Companies focus on how their brand communicates through every digital channel. They no longer rely on static, stand-alone guides as the only source to define the brand. Today, we define a brand's personality and operationalize it through the use of integrated systems, writing prompts, and high-stress scenarios.

Today, when creating a brand's digital identity, the most effective way to test these brand voice examples is during high-stress moments. For example, when a user experiences an error message while making a purchase, a payment failure notice, or an inability to access the site; language must be consistent, so as not to irritate the user.

A common inadequacy among marketers is that they don't treat voice as a permanent aspect of a brand. Instead, many argue that a brand's voice is dependent on the tone in which it is delivered based on the situation. Today, however, successful teams approach writing as an operational system rather than merely writing words to use. They create a style guide that establishes exact word counts, measured emoji usage, and defined sentence structure.

Using data to inform writing allows companies to create training for new writers and gain control over artificial intelligence (AI) tools without losing their unique brand identity.

The Four Rules of Brand Identity

Prior to writing, successful teams determine their brand within four dimensions, using the four-dimension model developed by the Nielsen Norman Group as their guiding framework to develop their brands and digital personalities. It requires that teams identify their position on four different sliding scales.

First, the first scale is formality: casual and relaxed vs. very formal and businesslike. Second, the scale for humor is serious and direct vs. fun and playful. Third, the respect scale measures the level of respectfulness of the brand, from the highest level of respect to the most irreverent or bold approach to marketing. Finally, enthusiasm is the fourth scale: matter-of-fact vs. extremely enthusiastic. By selecting four specific points on these four scales, brands establish limits and boundaries for every piece of content created.

23 Brand Voice Examples in Everyday Use

The most successful brands will be instantly recognizable just by the words they use and do not require any logo to do so. Below are 23 brand voice examples of businesses using their personality rules in the everyday interactions they have with their customers.

1. Nike

Nike uses a strong and confident writing style based on short, bold, and to-the-point commands, or at least that is the way that the copy seems to have come across when completed.

The majority of the text is written in a very casual manner with a level of seriousness that the athletic community has towards physical exertion and effort. The level of enthusiasm in their writing is at an extreme respect for the reader's ability to succeed.

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp writes as if they are someone or something that is going to provide you with a straightforward and realistic translation of their products and services. In addition, they only use humor in a particularly dry way.

Their main goal for using humor is as an attempt to alleviate the stress that some users may feel when they are dealing with the intricacies that come with using and navigating their service. In this case, Mailchimp adopts a very casual, relaxed, and matter-of-fact tone in the utility messages that are sent out via email before and after the user makes a purchase.

3. Apple

The writing style used by Apple is very minimalistic in nature. It is made up of statements of fact in the product category and has a limited number of adjectives, which focus on making a small number of very strong assertions.

In addition, the tone used in their copy is very balanced between formal and informal. It is ultimately extremely serious and respectful.

4. Wendy's

Wendy's is known for being particularly combative and aggressive when it comes to its use of social media. Competitors and customers are roasted with a light-hearted and funny tone that is full of satire and enthusiasm.

5. Innocent Drinks

Innocent Drinks takes the approach of being very chatty and self-deprecating while using lowercase letters to create a sense of mischief on their product packaging and website. The writing is humorous and shows enthusiasm for fruit and health in an irreverent and casual way.

6. Monzo

Monzo takes a straightforward kind approach to banking with warmth and wit in their writing style while being direct about all things money. Rather than making humor the focal point, the humor is used to enhance the writing, creating a tone of respect and matter-of-fact approach to the act of handling money.

7. GOV.UK

GOV.UK is the world leader in writing using plain English as their style is based on the use of action-first verbs, e.g., “Pay your Car Tax” with a strict list of prohibited words. The GOV.UK voice is therefore formal, serious, respectful, and matter-of-fact.

8. Oatly

Oatly uses absurd, deadpan humor in advertising, while using a similar writing style for their utility copy. The utility copy can be just as bizarre as an Oatly advertisement. An example of this would be the Oatly 404 error page which states “there is nothing to look at here.” Oatly writing has a casual, dry, irreverent, and matter-of-fact tone.

9. Basecamp

Basecamp creates competent, straightforward, direct, one-on-one writing that uses stellar prompts, e.g., “Let me know if this sounds like a good idea.” Their Basecamp writing tone is casual yet serious and respectful, and matter-of-fact.

10. Duolingo

Duolingo has a comical and whimsical sense of social media engaging with their owl character that publicly mocks those who have not progressed with their language practice. The Duolingo voice is casual and humorous, yet irreverent and highly enthusiastic.

