Crafting a brand voice that resonates

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.” - Maya Angelou

Your voice is one of the most powerful parts of your personality. Formed over a lifetime of experiences and comprised of nuanced tone, diction, pitch, and pace, your voice encompasses your singularity, your roots, and aspirations. It is deeply personal, and it's what makes you human.

That’s why brands need to honor voice as core to their ability to connect. We’re often surprised to see that, for so many brands, while their voice has been considered and loosely defined, there’s no real strategy for executing that voice.

Why? Because strategy tends to wrap up at the highest level. Often, because writers aren’t crafting the strategy, and senior leadership doesn’t understand what it actually takes to execute brand voice strategy. So those in charge of bringing the voice to life? They’re left with a dead strategy and no tools for implementation.

What does it look like to craft an effective tone of voice strategy? Here are the nonnegotiables:

• Voice and Tone Audit: This fundamental first step identifies areas of inconsistency and opportunity and lays out the path for strategic work.
• Voice Traits: 3 to 5 words that express the style and persona of your brand’s voice, defined with supporting statements outlining the tonal nuances of each trait. There are a million ways to be casual, conversational, and clever—you’ve got to establish nuance within each trait for your voice to sound ownable and unique.
• Voice Position: Like a brand positioning statement, but for your brand voice. A succinct paragraph defining the qualities of your brand’s voice, how it sounds, how it seeks to connect to your audience, and how your audience feels after interacting with your voice.
• SEO Guidelines: SEO is the death knell of writerly craft and tonality. Smart SEO guidelines show how to elegantly weave keywords into your copywriting so you don’t deaden your tone of voice.
• By-Channel Guidelines: Every channel is different! A good voice strategy is grounded in guidelines for understanding the unique culture of each channel, listening, and adapting copy within. This should include best practices for messaging across all brand channels and touchpoints—including the consumer mindset and intent for each asset, how to flex tonality, integrating SEO, and functional information like character counts—with examples.

One of our guiding principles is that there is no ingenuity in mimicry. If your brand voice isn’t ownable and fully defined, it shows. When you wing it, mimicry’s all you’ve got left, and that guarantees a brand voice that is inconsistent, unrelatable, and ineffective. Is your tone of voice strategy missing the elements that make it executable?

Let’s craft your brand voice

Truth Serum: Hannah Samendinger

Attorney Hannah Samendinger is known for jumping in regularly with friendly, accessible, compassionate counsel amidst all the wildness of owning and growing a creative business. She drops in to take some Truth Serum and talk about representing creatives, language transparency with clients, the generational shift in how lawyers are communicating, the general health of Intellectual Property, AI and the law, and great horror movies. ?

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Antonym in synonym: Our collective creative loves

Our Truth Serum guest Hannah Samendinger recommended the New York Review of Architecture, and we've been inhaling it. “Resisting prestigious mediocrity since 2019," the magazine features quick hits and long-form takes on NYC landmarks and boondoggles. From the Port Authority Bus Terminal to Little Island, Brooklyn brownstones to Rikers Island, the writing is by turns incisive, witty, heartbreaking, and informative.

A recent exhibition at the Grolier Club, one of North America’s oldest bibliographic societies, was "put together by a bunch of absolute nerds." That's a beautiful compliment for Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, a collection of the greatest non-existent works in all of literature, from The Songs of the Jabberwock to Sylvia Plath's lost memoir. It was an odd, wistful, and charmingly speculative exhibit you have to see to believe. We hope it gets an encore.

Keeping with the theme of printed joy, still-life painter Fern Apfel is drawn to all things paper in her new exhibition Letters Home. From playing cards to old stamps to pages of well-worn books, her muses celebrate the tactile. Apfel’s appreciation of memory and nostalgia eschew wistfulness in favor of hope and love. Letters Home is, you guessed correctly, focused on the beauty in old letters and how they act as portals to loved ones, parents, old friends, and our old selves.

Just outside New York City, wild wolves lie in wait. For 25 years, the Wolf Conservation Center in Westchester County has worked to return critically endangered Red Wolves and Mexican Gray Wolves to their natural habitat. The regular tours are absolutely worth a trip upstate one weekend, and you can join the howls overnight in the Sleeping With Wolvesexperience, which runs $150 for one person in a tent (on the other side of the fence). Or, check in every once in a while via the live webcams.

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