With the rise in voice assistant platforms, smart speakers and wearables. Have you thought about your brand’s presence in this space? Well, In today’s episode we are joined by Chip Edwards, a Partner at Create My Voice. He is a voice branding expert that helps brand owners (businesses and influencers) create their verbal brand on Voice Assistant platforms like Smart Speakers, smartphones, and wearables and he explains how to leverage these mediums and verbal branding to help build your brand.
You can find Chip Edwards on
Personal Social Media:
Linkedin – https://linkedin.com/in/cedwards
Facebook Personal – https://facebook.com/CMV.Chip.Edwards
X Personal – https://twitter.com/ChipEdwards4
Create My Voice Website – https://CreateMyVoice.com
Instagram – https://instagram.com/CreateMyVoice
Facebook – https://facebook.com/CreateMyVoice
X – https://twitter.com/CreateMyVoice
How to Create a Brand Tone of Voice Guide for a Growing Business
A brand tone of voice guide defines how your business should sound across different audiences, situations and channels. For a growing business, an effective guide needs to go much further than adjectives such as professional, friendly or confident. It should translate your brand strategy, positioning and personality into clear verbal principles, examples and guardrails that people can actually use.
Because the more your business grows, the more people speak on its behalf.
Marketing writes campaigns. Sales sends proposals. Leadership publishes thought leadership. Customer teams answer questions. Agencies create content. AI tools increasingly help produce everything from emails to articles.
Without a shared understanding of how the brand should communicate, something predictable happens.
The brand begins to drift.
And what initially looks like a copywriting problem can actually be a sign of something deeper: brand fragmentation.
I explored this idea from a slightly different perspective when I spoke to voice-branding expert Chip Edwards, partner at Create My Voice, on the Unified Brand Podcast.
We were discussing voice assistants, smart speakers and verbal branding. But one of Chip’s observations has become even more relevant as the number of channels through which brands communicate has multiplied:
“Once you strip away your logos and your colours and your fonts… all of a sudden you have to think about your branding a little bit differently.” — Chip Edwards
Strip away the visual identity and an important question remains.
Does your brand still sound like your brand?
That’s what a good tone of voice system needs to solve.
What is a brand tone of voice guide?
A brand tone of voice guide is an operational document that translates brand strategy and personality into repeatable language principles, examples and guardrails.
It gives everyone communicating on behalf of the organisation a shared understanding of how the brand should sound.
That distinction — operational — matters.
I’ve seen plenty of brand guidelines with a tone of voice page containing four words along the lines of:
- Professional
- Friendly
- Confident
- Approachable
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with those characteristics.
The problem is that they aren’t particularly useful.
What does professional actually sound like?
Can you be friendly when responding to a serious customer complaint?
When does confident become arrogant?
What does approachable mean when you’re explaining a technically complex service to a senior decision-maker?
And how would an external agency, new employee or AI tool interpret those same instructions?
If ten people can read your tone of voice guidelines and produce ten completely different interpretations, you don’t really have a system.
You have a set of suggestions.
What’s the difference between brand voice and tone of voice?
Brand voice and tone of voice are closely related, but they aren’t quite the same thing.
Brand voice is the consistent personality behind how a brand communicates. Tone of voice is how that personality adapts to a particular audience, situation and emotional context.
Think about how you communicate as a person.
You’re still fundamentally the same person whether you’re presenting to a board, talking to a friend or dealing with a difficult situation.
But you don’t use precisely the same tone in each.
Brands work in much the same way.
Your voice should remain recognisable.
Your tone should adapt.
A confident brand might therefore be:
- direct when sharing expertise;
- reassuring when dealing with uncertainty;
- concise when giving instructions;
- measured when responding to criticism;
- energetic when announcing something new.
The personality remains coherent. Its expression changes with the context.
That’s why I prefer to think beyond tone of voice and consider the broader idea of verbal branding.
Your verbal brand includes the language, messaging, vocabulary, stories, personality and communication behaviours through which people recognise and understand you.
Tone is one part of that system.
Why does tone of voice become more important as a business grows?
In the early stages of a business, brand consistency can happen almost accidentally.
The founder is involved in most communication.
They write the emails. They lead sales conversations. They approve the website. They post on LinkedIn. They explain the company to new employees.
The brand effectively lives inside their head.
Then the business grows.
Ten people become 30.
One office becomes several locations.
A small marketing function becomes an internal team.
External agencies become involved.
Sales develops its own presentations.
HR writes recruitment material.
Customer service creates templates.
Different regions adapt things locally.
AI gets added to the workflow.