11. Old Spice

Old Spice is focused on using absurd, theatrical, and outlandish language. Some of the brands mentioned below represent an irreverent style to their copywriting.

12. Patagonia

Patagonia employs a direct, value-driven style. The company has a clear environmental belief, and this is evident in the copy used in the product descriptions and in their marketing campaigns. Their tone is a blend of formal and casual with a focus on being serious and enthusiastic about the company and its products related to nature.

13. Headspace

Headspace has a calm and comforting structure. They typically use short and simple sentences to give readers mental relief from the content they are reading. They have a casual, respectful, serious, and highly reassuring tone in their style.

14. Slack

Slack uses encouraging and fun microcopy as part of their application. They celebrate every small victory achieved by users, like keeping their notification inbox clear. The tone is casual, friendly, respectful, and highly enthusiastic.

15. Walmart

Walmart has a neighborly and practical identity with the copy they create. Their copy emphasizes immediate usefulness and value to the customer rather than lofty aspirations. The tone is casual, very respectful, serious, and highly factual based on the information presented to them.

16. Microsoft

Microsoft has an overall warm, clear, and practical style. Their internal guide to writing is "simple and human." Simple and clear is the goal for the writing they create. The tone is casual, respectful, serious, and highly factual.

17. Liquid Death

Liquid Death applies an irreverent and aggressive style to every aspect of their brand. Even the consent wording used in their Terms of Service and 404 error pages use this irreverent element by saying things like "MURDER YOUR THIRST" and "REST IN PEACH."

18. Who Gives A Crap

The company Who Gives A Crap combines a fun social cause (toilet paper) with an unending supply of toilet jokes. The company has a balanced approach to both their serious environmental cause and humorous writing. The tone is casual, funny, irreverent, and extremely enthusiastic.

19. Everlane

Everlane uses simple statements and doesn’t use humor at all. Everlane uses restraint, which gives them total assurance in the efficacy of their brand. Their copy features a concise message that there is a better way with their products/elements, as they refer to the primary traits of better materials, factories, and style.

20. Huel

Huel takes a straightforward clinical approach by simply providing the facts. Huel focuses on science and the rapid use of nutrients, and generates all communication in a scientific voice, listing nutrient counts with no information intended to create delight for the user.

21. Cards Against Humanity

Cards Against Humanity has a very affectionate way of insulting the audience that reads their communications. They frequently adopt short and quick delivery by employing terse and punchy punctuation and dropping one or two-word exclamations (i.e., “Wow.”) as the complete thought or sentence. Their voice evokes a casual, highly irreverent, and dry type of tone.

22. Tony's Chocolonely

Tony's Chocolonely is mission-driven and warm in tone and content. This is evidenced by their distinctive punctuational style, which combines single punctuation dots and double dot conjunctions as defining elements on the exterior of all packaging and in their digital copy.

23. Aesop

Aesop has an entirely restrained literary style that is highly articulated. They produce academic essays as product descriptions. This has a formal style, plus a highly serious, respectful, and non-subjective voice.

Creating a Working Language Guide

The development of a working language system is predicated on an intense focus. Therefore, to transmute from the traditional format of a large corporate-style language reference guide into a functioning and easily utilized daily-use language guide for modern content teams involves utilizing a single-page format with a clear functional purpose.

Thus, this guide takes the ambiguity away from the written communications. It permits writers to understand how they should sound. An illustration of this can be achieved by listing the major primary traits of a brand, with a concise definition of what is meant by the trait, followed by appropriate examples of "Do" and "Don't" style of sentences/examples.

The chart will outline how to maintain confidence without sounding arrogant. It will demonstrate plain-speak without the perception that you are speaking down to the reader. It will also provide a warm tone, while not being overly emotional, with a minimal concept of how to create warmth.

Setting Clear Brand Boundaries

By looking at this one-page style guide, a new writer or agency partner will immediately know the outer limits of a brand's messaging.

Using a Banned Word List

Digital teams should create a banned word list, inspired by GOV.UK.

In the same way that high-performing digital teams avoid using empty business words, they also restrict using banned words such as: collaborate, empower, facilitate, impact, incentivise, leverage, and utilise. Instead, they prefer specific action verbs: ship, fix, release, and build. When you replace vague business terminology with concrete nouns and verbs, you create a more authentic and direct personality.

Adapting for Regulated Industries

Regulated brands (e.g., financial technology, medical, legal) must abide by compliance regulations.

For example, when explaining why someone was denied a loan or given a medical diagnosis, humor is inappropriate.

