What Is Your Brand Voice?
The words, phrases, and emotional tone that your brand uses to express itself to your customers.
Brand Voice Definition
Your brand voice includes your emotional tone as well as the language you use when you communicate with your customers. it should align with and extend from your brand’s overall personality.
Tone of voice describes the emotional quality of your communication. While it’s linked to your archetype, but there’s plenty of room within that to make it unique and aligned with your specific audience.
Your tone of voice can have a lot of subtle and specific aspects to it. And that’s exactly why it’s important to define it clearly to retain that consistency for everyone on your team that uses it.
In addition to tone, the specific words and phrases your brand uses — and doesn’t use — further crystallize your voice.
Brand Voice Exercise
The question to start with when you define your brand’s voice is: “What tone and language would best create an emotional connection with your target customers?”
To answer that, you need to talk to your customers. Listen to how they speak and the words they use. One of the most effective ways to connect with your audience is to reflect back a voice that’s natural and familiar to them.
With those ideas locked in your head, you can define your tone of voice with a couple exercises that we developed. These are both based on research conducted by the well-respected User Research consultancy the Nielsen Norman Group.
The first part of the Tone exercise involves choosing a position on four sets of opposite words.
Once you’ve defined your tone, the next step is to compile lists of common words and phrases that define your brand’s voice. Remember to include both what you do say as well as what you don’t.
For each of the four word pairings below, place an “X” in the box that best corresponds to the Tone you desire for your business.
Highlight 4 – 6 words that describe your desired tone well. Strikethrough up to 6 words that do not describe your desired tone.
Get Help Crafting Your Brand Voice
Free Brand & Marketing Workbook
Get immediate access to our 10 page workbook to help you define your Core Purpose, Vision, and Core Values, along with resources for Brand Archetypes, Tone of Voice, Messaging, and more!
Hands-on Brand Strategy Help
Transform your best business thinking into an actionable, shareable, growth-oriented guide. Click below to learn about the Brand Guidebook process.
