The thickest brand voice guideline document I have ever held in my hands was eighty-two pages. It had a glossary. It had a do-and-don’t matrix with thirty rows. It had a flowchart, which I did not know was possible for a creative deliverable. The brand the document described could not write a tweet that didn’t sound like every other tweet in its category. The two things were not unrelated.
Here is the take, stated as plainly as I can: if your brand voice requires a document to be reproduced, you do not have a brand voice. You have a brand-voice committee disguised as a guideline.
§ 01 — What a voice actually is
A voice is a stable point of view. You can recognize it in two sentences. You can recognize it if you read it on a billboard, in a customer support email, or in an Instagram caption written at 11 PM by a junior on the social team. The recognition is the entire point. The voice is the asset. Everything else — the campaign, the photoshoot, the tagline — is downstream of whether the voice exists.
Voices in the wild that everyone reading this can recognize without looking up: Wendy’s social, which has been carried for years by a small team and an editor with a sharp ear, not a PDF. Liquid Death, whose entire brand is a single committed bit run by founders who refuse to soften it. Oatly’s mid-2010s packaging copy, which was written by Toni Petersson’s small in-house team and reads like a personal essay every time. Mailchimp circa 2014, when Kate Kiefer Lee was the voice and the entire support center sounded like one slightly weird friend. Innocent Drinks in the UK, two decades of yogurt-pot copy you can identify blindfolded. RXBAR’s “No B.S.” era. The early Apple “Think Different” voice, two decades old and still distinct. None of these brands’ voices live in a document. They live in a tone, a worldview, and — crucially — a small number of people who actually carry the voice in their heads and write it without thinking.
When a voice exists, you don’t need a guideline. The team just writes. The output is recognizable because the people producing it share a worldview that’s been calibrated by hiring, by feedback, and by working in close proximity to a few opinionated humans who set the standard. The document, if there is one, fits on a page. Sometimes on a Post-it.
§ 02 — Why guideline docs get thick
Guideline docs get thick when nobody on the team actually carries the voice. They get thick because the voice is being assembled in real time, by committee, every time someone has to write a caption. The document is a workaround for the absence of taste.
The counter-examples write themselves. Every large bank’s brand voice document is a hundred-plus pages, and you cannot tell Chase’s tone from Wells Fargo’s from Citi’s by reading three lines of their copy. Every telco I have ever worked adjacent to has a vault of brand-voice PDFs, and the resulting ads sound like they were focus-grouped into beige paste. The cosmetics conglomerates — same pattern. The voice does not survive contact with the document. The document is in fact where the voice goes to die, suffocated under qualifications and exceptions and committee-edited examples. I worked at a place — fine, several places — where the brand voice guidelines had grown into a small library. Different sub-brands had their own appendices. There were rules about Oxford commas that had been debated in three separate Slack threads. The document had been edited so many times that no single person on the team could tell you what the voice actually was; they could only tell you what it was not allowed to be, with references to the relevant section of the PDF.
The output was, predictably, beige. Every caption sounded like it had been written by a committee, because it had been. The team was not bad — the writers on it were, individually, excellent. The document was the problem. It had replaced taste with compliance, and compliance is, on net, the death of a voice. Compliance writes the average. Average is what every other brand in the category sounds like.
§ 03 — The objection
I know the objection. The objection goes: “but we’re a big brand. We have hundreds of writers across agencies and freelancers and contractors. We can’t have everything in someone’s head. We need a system.”
Yes. Of course. I am not arguing against governance. I am arguing against the conflation of governance with voice.
Governance is the part of brand identity that says where the logo goes, what the palette is, what the typography is, which spellings are American versus British, whether you use serial commas, what trademarked terms must be capitalized. Governance is checklist-friendly and rules-based, because the things it governs are deterministic. A logo has a position. A color has a hex code. These things are knowable.
Voice is not knowable in that way. Voice is a worldview. It is taste. You cannot rules-engine taste into a freelancer’s brain by handing them a sixty-page PDF. You can only show them five hundred examples and have someone with the worldview edit their first ten attempts brutally. That is how voice transfers. It transfers by apprenticeship, not by documentation.
§ 04 — The one page that works
The guideline doc that actually transfers voice is one page. Possibly two. It contains, in order:
- One sentence about what the brand believes about the world. Not what it sells. What it believes. If you cannot finish the sentence “We believe that…” in fewer than fifteen words, the voice does not yet exist.
- Three to five short examples of the voice in the wild. Real sentences. Not “use active verbs.” Actual lines the brand has said. Examples train pattern recognition; rules don’t.
- Three to five short examples of what the voice is not. Same format. Real counter-examples. These do more work than any rule ever has.
- The name and Slack handle of the person who edits voice questions. One person. Not a committee. The bottleneck is the feature.
That is the document. If your current document is longer than that, the additional pages are not transferring voice — they are documenting the fact that the voice does not transfer.
§ 05 — The take
The brands that have a voice you can recognize across every surface have, somewhere in the building, a small number of humans who write the voice without thinking about it. They have probably written all of the early examples themselves. They have probably edited every junior writer’s first draft. They have probably been told, at some point, that this is “not scalable.” It scales fine. It scales the way taste always has — by apprenticeship.
The brands that have an eighty-page guideline doc have nobody in the building who can carry the voice. They have, in the place where the voice should be, a PDF. The PDF was expensive. The PDF will not save them.
Cormac McCarthy did not have a brand voice guideline doc. He had a worldview about what punctuation was for, and he applied it consistently for sixty years. You knew it was him after one paragraph. That is what a voice is. Anything more complicated than that is governance pretending to be creative direction.
If you can summarize your brand voice on a Post-it, you have one. If you need a PDF, you have a meeting that has not yet ended.