Nobody deliberately sets out to fragment the brand.
It happens gradually.
At Elements, we describe this progression through the Brand Lifecycle™:
Alignment → Drift → Fragmentation → Brand Identity Crisis → Unification.
The problem isn’t usually that people don’t care about the brand.
It’s that different people begin working from different interpretations of it.
Tone of voice can be an early manifestation of that drift.
One team sounds corporate.
Another sounds casual.
Sales describes the value proposition differently from marketing.
Leadership uses language that never appears on the website.
Your AI-generated content sounds polished but could belong to any competitor.
Eventually, the organisation isn’t communicating with one voice.
It’s communicating with dozens.
And customers experience the inconsistency.
This reflects a central belief behind our work at Elements: a brand isn’t simply a marketing asset. It’s an operating system that should help guide communication, behaviour and decisions throughout the business.
If you’re seeing similar signs of drift elsewhere in the organisation, our Strategic Shifts guide explores the bigger strategic changes that help growing businesses move from fragmented activity towards a more unified brand.
Why do most tone of voice guidelines fail?
Most ineffective tone of voice guidelines suffer from the same problem.
They describe personality without translating it into behaviour.
Consider:
Our brand is bold.
It sounds reasonable.
But what does bold mean?
Does it mean short sentences?
Provocative opinions?
Challenging established category assumptions?
Making ambitious promises?
Using humour?
Being confrontational?
The word doesn’t tell you.
Now compare it with:
We express confidence through clarity. We lead with a point of view rather than hiding behind qualifiers. We challenge conventional thinking when we have a reason to do so. We never manufacture controversy simply to attract attention.
That’s much more useful.
A writer can use it.
A Marketing Director can review against it.
An agency can interpret it.
An AI tool can be given it as context.
And leadership can challenge communication that falls outside it.
The principle is simple:
Don’t just describe how your brand sounds. Define how your brand behaves through language.
How do you create a brand tone of voice guide?
A useful brand tone of voice guide can be built through seven steps:
- Clarify your positioning.
- Understand who you’re speaking to.
- Define your verbal personality.
- Translate personality into communication behaviours.
- Establish vocabulary and language rules.
- Define how tone changes by context.
- Create real examples and anti-examples.
The sequence matters.
Starting with “what should we sound like?” is starting too late.
You need to understand who you are first.
1. Clarify your brand positioning
At Elements, our Unified Brand Framework™ begins with Clarify for a reason.
Strategy must precede expression.
Before deciding how your brand should speak, establish:
- Who are we for?
- What matters to those people?
- What problem are we particularly equipped to solve?
- What do we believe?
- What makes us meaningfully different?
- What position do we want to occupy?
- What should people understand about us that they don’t understand about competitors?
Voice then becomes an expression of those decisions.
Imagine two businesses selling broadly similar professional services.
One differentiates itself through rigorous expertise, certainty and risk reduction.
Another differentiates through challenging conventions and helping clients transform their category.
Should they sound the same?
Of course not.
Yet give both companies a tone of voice described as “professional, friendly and confident” and they easily could.
Distinctive communication starts with distinctive strategy.
2. Understand who you’re speaking to
Chip made another important point during our conversation:
“You’ve got to figure out… what are the things that I have that my audience wants from me?” — Chip Edwards
That sounds simple, but it isn’t.
Brands naturally communicate from the inside out. We want to explain our services, our process, our history, our features, our achievements and our latest campaign.
Customers approach the relationship from the opposite direction. They’re asking:
Can you solve my problem?
Do you understand what I’m dealing with?
Why should I believe you?
Why are you different?
What happens next?
A strong verbal brand starts where those two worlds meet.
That means understanding more than your audience’s demographics or job titles. You need to understand their situation.
What are they trying to achieve?
What are they worried about?
What do they already understand?
What assumptions are they bringing with them?
What language do they naturally use to describe the problem?
Your voice needs to work for the people hearing it, not just the people creating it.
3. Define your verbal personality
Now you can define the character behind the communication.
Choose a small number of meaningful personality characteristics.
But resist the temptation to stop there.
For each characteristic, ask:
What does this actually mean when we communicate?
For example:
Insightful
We don’t simply tell people what is happening. We help them understand why it matters.
We connect individual brand problems to the wider commercial picture.
We simplify complexity without stripping out the thinking.
Direct
We get to the point.
We don’t hide simple ideas behind jargon.
We make a clear argument and explain the reasoning behind it.
Warm
We write to people, not personas on a spreadsheet.
Our expertise should make complicated things feel easier to understand, not make the reader feel less knowledgeable.
Now the personality is beginning to become operational.
