PSA: You’re (probably) thinking about tone of voice all wrong

Little task for you. It’ll take two seconds, I swear.

Think about the words you want people to associate with your brand’s tone of voice, and how you want to come across. Go on, take a moment.

Got them?

If you used words like “clear”, “trustworthy”, “relatable”, “friendly”, “professional” or similar, you’re not alone. But you are missing the point (sorry).

A common tone of voice misconception

Everybody wants their brand to sound “clear”, “trustworthy”, and “relatable”. But the problem is, they’re not actually your tone of voice. They’re just the baseline expectations for not creating awful content.

It’s like running a restaurant and saying you want the food to be ‘edible’. Yes. Great, you should 100% want that. I want that for you, too.

But what kind of edible food do you want to serve? Gourmet French cuisine? Desserts only? Grab and go wraps? Generic terms don’t help anyone get to know your brand.

And if you give a tone of voice brief that says “professional, but friendly,” every writer will interpret that differently — and likely default to a standard that’s safe, nondescript, and difficult for anyone to recognise in the wild.

Defining your actual tone of voice

Pro tip: When you think about a word that you want to describe your brand voice, think of the opposite of that word before you commit.

If that word would result in generally poor content (unclear, untrustworthy, or unrelatable, for example), then you're not defining your specific tone — you're just describing basic content hygiene.

Your actual tone comes across in rhythm, sentence length, word choice, and punctuation. How witty you are. How you abbreviate, or how you don’t abbreviate. How cheeky you want to be with your audience, or how inteligent you want to sound. It’s the reason a skincare brand and a financial services organisation can both sound “professional” even with completely different voices.

Defining your own tone of voice — and doing it properly — requires thinking in spectrums. Where do you sit between various adjectives. Are you more formal or more conversational? Do you lean towards warm, or is your brand detached? Are you playful, serious, or a mixture of both? Are you cynical? Idealistic? Diplomatic? Realistic? Pragmatic? The list goes on…

Once you start defining your place on the scale, it’s possible to work out a tone of voice that actually feels unique to you and your brand. 

Taking tone of voice to the next level

When I work with clients on tone of voice strategy, I get into the weeds. Some love this, some hate it, but all of them are glad we’ve done it by the end of the project.

Most of the time, I don’t ask how they want to come across directly. Because they’ll inevitably say clear, trustworthy, and relatable. And that’s not helpful to me, because in no universe am I drafting content that’s unclear, untrustworthy, and unrelatable, right?

So instead, I ask what kind of associations they want people to have with the brand. I ask them what they dislike in marketing — what they’d actively hate to sound like. I ask them who they’re speaking to, and what traits they love about their audience. I ask them who they’re not speaking to, and what they’d never, ever stand for.

I even ask, if your brand was a celebrity, who would they be? And then we laugh and workshop and mentally audition celebrities in our heads. And I’ll be 100% honest, ‘your brand is Tate McRae incarnate’ never makes it into the final document. But it does get us thinking on an extremely specific level, and by the end of the conversation, I definitely know more about their brand and how they want to showcase it.  

And that’s way, way more valuable than being told “I want to come across professional but friendly”.

Why tone of voice matters

Everyone has a content engine right now. Content is everywhere. And more specifically, average and generic content is everywhere.

AI has made it easier to churn out slop at scale — but harder to make content stand out. But that’s where a good tone of voice comes in.

Your tone is what makes someone stop scrolling. It’s how your audience recognises you in a sea of sameness. It’s not about being louder, it’s about being unmistakable.

With AI now handling so much of the generic, filler content, audiences are gravitating towards brands that feel real. Human. Specific. Genuine. The kind of voice that makes someone think: “Oh, I know who wrote this.” Or better yet: “This sounds like someone I like and trust.”

If you’re sitting on tone of voice guidelines that feel vague, flat or like it could belong to at least five other companies in your industry, it might be time for a rethink.