Brand Voice.

I want to run a quick experiment with you. I am going to read you two pieces of copy. Both are from real brands. I am going to remove the logos, the colors, the fonts. Just the words. And I want you to see if you can guess who wrote them.

Here is the first one. "Wow no cow. We know, we know, you're wondering why a carton is talking to you. Honestly, we're wondering that too. Anyway: it's oat drink. Made from oats. Some people call it milk. We can't. (Lawyers.)"

Here is the second one. "We are engineering a new paradigm of enterprise infrastructure, delivering unprecedented performance at scale. Our platform empowers forward-thinking organizations to unlock value across their digital transformation journey."

You probably guessed the first one is Oatly. You could have guessed it even if you had never tasted their product, because the voice is that specific. Wry. Self-interrupting. Anti-corporate. Willing to break the fourth wall inside its own packaging copy. You cannot mistake Oatly for any other brand in the grocery aisle, and you cannot mistake their copy for anyone else's. The second sentence, on the other hand, could be literally any B2B software company in the world. You cannot tell the difference between that sentence and a hundred other sentences from a hundred other companies, because there is no difference.

That is what I want to talk about today.

The difference between a brand that has a voice and a brand that has a word count.

This is episode seven. Brand voice. The most overlooked, under-invested, and strategically important asset most companies will ever build. And if you do not build it on purpose, it gets built anyway, by committee, by default, by the loudest person in the room, and it will cost you.

Why voice matters

There is a famous study that Ann Handley, who wrote "Everybody Writes," likes to reference. If you removed the logos from the marketing materials of most B2B companies and asked their own employees to match the copy to the company, the employees would fail. The words are interchangeable. Which means the brand, as experienced through language, does not actually exist. It is a logo sitting on top of a pile of generic sentences.

Voice is the part of your brand that scales with your company. As you grow from fifty people to five hundred, you cannot personally touch every customer interaction. You cannot review every sales email, every support reply, every product release note, every social post, every landing page. What you can do is build a voice so clear and so well-documented that any writer in your company, or any freelancer, any agency, any new hire, can produce copy that sounds unmistakably like you.

Marty Neumeier in "The Brand Gap" describes a brand as "a gut feeling about a product, service, or company." Voice is one of the primary ways that gut feeling is transmitted.

The logo gets your attention. The voice earns your trust.

Voice versus tone

Before we go further, a quick definitional note. Voice and tone are not the same thing, and a lot of companies conflate them.

Voice is the fixed personality of your brand. It does not change. Mailchimp sounds like Mailchimp whether they are announcing a new feature or dealing with an outage.

Tone is how that voice modulates in different situations. Even a warm, funny brand like Mailchimp will sound more measured when they are writing an apology for a service interruption. But underneath the measured tone, the voice is still the same voice. You still recognize it.

The Nielsen Norman Group has a useful framework here. They describe four dimensions along which voice operates. Funny versus serious. Formal versus casual. Respectful versus irreverent. Enthusiastic versus matter-of-fact. Most good brand voice documents plot the brand somewhere on each of these axes, give examples of what that looks like in practice, and then say how the tone shifts in different contexts.

The Mailchimp masterpiece

I have to spend a few minutes on Mailchimp, because their voice and tone guidelines are probably the single most famous document in the industry. They are public. They are at styleguide dot mailchimp dot com. If you have not read them, I would go read them tonight.

Mailchimp's voice, as they document it, is five things. Plainspoken. Genuine. Translator. Familiar. Funny but not silly. They give you examples of each. They show you the rewrites. They explain why a sentence that is technically correct gets cut because it is not Mailchimp's voice.

The person most responsible for this work was Kate Kiefer Lee, who was their content director for years. She wrote a book with Nicole Fenton called "Nicely Said" that is one of the most practical guides to brand voice you can read. What Mailchimp figured out before almost anyone else is that voice is an engineering problem, not a creative problem. You have to write it down. You have to give examples. You have to update it when things change. You have to train people on it.

The business result is extraordinary. Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit for twelve billion dollars in twenty twenty-one. A significant portion of the premium in that acquisition was the strength of their brand, and a significant portion of the strength of the brand was the voice, the sense that this was a real company with a real personality, not a software product.

Three cases, radically different voices

Let me give you three more examples that all work, but work in very different ways. Because voice is not about being warm or funny. It is about being distinctive and consistent.

First. Liquid Death. The canned water company. Their voice is heavy metal. They describe water as "murdering your thirst." Their cans look like beer cans. Their advertising is satirical and aggressive. If you read a single sentence of Liquid Death copy, you know it is them. The business result, a company selling water, the most commoditized product on earth, has reached over a billion dollars in valuation on the strength of that distinctive voice.