4. Translate personality into communication behaviours
This is where your voice starts becoming repeatable.
For each characteristic, establish:
We do…
and:
We don’t…
For example:
| Principle | We do | We don’t |
| Clear | Use concrete language and explain complex ideas simply | Use jargon to demonstrate expertise |
| Confident | State our point of view and support it | Make exaggerated or unsupported claims |
| Human | Write naturally and directly | Force humour or manufactured informality |
| Insightful | Explain why something matters | Repeat generic industry advice |
| Useful | Help the reader make progress | Create complexity to make our services appear necessary |
This gives people boundaries without writing a restrictive rulebook for every possible sentence.
And boundaries matter.
Creativity becomes easier when you understand the territory you’re operating within.
5. Establish your brand vocabulary
Distinctive brands develop distinctive language.
Some words should appear regularly because they reinforce the ideas you want associated with the business.
Others should disappear because they’re vague, clichéd or inconsistent with your position.
Create three simple categories.
Words and ideas we own
These are concepts central to your brand strategy.
At Elements, for example, you’ll regularly see language around:
- clarity;
- alignment;
- fragmentation;
- unification;
- potential;
- transformation;
- amplification.
They’re not randomly chosen copywriting preferences. They connect directly to how we think about brand.
Words we use carefully
These may be legitimate industry terms that need explanation or context.
Words we avoid
This includes jargon, tired category clichés, exaggerated claims and language inconsistent with your personality.
If every competitor is “innovative”, “customer-centric”, “passionate” and offers “bespoke solutions”, repeating those words doesn’t strengthen your differentiation.
It weakens it.
6. Define how your tone changes by context
Your brand needs one coherent voice.
It doesn’t need one emotional setting.
Create examples for the situations your team encounters regularly.
For example:
| Situation | Tone |
| Thought leadership | Confident, challenging, insightful |
| Educational article | Clear, generous, authoritative |
| Sales proposal | Focused, confident, commercially relevant |
| Customer complaint | Calm, human, accountable |
| Good-news announcement | Energetic, positive, concise |
| Technical explanation | Clear, precise, jargon-light |
| Social media | Conversational without becoming throwaway |
This is particularly important as businesses add more communication channels.
The question isn’t:
How do we sound identical everywhere?
It’s:
How do we remain recognisably ourselves everywhere?
Those are very different objectives.
7. Use examples and anti-examples
If I could change one thing about most brand voice guidelines, it would be this:
Show, don’t just describe.
Give people examples of what good looks like, and show them what doesn’t fit.
Suppose your generic version says:
“In today’s rapidly changing business environment, having a strong and consistent brand is more important than ever.”
There’s nothing grammatically wrong with it, but there’s little memorable about it.
A more distinctive version might say:
“Making an unclear brand more visible doesn’t solve the problem. It simply helps more people misunderstand you.”
Now we have a point of view. The sentence tells the reader how the brand thinks.
Build a bank of examples across:
- website copy;
- emails;
- sales messages;
- social content;
- thought leadership;
- customer communication;
- headlines;
- calls to action.
Then include anti-examples and explain why they don’t work.
This is invaluable for new employees, agencies and AI tools because you’re not asking them to interpret an abstract concept.
You’re showing them the pattern.
How can verbal branding reduce cognitive load?
One of the most interesting parts of my conversation with Chip was his discussion of cognitive load.
Talking about conversational technology, he explained:
“We’re moving the cognitive load from the user to the computers.” — Chip Edwards
The technology has changed since that conversation. The principle hasn’t.
In fact, it extends well beyond technology:
Good brands reduce cognitive load.
They make information easier to understand, decisions easier to make and experiences more intuitive. They explain complicated subjects clearly and use language customers understand.
Chip put it another way:
“How do you make the user’s experience really, really friction free?” — Chip Edwards
That’s an excellent question for any brand communication.
Does your customer have to decipher internal terminology? Work out what you do from a vague headline? Navigate 12 choices when three would be enough?
The strongest verbal brands use their expertise to make things simpler.
One of our cultural principles at Elements is translate complexity into simplicity.
That’s not about dumbing things down. It’s about doing the difficult thinking before asking the customer to engage with it.
How do you keep your brand voice consistent as the business grows?
You don’t achieve consistency by policing every sentence.
You achieve it by creating shared understanding.
That distinction matters.
Rigid guidelines can make a brand lifeless.
No guidelines create fragmentation.
The answer sits between the two.
Give your people enough clarity to make good decisions independently.
That means your tone of voice guide should be accessible to everyone who communicates for the brand, including external partners.
