From Writer to Voice Strategist: Understanding the Principles of Brand Voice

I started out as a freelance copywriter. You know the type. The person you’d email at 5 PM with a tight deadline, and somehow the copy would land in your inbox by morning. I loved the craft. Loved the challenge of finding exactly the right words.

For a while, that was enough.

Then came 2015. And together with my partner we landed a bigger client. Then another. Suddenly we weren’t just writing articles and ad copy anymore.

We were being asked into brand workshops, sitting in conference rooms with marketing directors and creative teams. And that’s when we started noticing a pattern that would completely reshape what we thought our agency was supposed to be.

The Brand Book Problem

Every single company I worked with had one. A brand book. Beautiful, expensive, meticulously designed. Sixty, seventy, eighty pages sometimes. But here’s what struck me: they were almost entirely about the visual stuff.

Logo specifications. Color palettes. Typography guidelines. The geometry of how the logo should sit on a business card. It was all there, polished and precise.

Then came the section on voice. Typically half a page. Maybe a full page if the agency that created the book was feeling generous.

“We are innovative, trustworthy, and forward-thinking,” it would say. Three adjectives. Maybe four. Sometimes a quick note about tone: “We speak to professionals, but we’re not stuffy.”

And then… nothing. Silence. The end.

I watched marketing directors stare at those guidelines. I could see the moment the panic set in.

Because now they had to take those three adjectives and apply them across their website, their social media, their internal communications, their customer support emails, their packaging copy, their LinkedIn posts, their press releases, their error messages.

They had to do it in different languages. They had to make it work for customers, for partners, for their own team.

Nobody had any idea how.

The Moment Everything Changed

One afternoon, a frustrated CMO from a tech company called us. They’d just received their brand book from a well-known agency, thousands of euros spent, very prestigious firm. But their marketing team was paralyzed.

They had these vague principles but no framework. How do you sound innovative and trustworthy when you’re writing a privacy policy? How do you be forward-thinking when you’re explaining a product feature to someone who’s never used your software before? How do you maintain the same voice across 30 different touchpoints when every single one has different requirements?

She asked if we could help. Not just write a few pieces. Help them actually understand and apply their voice.

That’s when I stopped being just a copywriter.

We spent the next three months with her team. We didn’t write new copy. Not yet. Instead, we mapped out exactly how the brand actually showed up across all those channels.

We audited real examples. We noticed patterns. We started asking deeper questions: What does innovative actually sound like in a technical context versus a social media context? Where does trustworthy show up as reassurance, and where does it show up as honesty? How do you be forward-thinking without sounding arrogant or out-of-touch?

And then we created something completely different from the brand book they’d received. We built a comprehensive framework that showed them, with precision and practical examples, how to apply their voice to every single situation they’d ever encounter.

The results were remarkable. Their marketing director told us later that it was the first time they’d actually used their brand guidelines instead of letting them gather dust on a shared drive.

We realized we’d accidentally stumbled onto something. Something bigger than copywriting. Something companies actually desperately needed.

The Principles We Discovered

Over the next few years, as we transformed from a copywriting agency into a communications consulting firm, we worked with dozens of companies. Tech startups and insurance companies, nonprofits and luxury brands, B2B software and direct-to-consumer e-commerce.

Every client was different. Every brand voice we helped develop was unique.

But underneath all that variety, we discovered that certain principles remained constant. These weren’t rules about how a brand should sound. They were truths about how voice actually works. Regardless of industry, size, or market.

1. Your voice exists whether you intentionally create it or not

Here’s something that surprised a lot of our clients: you don’t have a choice about whether you have a brand voice. You already have one.

It’s happening right now, in every email your company sends, every chat message your customer support team writes, every line on your website. The only choice you actually have is whether that voice is intentional or accidental.

Most companies, we discovered, were operating accidentally. They sounded different on Instagram than they did in their customer newsletters. They sounded professional on their homepage but confused in their error messages. Warm in their marketing emails but cold in their onboarding.

That inconsistency felt like betrayal. People would connect with the brand in one place, then feel like they’d been sold a lie in another. The first question we always asked wasn’t “what should you sound like?” It was “what are you already sounding like — and is it working?“

2. Personality matters more than values

This was counterintuitive to almost everyone we worked with. We’d sit in rooms full of smart, thoughtful people who’d spent weeks defining their brand values. Integrity. Innovation. Reliability. Customer-first thinking.

But then we’d ask: “Okay, who else is reliable? And who else has integrity?” Their competitors. Their competitors’ competitors. Basically everyone, if they’re smart about their messaging.

The problem isn’t that those values aren’t real or important. The problem is that they don’t tell you how to sound. Two companies can both be reliable, but one sounds like your accountant and the other sounds like your best friend.

What actually creates distinction — what makes people recognize you and want to engage with you is personality. Not what you believe in.

Think, how you come across as a human entity. Are you naturally curious? Wry? Earnest? Do you explain things patiently or with a sense of humor? Do you lean into formality or do you break conventions?

When we started building voice frameworks, we stopped asking clients “what are your values?” We started asking “if your brand was a person I met at a party, what kind of person would that be?”

The answers changed everything.

3. You can’t fake it — your voice has to be grounded in who you actually are

This was the hardest principle to enforce, because ambition is beautiful, and we understood the impulse.

Occasionally we’d work with a company that didn’t particularly like themselves. They wanted their voice to be “innovative” and “bold” and “playful”. But the actual organization was conventional, risk-averse, and formal. They wanted to become a different kind of company, and they hoped that sounding different would make it happen.

It never worked.

What we learned was painful but important: you can’t fake your way into a voice.