Second. Patagonia. Their voice is activist. Calm, principled, direct. They famously ran a full-page ad in the New York Times on Black Friday that said "Don't Buy This Jacket." That sentence is only possible because the brand has a voice that is anti-consumerist. If Nike ran that ad, it would be a joke. From Patagonia, it is a statement of values that customers then reward by buying the jacket.

Third. Apple. Their voice is spare, confident, minimalist. Apple's product pages use more white space than words. Every sentence is short. Every claim is declarative. "It's the most powerful iPad we've ever built." They do not hedge. They do not explain. The voice assumes the reader is smart and busy. That is a choice, and it is a choice that would not work for every brand, but it works for Apple because it matches every other element of what the brand stands for.

Notice that all three of these voices are extremely different. Heavy metal. Activist. Minimalist. The point is not to be warm. The point is to be consistent, distinctive, and recognizable in isolation.

How voice actually gets built

Let me tell you how voice gets built in the companies I work with. Because there is a naive version and a professional version, and the naive version does not work.

The naive version is that you hold a workshop. You brainstorm adjectives. You decide the brand voice is "friendly but professional." You put that on a slide. You email the slide to the team. Nothing changes. Six months later, the marketing team is still writing like they always have. The voice does not exist in practice. It exists only as a document nobody uses.

The professional version has three components. First, you identify the voice. This involves real research, customer interviews, competitive analysis, internal interviews with the founder and leadership team, to find the points of genuine distinctiveness. What does this company actually sound like at its best? What words does the founder use in meetings that never make it into the marketing copy? Where is the brand being flattened by committee writing?

Second, you document the voice with working examples. Not adjectives. Adjectives are useless. "We are authoritative." Everyone thinks they are authoritative. What does authoritative sound like in a customer service email? In a pricing page? In a social post? In a crisis response? The document has to show side-by-side comparisons. Here is how we would say this. Here is how we would not say this. Here is why.

Third, you train the people. Every writer, every marketer, every salesperson, every customer service rep has to internalize the voice to the point where they can produce it without looking at the document. That requires workshopping, edits, and feedback. It is not a one-time deliverable. It is a capability you build into the organization.

The stage where voice falls apart

Now for the listener. If you are running a company between five and a hundred million in revenue, you are at the stage where voice is going to make or break your next phase of growth. Here is why.

Below five million, the founder is still writing most of the copy. The voice is, by default, the founder's voice. It is authentic because it is one person. Above a hundred million, the company has usually hired enough professional communicators that voice becomes a discipline.

It is in the middle, your stage, where voice falls apart. You hire a marketer. The marketer writes differently than the founder. You hire a second marketer. The copy on the website starts sounding like it was written by two different people. You hire an agency. Now it sounds like three different people. Then sales gets involved and the pitch deck sounds like a fourth person. Inbound leads stop converting. The CEO is confused. Nobody can explain why.

What happened is that the voice was never written down. It existed in the founder's head. As soon as the founder stopped being the only writer, the voice fragmented. And every piece of communication the company produces now dilutes the brand a little bit further.

The fix is not complicated, but it does require commitment. Write the voice down. Give examples. Train the team. Revisit it every year. Make it a hiring filter. When you bring in a new writer, the voice document is part of onboarding.

For a consulting firm, this is especially important. Your voice is part of your expertise signal. If you sound like every other consulting firm, you are undercutting the premium you are trying to command. For a wealth management firm, voice is trust. You are asking clients to hand over money they took decades to earn. If your voice is generic, they wonder what else about your firm is generic. For a B2B tech company, voice is often the only thing that distinguishes you from competitors with similar features. Two companies with the same functionality but different voices become two completely different brands.

What it costs to not do this

I want to tell you one last thing. Most of what I have described in this episode sounds like a marketing initiative. It is not. It is a sales lever. Every piece of sales material, every email, every landing page is either working for you or against you based on whether it sounds like your brand or sounds generic. If your voice is distinctive and consistent, you compound recognition with every impression. If it is not, you are paying full price to acquire each customer without any compounding.

Companies that invest in voice early pay less for marketing later. That is the real ROI.

So here is your takeaway. If your brand had to survive without any visual identity, no logo, no colors, no fonts, would customers still recognize you from the words alone? If the honest answer is no, voice is probably the highest-leverage investment you can make right now. It costs less than a rebrand. It compounds faster than advertising. And it is the one brand asset that scales perfectly with headcount.

Next episode, I want to tackle the most confused subject in all of business. The difference between marketing and branding. Everyone thinks they know the difference. Most people get it wrong. And the cost of getting it wrong is entire companies that overspend on marketing because they have under-invested in brand.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.