# Verbal Identity

> Verbal Identity

- Skill: `everyinc/verbal-identity` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add everyinc/verbal-identity`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/everyinc/verbal-identity/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: everyinc (https://skillmd.com/u/everyinc)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/everyinc/verbal-identity

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# Verbal Identity

Turn an approved strategic foundation and brand character into a distinctive, repeatable
verbal system. This skill defines how the brand thinks, speaks, adapts, and edits across
surfaces. It precedes art direction.

## When to invoke

- When an approved brand strategy needs archetype, personality, and tone expressed in language
- When building the verbal identity section of a brand book
- When a brand voice is vague, inconsistent, generic, or built from adjectives alone
- When channel writers need shared rules without flattening every surface into one tone
- When the compound-brand workflow reaches the verbal identity phase

## Inputs

Require the approved strategic foundation, brand character, audience language, evidence
corpus, product experience, existing writing, and anti-examples. For an existing brand,
use real emails, articles, product copy, sales material, and high-performing messages as
evidence. Examples reveal behavior; they do not become templates.

## Territory process

Load `references/territory-workflow.md`. Present no more than two territories:

1. A functional-led territory emphasizing what the brand helps people do
2. An emotional-led territory emphasizing how the brand changes identity, feeling, or relationship

Both territories must express the same strategy. Each includes a governing idea, voice
traits, tonal range, signature moves, vocabulary, sample lines, risks, and surface tests.
Recommend one and require a human lock.

## Build the system

Load `references/verbal-system.md`. Codify the approved direction as behavior rather than
an adjective pile. Define:

- Voice in one line
- Three or four traits with operational meaning
- Philosophy and point of view
- Default writing behavior
- Tone modes and when each applies
- Surface registers
- Vocabulary and cadence
- Signature moves used sparingly
- We are / we are not distinctions
- Examples and anti-examples
- Editorial gates

## Validation

Test the system on at least four unlike surfaces: a homepage opening, product or offer
copy, an email, and a social or editorial passage. A useful verbal identity creates family
resemblance without making every output sound identical.

## Dependencies

- `foundation/marketing-os`
- `strategy/compound-brand`
- `marketing-science/archetyping`
- `craft/copywriting`
- `craft/editing`
- `brand-voice/{relevant brand}` when revising an existing brand

## Quick checklist

- [ ] Strategic foundation and character were approved first
- [ ] Real brand and customer language informed the work
- [ ] One functional-led and one emotional-led territory were presented
- [ ] The human locked a direction before codification
- [ ] Traits are behavioral and specific
- [ ] Tone changes by context without changing the core voice
- [ ] Surface tests show range and family resemblance
- [ ] Generic AI phrasing and canned constructions are removed