Brand tone of voice

Pin down the messages that matter most.
Then prepare to stand out from the crowd.

Step one: defining your marketing messaging

Not all words are created equal

Effective messaging is all about the value you add. It puts your customer firmly front and centre. And it helps you to frame your offer in terms of clear benefits and meaning, rather than getting lost in the details of features.

Give people a reason to believe

Your messaging spells out just what’s in it for your buyers. It gives them a reason to believe in what you do. And helps them start to picture how you’ll change their lives for the better.

We’ll look at what you want to say, and how to make it resonate with your different audiences.

Messaging makes your life easier

The right marketing messaging delivers meaning. It helps you connect with the right people at the right time.

We’ll craft your marketing messaging with key paragraphs you can lift and shift time and time again, everywhere from your annual reports to your website copy.

So, when you need to tell the world what you do, and why they should care, the exact words you need are ready to go.

Gain strategic clarity

On a macro scale, strong marketing messaging creates space for you to achieve your ambitions. It builds a solid foundation from which you can grow or expand into new markets

It also supports your people through any periods of internal transition and change due to rebranding or repositioning exercises. And it enables you to reflect a greater scale following a merger or acquisition.

With clear marketing messaging, you gain the strategic clarity to move in new directions with confidence.

Step two: developing your distinct brand voice

A hard truth about your customers

Your customers are self-centred. They want to know how you’re going to make their lives easier. They’re also busy. And they’re being presented with multiple options to choose from. Which means they’re distracted. To capture attention demands that you stand out.

How to create brand distinction

Developing a tone of voice that sounds like you and only you creates the distinction you need to stand out in the marketplace. And when applied to your brand messaging, it helps people understand what you offer and feel what it’s like to do business with you.

Developing a distinct brand tone of voice

To develop your brand tone of voice, I use Nick Parker’s Voicebox method. It’s a heady combination of face-to-face workshops and hands-on exercises, combined with detailed research and reflection.

“Voicebox is a radically simple yet powerful method for creating distinctive, memorable and authentic brand voices.”
 
Nick Parker, That Explains Things

And it takes your business strategy and turns it into words that work and that people inside and outside the business can understand.

Voicebox details a creative process that makes your offer clear, and demonstrates to your buyers why they should choose you.

It gives you a brand voice that’s authentic to your business. And it gives me all the ingredients I need to write practical brand writing guidelines your teams will enjoy using.

More than a brand voice

Participants say the process helps them understand their brand voice and its impact on their employees and customers alike.

And report that it’s helped them understand each other better, and even to discover new things about themselves and the business they work for. The workshops capture people’s thoughts and ideas about how they want their brand voice to feel and sound.

It engages the room in why tone of voice matters so much and gets people talking, sharing, thinking, and exploring how they want people to feel about the brand. It also gives everyone a chance to sense-check their thoughts and ideas with their peers and with someone outside the business.

It’s a safe place where ideas can fall flat and the world won’t fall apart. And it’s also where ideas can set the room on fire.

Space to explore your ambitions

Voicebox gives you a safe framework to work within that means you can ask big questions, challenge pre-conceptions and explore ambitions. And it gives you permission to lean into the details and discover aspects of your brand voice that highlight what makes you different.

• Like the family business where, as the father retired, the son wanted to know if it would be appropriate to introduce the company’s sense of humour into their tone of voice. Our research stage revealed their target audience of engineers would need to attend four days of intensive training. Our tone of voice workshop reached the consensus that, “If you can make them laugh, you’re onto a winner.” Cue, some of the funniest social media posts you’ll find on LinkedIn.
• The paid media agency that’s leaning into its founder’s Australian roots with a playful tone of voice around its name—Platypus Media. And going from strength to strength, recruiting new team members with a call to “dive into the pond and join the paddle.” (The collective noun for platypuses.)
• The B-Corp design agency that leaned into a confident, purposeful, and compelling tone of voice, and is now attracting project enquiries from national and international NGOs.
• And the highly-regulated business with a refreshed and more modern tone of voice, which the Head of Comms reports is ‘delivering value from talent attraction and retention to stakeholder confidence.’

Your unique verbal identity

Voicebox gives you a verbal identity that’s a true and authentic representation of your business. A voice that reflects your values and purpose. And that makes sure you stand out in the market.

A foundation to build internal capability

It’s work that sticks, so teams feel a sense of ownership. And it gives you the building blocks of a brand language that’s distinct, consistent, and repeatable—not just a glossy report to put in a drawer.

The Voicebox method provides the ingredients that go into practical writing guidelines that mean people can keep applying your brand voice to their writing with confidence, long after the project ends.

Practical brand writing guidelines

Brand writing guidelines give the people who need to write as and for your business absolute clarity on how to do it—with simple guardrails that add a layer of confidence and inject space for creativity.

Just as no two businesses are the same, no two sets of guidelines are the same.

I design each set to meet the needs of the people who’ll be using them, with your brand narrative, useful examples, and a clear messaging architecture as required.

Making your guidelines fit for purpose means people can refer to and apply the guidance on each page with ease. And, with follow-up training, your guidelines will continue to build your internal capability—and your brand, long after our project ends.

Writing guidelines for AI tools

The arrival of AI and Large Language Models is changing the way that companies produce their communications. And the way that you might commission a copywriter.

It’s early days, and it’s changing fast. But by defining your tone of voice, you make sure your brand sounds like you—and not like everyone else who’s using AI to craft their communications.

AI-ready writing guidelines help teams do more with less, without going off-brand. The better and more detailed the guidelines, the better the output—just as it would be if you were briefing a new junior copywriter.

AI-ready writing guidelines act as guardrails, helping you use AI without going off brand or generating the ubiquitous ‘AI-slop’ that clouds messaging and damages brands.

They help with the heavy lifting before you write a prompt. And help you produce an informed first draft. So, people can join the creative process as editors, checking for hallucinations and adding nuance as you go so you look, sound, and feel credible—and still stand out against generic AI noise.

That’s not all

Here’s how I’ve seen the Voicebox framework deliver value to clients:

1. It supports brand positioning or repositioning projects.
2. It brings people together to build team and company cultures.
3. It makes sure even the quietest voices in the room are heard.
4. It sparks valuable conversations.
5. It creates cohesion between senior leaders and their teams.
6. It highlights and solves significant differences of opinion.
7. It helps whole businesses to write with clarity and confidence
8. It builds brand value.
9. It helps change managers with internal alignment during transition periods.
10. It lays the foundations for future growth and expansion into new markets.
11. It creates a framework to reflect a new direction or company scale.
12. It helps you showcase new products and services.