Your brand personality is more than a collection of fonts, colors, logos, and messages. It’s how you bring those elements together in a way that’s unique to your business. A clear brand identity and recognizable tone of voice make your brand memorable and build customer loyalty. Ninety percent of customers expect consistent interactions across channels—and that starts with a consistent tone of voice.
In this post, we’ll analyze examples of different brand tones, walk through how to find your brand’s tone of voice, and show you how to get your entire workforce to write in a consistent brand tone with the help of AI.
Crafting a well-defined brand voice and tone is vital, not only to your content and marketing strategy, but also to your overall brand strategy.
A consistent and unique brand voice increases brand recognition and brand loyalty. For example, people might look forward to your playful emails or appreciate your all-business attitude. These expectations help consumers form an emotional connection with your brand.
The stronger your brand recognition, the more critical it is to be consistent across every customer experience and touchpoint. If the tone of voice is off in even one message, your customers will notice. Small inconsistencies lead to confusion, erode trust, and can ultimately damage your brand’s reputation.
Developing and documenting brand tone of voice guidelines helps every employee—whether marketers, customer support agents, or sales representatives—channel your brand personality so it shines through in every customer interaction. Clear brand voice guidelines reduce reliance on a handful of editors to perform content reviews and make a consistent brand voice scalable across the business.
What is brand tone of voice?
Brand tone of voice refers to the way your brand communicates with your audience, shaping the overall personality and impression your brand conveys through messaging. It’s not just what you say (i.e., voice) but how you say it (i.e., tone).
Your brand voice is like your personality. It’s a combination of characteristics—word choices, favorite phrases, and level of formality—that creates your unique identity.
Your brand tone is how you convey emotion. It’s how you naturally adapt your voice to an audience or setting. Think of the difference between how you would present a marketing plan to the board of directors versus how you would phrase a Slack ping to a close colleague.
A well-defined tone of voice is crucial because it helps you achieve multiple brand goals:
- Build recognition: A consistent tone helps audiences easily recognize your brand across different platforms.
- Strengthen trust: By maintaining a consistent tone, your brand fosters reliability and trustworthiness.
- Differentiate your brand: It allows you to stand out by reflecting your unique personality and values.
- Shape perception: It can influence how customers feel about your brand, whether they see it as approachable, innovative, or premium.
- Guide communication: It ensures that all teams, from content marketing to support, communicate in a way that aligns with your brand’s identity and goals.
Elements of brand voice
Brand voice guidelines provide all the information writers, content creators, and anyone else who is communicating on behalf of your company need to nail your unique brand personality every time. Key elements to cover include the following:
- Brand voice characteristics: This defines the core characteristics that reflect how your brand would act or speak if it were a person. Are you playful, serious, empathetic, authoritative, innovative, or friendly?
- Tone: As we said above, tone refers to the emotional inflection of the brand’s voice and can vary depending on the context or audience. For example, your tone might be upbeat and informal in social media posts but more professional in customer support emails. Tone adjusts based on situations while still aligning with your overall brand voice.
- Writing style: Your writing style guide sets standards around sentence structure, paragraph length, and the oft-debated Oxford comma. Clarifying your preferences will make your brand voice more consistent.
- Vocabulary and jargon: This element focuses on the specific words, terms, and phrases your brand uses to communicate with its audience. Whether your brand opts for industry-specific jargon to demonstrate expertise or chooses simple, accessible language to ensure inclusivity, the choice of vocabulary plays a critical role.
- Audience: Your voice should resonate with your target audience. This involves understanding their preferences, pain points, and communication style. A brand voice that is relatable and appropriate for its audience will create stronger connections and foster trust.
While reading a definition is nice, looking at examples is the best way to understand how a brand’s tone of voice comes to life. Analyzing recognizable brands with different personalities will help you understand the nuances of brand voice and different tones. Below is a quick analysis of five recognizable brands based on their mission statements:
1. TikTok: Expressive and empowering 👋
Mission: “To inspire creativity and bring joy”
Analysis: TikTok’s brand voice is playful, creative, and approachable, aligning with its mission to inspire creativity and bring joy. It uses an informal, energetic tone that resonates with its youthful, trend-driven audience, embracing slang and internet culture to stay relatable. Its voice is empowering, encouraging users to express themselves authentically while fostering a fun and inclusive community. This approach positions TikTok as a catalyst for creative expression and happiness in the digital age.