Nevertheless, regulated brands can express their own unique style through extreme clarity, candid kindness, and calming reassurance. Regulated brands also offer glossaries that outline "we say / we don't say" explanations approved by their lawyers, while removing the cold, robotic language present in most corporate guides.

How to Measure Your Language

To track how your language drifts or changes over time, content managers must conduct periodic sample audits of their content.

For these audits, the content manager should randomly choose 30 recent pieces of content (including emails, social media posts, landing pages, and error messages) and calculate the actual numbers behind the content.

• Average Sentence Length: Average the number of words per sentence to assure appropriate pacing of the copy.
• Exclamation Frequency: Count how many exclamation points appear in 100 words to avoid an overabundance of forced excitement.
• Emoji Rate: Tracks how many times emojis are used in posts to ensure that images or visuals have a consistent appearance throughout all modes of communication.
• Pronouns Ratio: Allows marketers to check how many people are talking about their business and not necessarily how many people are talking about how great their business is; therefore, the ratio of "you" to "us" keeps the focus of content on customers rather than about how great they are as a company.

By establishing these metrics, content leaders have data points to guide them as to the content quality. When a freelance writer produces a first draft, the editor has a reference point for each specific metric that is indicated as being off or incorrect, rather than just saying that it was "too much energy" or "not enough."

Governing Brand Voice in the AI Era

With technology becoming more sophisticated, and teams using technology more than ever before to write drafts, the use of static PDF guidelines has been rendered obsolete when it comes to determining what is the appropriate brand voice of a company. If established guidelines are not strictly adhered to, it’s very likely that any tool using technology to write content will quickly move toward generic corporate language instead of following your brand voice examples.

Marketing leaders need to incorporate their brand’s language guidelines into a software system in order to scale the use of content safely.

To utilize the one-page chart and the banned-word list as part of an ongoing system prompt/canvas setup within the AI tool, they must create a permanent example of the one-page chart that all users can refer to when developing new content.

Creating a versioning method (i.e., v1.0, v1.1) and assigning each document a named human owner ensures that someone will review the created content every three months. In addition, a bank of examples that includes 10-20 real-world examples covering different channels, including website, ads, and social media must also be incorporated into the AI system to anchor any generated language, enabling it to be consistent with the voice and tone of the brand across all digital touchpoints.

Final Analysis: Testing Your Words

How we communicate through our brand will not be determined by a billboard advertiser. Time of customer frustration, confusion, or lack of direction is a critical moment in a customer’s journey.

When there is an issue with a shopping cart or app or a subscription auto-renewed, the words that appear on the screen completely dictate how the customer will perceive the entire company and customer relationship.

Companies that focus on a small, highly measurable, tightly governed set of language systems and are intentional about creating that difference, actually have a much clearer way to differentiate themselves from other generic competitors. By creating clear guidelines for what is allowed and prohibited (e.g., “we can’t say this,” “we have to use that”), companies can ensure their emails, error messages, and product descriptions have a human feel.

Out with the bulky, neglected brand guideline documents; in with a concise, one-page guidance system that you can use as your control variables and then use as a measured variable of effect.

FAQ

How do we measure the business return on a new voice system?

The best way to measure the effectiveness of a new voice system is to track how many customers use it and to eliminate as many customer support tickets and complaints as possible by tracking the number of customer interactions during difficult/critical times, such as during e-commerce checkout and checkout completion.

Emotional connections created through clarity of language are highly correlated with customer lifetime value and customer retention rates.

What is the easiest way to enforce tone in a heavily regulated environment?

To create a clear and concise list of language that we can say and language we cannot say, with specific definitions for these terms approved by compliance and legal teams. By changing the cold and bureaucratic language to more simplified, easy-to-understand language, we enable writers to quickly and efficiently create quality content.

Once compliance and legal have approved the very specific language that will be used in all errors, refunds, and terms of service, writers will be able to get their work done quickly and efficiently without needing to get constant legal reviews.

How do we prevent drifting of language when working with AI tools?

By creating a mandatory ten-point checklist for every AI draft with a clear directive to check the AI's work against a list of banned words and a specific set of sentence length metrics. You will never ask an AI to just "write in our style." In order to train the AI properly, you should feed the AI the entire system prompt (the one-page chart) along with 10 real-world examples of each type of sentence.

Why are writers ignoring massive style guides?

The primary reason writers ignore large style guides is because they are not operational. A long PDF file is completely unhelpful for a writer working under tight deadlines. To ensure that writers will adopt the style, the style guide must be condensed into a one-page chart, included in daily project briefs, and utilized in the software systems that writers use on a daily basis.