Brand tone of voice
What does your business stand for? Let’s pin that down.
Then develop your brand voice.
Developing a distinct brand voice
Your customers are self-centred. They want to know how you’re going to make their lives better. They’re also busy. And constantly presented with multiple competitors to choose from. Which means they’re also distracted.
To capture their attention demands that you work hard. That you know how to stand out as a business and a brand, both visually and verbally.
That means looking and sounding irresistibly like you and you alone—leaning in with enthusiasm and conviction into what makes you stand out and what makes you different to everyone else in your space.
It’s a strategic call. And it demands confidence and team alignment. What stays? And what goes? And who gets the final say?
How to create brand distinction
Developing a brand voice that sounds like you and you alone creates the distinction you need to stand out in the marketplace. It helps people understand what you offer and feel what it’s like to do business with you—which makes it an invaluable brand asset.
And the process of developing that voice? It gets everyone on the same page. It strengthens your team culture. And it makes it so very much easier to write with clarity and consistency, so you can build your brand with ease and stake your claim to the customers you want to serve.
It’s also a whole lot of fun.
“Since working with Katherine and redeveloping our brand, tone of voice, and website and brochure copy, we’ve seen a 48% increase in annual turnover.”
Developing your distinct brand tone of voice
To develop your brand tone of voice, I use Nick Parker’s Voicebox toolkit. It’s a heady combination of face-to-face workshops and hands-on exercises, combined with hours of detailed research, interviews, and reflection.
Making your offer clear
It takes your business strategy and turns it into words that work and that people inside and outside the business can understand. It makes your offer clear, and demonstrates to your buyers why they should choose you. And it gives you a brand voice that’s authentic to your business. So you sound and feel like you, only you, and no one else in the market.
Putting your brand voice to work
It also gives me all the ingredients I need to write the hands-on invaluable practical brand writing guidelines your teams will enjoy using. Beyond knowing where to place your brand logo and what Pantone colours to use.
Building your brand—and your business
Your brand guidelines should define your tone of voice and be packed with clear and workable examples of that voice in action. Everywhere from your website and LinkedIn company page to your annual reports and investor showreels. So everyone in the business can produce the copy your business needs to thrive and grow.
“Katherine’s unique skill set, and knowledge proved invaluable during our repositioning process. It’s not easy for any business to go through change.
By taking the time to listen, understand and facilitate the process, Katherine captured our vision in the form of the right words in the right place to truly describe our offering as a business, while retaining our personality.”
How you gain more than a brand voice
Voicebox workshop sessions help people better understand the importance of brand voice and its impact on their peers and customers alike. It helps people discover new things about themselves and understand what the business they work for stands for.
Nurturing collaboration
The workshops help your people share their thoughts and ideas about how they want your brand voice to feel and sound. The process engages the room in why tone of voice matters so much and gets everyone talking, sharing, thinking, and exploring how they want customers to feel about your brand.
An exercise in team culture
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. It’s also where ideas can set the room on fire.
“It was an absolute joy working with Katherine. Her workshops & questions were invaluable in helping us consolidate our messaging framework, and the deliverables she gave us were above and beyond what we asked for in terms of quality.”
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.
“Voicebox is a radically simple yet powerful method for creating distinctive, memorable and authentic brand voices.”
Nick Parker, That Explains Things
Like the family business where, as the founders 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.”
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 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 brand voice
Voicebox gives you a verbal identity that’s a true and authentic representation of your brand and business. A voice that reflects your values and purpose. And that makes you lean into who you are and what you stand for. So you can stand out from the crowd and attract your target customers with confidence and consistency.
“Katherine has two unique strengths. A flair for grasping broad, often nebulous concepts, and then delivering them in a direct, matter of fact, understandable way.
The tone of voice workshop she held was engaging, enjoyable—and delivered. We continue to refer to the follow up material that she put together for us.”
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 our development project ends.
“The tone of voice workshop really helped to clarify what Crystallised stood for, how we could put these values into words, and helped us define the way that we write copy.
I feel more confident speaking on behalf of Crystallised after participating in the workshop, and we now have a set of guidelines which will help our new employees to represent Crystallised also.”
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.
“Our new website, copy and tone of voice have repositioned us on a national scale. Now, we’re getting more strategic project enquiries from national and international NGOs.”
That’s not all
Here’s how and where brand voice development also delivers value:
- Support for your brand positioning or repositioning projects.
- Bringing people together to build team and company cultures.
- Making sure even the quietest voices in the room are heard.
- Sparking invaluable conversations.
- Creating cohesion between senior leaders and their teams.
- Highlighting – and solving – significant differences of opinion.
- Helping the whole business to write with clarity and confidence – consistently
- Building brand value.
- Helping change managers with internal alignment during periods of transition.
- Laying the foundations for future growth and expansion into new markets.
- Creating a framework to reflect a new direction or company scale.
- Helping you showcase new products and services.
“Sometimes you need a specialist, but more importantly, someone who will have empathy with you and your company. That’s exactly what I needed when re-envisaging our proposition and tone of voice. Katherine nailed it perfectly, and I would highly recommend if you need a stand-out copywriter, you look no further than Katherine.”
Brand voice
What does your business stand for? Let's pin that down. Then develop your brand voice.