Train people on why the principles exist rather than simply distributing a PDF.
Review real examples together.
Keep adding examples as new situations arise.
And treat the guide as a living system.
Brands evolve.
Language evolves.
Businesses evolve.
Your guidelines should too.
If you’re unsure how aligned your wider brand currently is, the Brand Power Assessment can help identify where clarity, consistency and alignment are strong — and where fragmentation may be creeping in.
What role should AI play in your brand voice?
AI makes having a clearly defined verbal brand more important, not less.
AI can help businesses produce huge amounts of content. That’s useful, but producing more communication isn’t automatically a competitive advantage.
If every business can create polished copy quickly, polished copy becomes less distinctive.
The question changes from:
Can we create enough content?
to:
Can people recognise that content as ours?
Generic instructions produce generic results. Tell an AI tool to be:
Professional, engaging, knowledgeable and approachable.
and you’ve given it very little distinctive direction.
Instead, give it:
- your positioning
- audience context
- brand beliefs
- messaging hierarchy
- verbal principles
- preferred and prohibited language
- examples and anti-examples
- context-specific tone
- factual and strategic guardrails
You’re not simply prompting AI. You’re giving it a brand system.
Human judgement still matters. AI shouldn’t decide your positioning, invent your beliefs or determine what your business should stand for.
But once you have strategic clarity, AI can help you express it more efficiently.
That’s the crucial distinction.
Where does tone of voice fit into the Unified Brand Framework™?
At Elements, we approach brand building through three connected stages:
Clarify
First, understand who you are.
Your positioning.
Your audience.
Your differentiation.
Your beliefs.
Your personality.
Your direction.
Without that clarity, there is nothing meaningful for your voice to express.
Unify
Next, translate that understanding into a coherent system.
This is where verbal branding becomes critical.
Your messaging, tone of voice, visual identity, customer experience and internal behaviours should all be expressions of the same underlying strategy.
Different touchpoints.
Same brand.
Amplify
Then you grow visibility.
Campaigns.
Content.
Sales activity.
Social media.
PR.
AI-assisted production.
New channels.
The sequence is important.
Because amplification doesn’t fix confusion.
It multiplies it.
Clarify. Unify. Amplify.
Your tone of voice guide belongs primarily in Unify.
But it only works properly when it’s built on Clarify.
And once those two stages are working together, Amplify becomes significantly more powerful.
That’s the difference between making more noise and building a stronger brand.
Your tone of voice isn’t really about tone
That’s perhaps the biggest point I’d leave you with.
A tone of voice project can look like a writing exercise. But for a growing business, it represents something more important: alignment.
- Can marketing, sales, leadership and customer teams explain the business consistently?
- Do your communications reinforce the same position?
- Can agencies and new employees understand what sounds like you?
- Can they make good brand decisions without always asking the founder?
- Can AI scale your communication without removing what makes you distinctive?
When the answer is yes, you’ve built more than a writing guide.
You’ve created part of the operating system of the brand.
Chip’s original observation still holds up:
- Remove the logo.
- Remove the colour palette.
- Remove the typeface.
What remains?
- Your ideas.
- Your language.
- Your behaviour.
- Your experience.
Your brand should still be recognisable.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a brand tone of voice?
A brand tone of voice is how a brand’s personality comes through in its language. Your voice stays consistent, while your tone adapts to the audience, channel and situation.
What should a brand tone of voice guide include?
A useful guide should cover:
- Brand strategy and audience
- Personality and voice principles
- Communication behaviours
- Preferred and avoided language
- Tone by situation
- Real examples and anti-examples
- Practical guidelines for teams
What’s the difference between brand voice and tone of voice?
Brand voice is the consistent personality behind your communication.
Tone of voice is how that personality adapts to different situations.
Your voice remains recognisable, while your tone changes with the context.
How many tone of voice principles should a brand have?
There is no fixed number, but three or four clear principles are often more useful than a long list of adjectives.
Each principle should translate into specific behaviours and examples that teams can apply consistently.
Can AI follow brand tone of voice guidelines?
Yes, but AI works better with specific rules, behaviours, examples and anti-examples than broad adjectives alone.
Human review is still important for strategic decisions, factual claims and sensitive communication.
If different teams, channels or partners are currently expressing different versions of your business, book a Discovery Call with Elements Brand Management.
As a Unified Brand Agency, we help ambitious businesses move from fragmentation to clarity and alignment — building brands that don’t simply look better, but work better across the organisation. That reflects Elements’ positioning and its commitment to building commercially powerful unified brand systems rather than treating brand as a standalone marketing exercise.
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