2. Duolingo: Playful and encouraging 🤗
Mission: “To make language learning accessible, free, and fun for everyone”
Analysis: Duolingo’s brand voice is playful, approachable, and encouraging, reflecting its mission to make education free, fun, and accessible to everyone. Its conversational tone is casual and often humorous, making language learning feel fun and enjoyable. Through friendly and sometimes cheeky messaging, Duolingo creates a sense of achievement while maintaining a welcoming and nonintimidating environment for all its users.
3. Nike: Bold and confident 😎
Mission: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”
Analysis: Nike’s brand voice is bold and motivational, mirroring its mission to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. The tone is confident and aspirational, pushing individuals to strive for greatness and break through limits. With strong, direct language, Nike consistently inspires action, confidence, and perseverance, resonating with those who embrace a mindset of ambition and self-improvement.
4. Mailchimp: Approachable and quirky 😜
Mission: “To empower small businesses with innovative marketing tools to grow and succeed”
Analysis: Mailchimp’s brand voice is friendly, approachable, and slightly quirky, aligning with its mission to help small businesses grow through accessible marketing tools. Its tone is casual and down-to-earth, with a touch of wit, making complex topics feel simple and less intimidating. By using clear, human language, Mailchimp builds trust and engages users in a way that feels relatable and supportive.
5. LinkedIn: Professional and inclusive 🤝
Mission: “To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”
Analysis: LinkedIn’s brand voice is professional, supportive, and inclusive, reflecting its mission to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. The tone is knowledgeable yet approachable, balancing professionalism with a conversational style to foster networking and career development. LinkedIn emphasizes trust, growth, and collaboration, motivating users to build connections and advance their professional lives.
Feeling inspired by those brands? Follow these steps to define your brand voice:
- Pinpoint your brand’s core values. Adding core values to your style guide helps define your brand so business communications and marketing messages always sound authentic to your brand personality.
- Clearly define your target audience. Brand tone of voice is all about creating a personal connection with your target audience. Salesforce reports that 66% of customers expect brands to understand their needs and expectations. Take the time to understand your audience and how they want to communicate. Think about how you can adapt your tone to different audiences and communication channels.
- Analyze your current communications. Audit your existing content to understand what your brand tone of voice currently sounds like. Note where it aligns with the tone you want your brand to have and any inconsistencies that you wish to address. Then circle back to your core values and use them to develop your tone.
- Define key voice characteristics. Identify three to five adjectives, like in the examples above, that describe how your brand should sound. These adjectives will help guide the tone you want to maintain across all touchpoints.
- Establish how your tone flexes across channels. While your brand voice remains consistent, your tone may shift based on the context. For example, your tone might be more serious in crisis communication and more lighthearted in social media posts. Create brand guidelines for adjusting tone without losing consistency.
- Create your style guide. Once you define your brand voice, it’s time to document and communicate as part of your style guide. Encourage teams to use these guidelines to craft brand communications across the business and build a consistent brand voice.
Brand voice and AI
In the era of AI, having a strong and consistent brand voice becomes even more critical. As AI tools increasingly generate, edit, and automate content creation across departments, having a consistent brand voice is both a challenge and an opportunity. Humans are no longer the sole creators of communication; AI tools are being integrated into workflows, generating everything from brand narratives to product descriptions to customer support responses. While AI saves time, it’s crucial to ensure its output maintains your brand voice to avoid eroding customer trust.
Enterprise AI communication tools, like Grammarly, can help you maintain a consistent brand voice across your entire workforce by providing on-brand writing suggestions everywhere your team types.
The way your brand is presented significantly influences customer perception and loyalty. Without clear guidelines and a unified approach, inconsistencies will sneak through and undermine trust. That’s why it’s crucial to leverage tools that help you define a strong brand voice and make it easy for teams to apply that voice across their writing in real time.
Grammarly analyzes your writing to identify your tone of voice and provides real-time suggestions that keep teams on-brand across the business. With its brand tones feature, you can easily customize your brand voice and tone in Grammarly, then effortlessly ensure your entire organization is using it so employees communicate consistently across channels. You can also upload your company style guide directly into Grammarly to give your team real-time writing guidance specific to your brand.