The moment people experience the gap between how you sound and what they actually experience with your brand, the whole thing collapses. You get called out. Not necessarily aggressively, sometimes it’s just quiet. People just stop trusting.

So we developed a different approach. We’d help companies get really honest about who they were.

The good parts and the complicated parts. And then we’d help them articulate a voice that was authentic to that reality, while sometimes pointing toward where they were genuinely trying to grow.

That authenticity became the foundation everything else was built on.

4. Your voice is yours, not your audience’s

One of the most liberating conversations we had with clients was about letting go of the idea that they needed to sound like their customers.

This came from copywriting tradition — “write to your audience, speak their language.” And that’s true for messaging. What you talk about should absolutely be responsive to what people need.

But how you sound? That’s different. That comes from you.

We’d see companies tie themselves in knots trying to imagine what their target demographic would sound like, then attempt to copy that tone. But audiences are diverse. They don’t all talk the same way.

And more importantly, people aren’t drawn to brands that are trying to be exactly like them. They’re drawn to brands that are confidently, unapologetically themselves. Even when those selves are different from the audience.

The brands that connected most powerfully with their customers weren’t the ones doing impressions. They were the ones with a clear, distinct personality.

5. Everyone has to be involved, but not everyone is a writer

This one caused practical headaches, but it was crucial.

If your voice only lives in your marketing department, you don’t actually have a voice. You have some nice copy.

A voice shows up in your error messages, your internal Slack channels, your contracts, your customer support tickets, the signs in your office bathroom. All the places that most people don’t think about as “brand communication.”

But all those places are brand communication. And if they’re inconsistent with the rest of how you present yourself, the whole illusion falls apart.

So we’d present these frameworks to entire organizations. Marketing teams, product teams, customer service, operations. Everyone got trained on the principles. Everyone understood the personality and the approach.

But (and this is important) we didn’t pretend that training someone on your brand voice would turn them into a brilliant writer. That’s not what voice work does. Voice work equips people who already know how to write well to write in a specific way. It doesn’t create writers. It channels them.

6. Consistency and context are the difference between a voice and a collection of nice writing

We’d look at portfolios of company communications and see genuinely beautiful copy. Clever social posts. Warm customer emails. Compelling blog articles. All well-written. But the brand still had no discernible voice.

Why? Because every piece was good in a different style. The social media team had their vibe, the email team had theirs, the blog had something else entirely. It wasn’t inconsistency exactly, each piece was excellent. But there was no coherence. No single point of view running through everything.

And then there was the context issue. A tone that’s perfect for a fintech startup’s TikTok might be completely wrong for their account security warnings.

What works for a luxury brand’s homepage might alienate the people reading their FAQ. A voice needs to stay true to itself while also being smart enough to adapt to different situations.

Our frameworks had to address both. How to stay recognizably you across many different channels. And how to sound like you even when the context demands something different.

Voice makes great copy easier, but it doesn’t write it for you

Working on voice, we had to gently disappoint a lot of people.

“Okay,” they’d say, looking at their new comprehensive voice guidelines. “So now all our copy will be amazing, right? We just follow these principles and good writing happens?” Not exactly.

Think of voice guidelines like choosing a style for a room. You can pick an aesthetic — modern minimalist, maximalist eclectic, art deco glamour, industrial chic. That choice constrains your options beautifully. It makes your decisions easier. When someone shows you a piece of furniture, you can immediately tell if it fits.

But choosing a style doesn’t mean the room decorates itself. You still have to buy the furniture. You still have to understand the space. You still have to make choices. That’s what voice does. It’s a framework that makes creating better, more consistent, more authentic content significantly easier. But it’s not a shortcut around the actual work of creating great content.

We were honest about this from day one. We’re not promising to eliminate the hard part of writing. We’re promising to make the hard part much more straightforward.

The best brand voices are the ones nobody consciously notices

Most of our clients wanted their voice to be striking. Memorable. Talked about. They’d point to brands famous for their distinctive tone. Think the funny tech companies, the cheeky consumer brands, the ones with personality that jumped off the page.

And yes, those brands are doing something right. But that’s not actually what brand voice is for.

Brand voice isn’t about being interesting for interestingness’s sake. It’s about creating connection. And real connection, the kind that builds loyalty and trust, it isn’t something people consciously analyze.

When you meet someone and instantly click with them, you’re not sitting there thinking “oh, I notice how they structure their sentences” or “their vocabulary choices are distinctive.” You’re just… connecting. You’re getting them. The conversation is easy.

That’s what a great brand voice does. It makes people feel like they understand you. It creates a window into what your brand is actually like, and that window is so clear that people stop looking at the glass and just look through it.

The goal isn’t to be noticed. The goal is to be understood.

Where We Landed

Our agency transformed completely. We stopped being writers-for-hire and became strategists. We built comprehensive frameworks tailored to individual companies. We created guidelines so detailed and practical that they actually got used, not filed away.

Every framework was unique. No two clients’ voice guidelines looked alike. But the principles underneath them were always the same. Those truths about how voice works, how people respond to authenticity, how consistency builds trust.

And honestly? That consistency in our thinking is what made the work scalable. We could take those principles and apply them to companies of any size, in any industry, speaking to any market.

Today, platforms like Writitude makes this work even better.

We can embed those principles directly into a company’s workflow. The guidelines don’t just sit in a document. They become active, working in real-time as people create content. They ensure consistency across channels automatically.

They make it possible for those guidelines to actually shape the work, rather than just describe it after the fact.

But the principles? Those haven’t changed.

They’re as true now as they were when we started figuring them out in that conference room with a frustrated CMO and a brand book that nobody knew how to use.

Because they’re not marketing principles. They’re principles about how human connection actually works. And those don’t really change, no matter what tools you use to apply them.