Somewhere in your company's Google Drive, there's a brand voice document. It says things like "warm but authoritative" and "playful yet professional." It was probably created during a workshop that involved sticky notes.
Nobody has opened it in months.
The Voice Document Graveyard
Here's what typically happens. A company hires an agency or a brand strategist (sometimes us) to define their brand voice. A beautiful document gets created. It has spectrums. It has "we say this, not that" examples. It has personality attributes with detailed descriptions.
Everyone nods. Everyone agrees. And then everyone goes back to writing exactly how they wrote before.
The social media manager writes in their voice. The CEO writes in theirs. The sales team writes in whatever voice closes deals fastest. Customer support writes in Corporate Apology, which is its own dialect at this point.
The document didn't fail because it was bad. It failed because it was aspirational instead of operational.
Why The Gap Exists
The Voice Was Designed in a Vacuum
Most brand voice exercises start with "Who do we want to be?" That's the wrong question. The right question is "Who are we already, at our best?"
If your company's natural communication style is direct and no-nonsense, but your brand voice document says you're "whimsical and delightful," you've created a fiction. People can't sustain a voice that doesn't match their reality. They'll default to what's natural within a week.
Nobody Knows How to Apply It
"Warm but authoritative" means nothing when you're writing an error message at 11 PM. Or drafting a response to an angry customer review. Or writing microcopy for a checkout button.
Voice guidelines that don't include specific, situational examples are decorations, not tools. Your team needs to see what the voice sounds like in a billing dispute email, not just in a hypothetical brand manifesto.
There's No Enforcement Mechanism
Who reviews content for voice consistency? In most companies, the answer is nobody. Or everybody, which is the same thing. Without a clear owner and a review process, voice consistency is left to chance. And chance produces chaos.
The Voice Audit
Before you fix anything, you need to see the damage. Here's how:
Collect 20 real communications — five from marketing, five from sales, five from support, and five from leadership. Read them side by side.
What you'll usually find is that you don't have one brand voice. You have four or five. Marketing sounds like a lifestyle brand. Sales sounds like a SaaS demo. Support sounds like a government form. The CEO's LinkedIn sounds like a TED talk.
Your customers experience all of these. To them, it feels like talking to a company with a personality disorder.
How to Fix It
1. Start With Who You Actually Are
Record real conversations with your best customers. Listen to how your most effective salespeople talk. Read the emails your team sends when they're not overthinking it. Your authentic voice is already there — you just need to codify it.
2. Build a Voice That Has Teeth
Replace vague attributes with concrete rules:
- Instead of "We're friendly" **write** "We use contractions. We ask questions. We never start an email with 'I hope this finds you well.'"
- Instead of "We're professional" **write** "We don't use exclamation points in error messages. We acknowledge mistakes directly without corporate hedging."
- Instead of "We're bold" **write** "We state opinions without qualifiers. No 'we think' or 'we believe' — just say it."
3. Create a Swipe File, Not Just Guidelines
Build a living document of real examples. Every great email, social post, support response, or headline goes in the swipe file. When someone needs to write something, they look at how the brand actually sounds in practice — not at abstract principles.
4. Make Someone the Voice Police
Designate one person (or a small team) who reviews customer-facing content for voice consistency. Not to gatekeep creativity, but to ensure that every touchpoint sounds like the same company. This role pays for itself in brand coherence.
The Takeaway
Your brand voice shouldn't be an aspiration. It should be a mirror — reflecting who your company genuinely is, then turning up the volume on the best parts.
Kill the dusty document. Build a living voice that your team can actually use. Because a brand voice that nobody follows isn't a voice at all. It's a wish.