What is brand voice?
Brand voice is how a brand sounds when it talks. Not what it says, which changes with every campaign, but the character underneath: dry or warm, formal or blunt, playful or quietly confident. If you covered up the logo on a piece of copy and could still tell which brand wrote it, that is voice. It lives in word choice, in sentence length, in what the brand jokes about and what it never would, and in the small things like whether it says "you" or "customers".
Voice is different from tone. Voice is fixed; tone flexes with the situation. A brand with a wry voice is still wry when it apologizes for an outage, but the tone shifts from playful to careful. The voice is the person; the tone is their mood.
Why it matters
Why brand voice matters
A brand is recognized by its voice long after the campaign is forgotten. Logos are seen for a second; the voice is heard every time someone reads a caption, an email, a product page or a line in a film. When those all sound like different people, the brand feels like a committee, and committees are not trusted. When they sound like one person, the brand feels like something you could have a relationship with.
Voice is also the cheapest form of distinctiveness there is. Two companies can sell the same product with the same features at the same price; the one that sounds like itself wins the attention. It costs nothing to write a sentence with character instead of without one, and yet most brands default to the same corporate murmur because nobody decided otherwise.
In practice
How brand voice works in practice
- 01
Voice is built in the brand strategy phase, usually alongside positioning and values. The strategist and the writer define it with a short set of traits (three or four adjectives, each with a "this not that" explanation), then prove it with examples: the same message written in the voice and out of it. That becomes a section of the brand guidelines, with rules for the words the brand uses and avoids, how it handles humor, how it speaks to different audiences and how the tone flexes across channels.
- 02
Then it has to be practiced. A voice that lives only in a PDF dies within a year, because every new hire and every new agency writes the way they always did. The brands that hold a voice have a writer or a creative director who reads the work before it goes out, from the social caption to the script of the brand film, and sends it back when it sounds like somebody else. Voice in film is its own craft: the narration, the on-screen type and the way a subject is allowed to speak all carry it.
At RIOT
Brand voice at RIOT
We have worked with Coach for more than a decade, across campaigns, sizzle reels, holiday films and documentary work, which is long enough to know a brand's voice the way you know a friend's. For the Washington Commanders, the rebrand film and the new identity trailer had to establish the voice of a team with a new name: what it sounded like had to be settled before anyone saw what it looked like.
Watch out
What people get wrong about brand voice
Confusing voice with slogans. A tagline is a sentence; a voice is how every sentence is written. Brands that spend months on a line and no time on the voice end up with a great headline on top of copy that could belong to anyone.
The other mistake is defining a voice that no human can sustain. "Bold, irreverent, authentic and premium" describes nothing, because it describes everything. A voice has to leave things out. If there is no sentence the brand would refuse to write, it does not have a voice yet.
