voice-guide.md and the voice-DNA block beside it, per the harness Karpathy-wiki convention (compiled brand articles under 02-DOCS/wiki/brand/, raw user inputs under 02-DOCS/raw/brand/). The persisted file is an OKF v0.1 wiki article: open it with YAML frontmatter carrying a non-empty type: (use type: brand-voice) — see the frontmatter block in references/voice-guide-template.md, which is also the fill-in-the-blanks skeleton for the whole guide (traits → rules → 4-D ratios → word bank → context matrix → voice-DNA block) with one fully worked mini-example brand. This is the exact study marketing, landing-copy, and content-engine read to ground their copy. A guide in a slide deck is invisible to them.
Auditing for drift
To score a sample against the guide, run three passes:
- Ban scan — does the sample use any banned word? Each hit is a drift point.
- Rule check — passive voice, sentences over the ceiling, exclamation marks, undefined jargon. Count violations.
- Trait test — read it cold: which traits surface? If "plain-spoken + confident" reads as "hypey + vague," it is off-brand regardless of word count.
Off-brand reads like everyone else: abstract nouns, hedged claims, AI tells, energy faked with punctuation instead of verbs. The fix is always a rewrite toward a rule, never "make it pop."
Anti-patterns
| Anti-pattern | Why it fails | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Traits = "innovative, passionate, customer-focused" | No competitor claims the opposite; excludes nothing | Pick traits a rival would reject; add this-means/this-does-not-mean |
| "Be professional" as the only guidance | An LLM and a junior writer can't reproduce an adjective | Quantify into rules (person, length, voice, jargon) + a Bad→Good |
| Tone "somewhere in the middle" on every axis | Vague middle = no decision = generic output | Commit to a ratio (80/20) and justify it from a trait |
| Voice changes per channel | Channel-by-channel voices = no recognizable brand | Voice fixed; tone flexes per context (Step 5) |
| No ban list | Drift and AI tells creep in unchecked | The ban list is the drift killer — ship it first |
| Guide lives in a deck or someone's head | Downstream skills and LLMs can't read it | Persist machine-readable under 02-DOCS/wiki/brand/ |
| Writing the actual landing/email/article | That is a finished piece, not the definition | Stop; hand to landing-copy / marketing / content-engine |
Verify
scripts/verify.sh <guide.md> is a read-only structural linter for a produced voice guide: it checks the required sections are present (traits, rules with Bad→Good, four-dimension ratios, a non-empty ban list, context matrix, voice-DNA block), flags a trait count outside 3–5, warns on brand-neutral filler used as a trait, and greps the guide's own prose for words it lists in its own ban list (self-consistency). Empty or clean input exits 0 — no false failure.