The Brand Voice Exercise We Run With Every New Client

Ask a founder to describe their brand's voice and you'll almost always get a list of adjectives — friendly, professional, bold, approachable. Those words feel meaningful in the room, and they're nearly useless the moment someone actually has to write a customer email or a product description, because two people can read "friendly" and produce completely different sentences, both defensibly friendly.

The exercise we run to fix this starts by throwing the adjectives away and working from real examples instead. We ask for three pieces of writing the client genuinely loves — could be from their own brand, could be a competitor's, could be unrelated entirely — and three they actively dislike, from anywhere. The contrast between those two piles reveals far more about actual voice preference than any adjective list, because it's grounded in real sentences instead of abstractions.

From there, we build what we call a spectrum exercise: for each voice dimension that matters — formal versus casual, serious versus playful, reserved versus expressive — the client places their brand on a line between two extremes, and critically, explains what specifically would be too far in either direction. "Playful, but never at the expense of looking credible to an enterprise buyer" is something a copywriter can actually apply. "Playful" alone is not.

The output isn't another adjective list — it's a short set of paired examples: a sentence that hits the voice, and a near-miss sentence that violates it in a specific, nameable way. "We'd say this. We would never say this, because it crosses into [specific failure mode]." That contrast is what makes a voice guideline usable by someone who's never met the founder and has thirty seconds to write a social caption.

The test of whether this exercise actually worked: hand the resulting guide to someone outside the founding team, give them a scenario the guide doesn't explicitly cover, and see if they land somewhere the founder would recognize as "us." If they can, the voice work is real. If they still have to ask the founder what to do, the adjectives won, and the exercise needs another pass.