Why we need verbal culture not just guidelines

By Emily Penny

Brand voice is about how you embed language in your business. It’s your verbal culture, and it shows up in all written material – not just the big splash OOH campaign. It should ring true for YEARS, building ownership of signature phrases and ways of framing what you do, from naming through to micro copy.

Here’s how I think about it.

First of all, I use the term ‘brand voice’ instead of ‘tone of voice' because it encompasses this big picture perspective.

As with a person, your voice in the world is determined by more than tone or mood. It’s about WHAT you say as well as HOW you say it. It needs substance.

I’m used to seeing 'tone of voice' covered by a single page with three adjectives in 100+ pages of design guidelines. But that page is little use to anyone if it covers neither the prompts to help you intuitively ‘get it’ or the detailed rules for writing in style. It’s wide open to interpretation – and not in a good way, in a kind of vague-and-contradictory-riddle way.

We need to define the RELATIONSHIP you're building with your audience and how language supports that.

Just as with company culture, you can’t define a brand voice and walk away. The real work is in the embedding. It's about building both confidence and motivation.

That means co-creating the vision with the internal team – knowing who will champion the voice and how it will be managed.

Rules are helpful, workshops are better – sessions that involve listening and refining the toolkit live, getting people behind the strategy AND sharing concrete ways to keep the voice on track.

Brand voice isn't a sprint. It’s a way of working, role-modelled by your leadership team, and actively nurtured by your in-house writers or external partners often over years not weeks.

And no, no I'm not worried about AI taking my job, because this really isn't what AI does. But it's what we do every day.