Most Brand Voices Sound Like a Legal Team Wrote Them

Read your brand's last ten posts out loud.

Do they sound like a person? Or do they sound like a person who's worried about getting sued?

Most brand voice sounds like the second one. Smooth. Safe. Approved. Every edge sanded off by three rounds of review until what's left could belong to literally any company in your category. Swap the logo and no one would notice. That's not a voice. That's a hostage statement with a nice font.

I've written for a lot of brands you've put in your fridge. Here's what I've learned about why most of them sound dead, and how to fix it.

Why it happens

Nobody sets out to sound like a legal team. It happens by committee, one reasonable edit at a time.

The writer drafts something with a little life in it. Then it goes up the chain. Legal softens the claim. Brand adds the approved adjective. A VP removes the joke because "is this on-brand." Someone worries a competitor might do it better. Someone else worries a customer might not get it.

Every single edit is defensible. And the sum of all those defensible edits is a paragraph that offends no one and moves no one. You didn't write bad copy. You optimized the life out of good copy. Death by a thousand approvals.

The fear is the problem. Every safe edit is fear wearing a helpful face. And safe copy is invisible copy, which is the most expensive kind, because you paid to make it and it did nothing.

What a voice actually is

A brand voice is not a font, a color, or a list of adjectives in a slide deck that says "we're bold, human, and authentic." Everyone's deck says that. None of them are.

A voice is a set of choices you're willing to make that your competitor isn't.

That's it. It's the joke you'll tell that they won't. The opinion you'll take that they're too scared to. The specific word you use because it's true, not because it tested well. Voice is built out of the stuff most brands edit out precisely because it's the stuff that's distinct.

If your voice couldn't possibly belong to your competitor, you have one. If it could, you don't. You have a color palette and a wish.

How to give a brand a pulse

Here's the actual work, minus the workshop.

Have an opinion. A brand with no point of view has no voice, because voice is just point of view with good timing. Decide what your brand actually believes about the world, the kind of thing a real person would argue about, and then be willing to say it where customers can see.

Write like one person talking to one person. Not a company addressing a market. The best brand copy sounds like a smart friend who happens to know a lot about this thing, not an institution issuing a statement. Pick the one human on the other end and talk to them.

Keep the specific. Committees love the general, because the general is safe and unfalsifiable. But the general is also forgettable. "We deliver quality solutions" is safe and dead. The specific, weird, true detail is the thing people remember. Fight for the specific in every review.

And protect one flinch. Every good piece of brand copy has one line that made someone nervous in the approval meeting. That line is usually the whole reason the copy works. Learn to tell the difference between "this is a legal problem" and "this just makes me nervous because it's actually saying something," and fight like hell to keep the second kind.

The part leadership needs to hear

You cannot approve your way to a memorable brand.

Every layer of review lowers the risk and lowers the reward in the exact same motion. At some point you have to decide the goal is to be felt, not just to be safe, and then you have to give someone permission to write copy that a nervous stakeholder might flinch at.

That permission is the whole ballgame. It's the difference between a brand that sounds like it has a pulse and one that sounds like it has a compliance department. Both exist. Only one gets remembered, shared, and quoted back to you by a customer who felt something.

Safe is expensive. It just hides the bill.

What to do Monday

Read your last ten posts out loud, for real. Circle every line that could belong to a competitor. That's most of them, and that's the problem, sitting right there in a color you approved.

Then write the eleventh post like a person with an opinion who trusts the reader to handle it. Keep the flinch. Ship it. Watch what happens.

Making brands sound like they have a pulse is what I do for a living, for the brands in your fridge and the ones trying to get there. If yours reads like the legal team got to it, that's a fixable problem. You can see the work, or just reach out and we'll talk.

Your brand is allowed to be interesting. Someone just has to let it. 😘