Brand voice & verbal identity
Our three-week process gives your brand a voice that sounds like only your brand and a language system that anyone – your team, freelancers, AI, Dave in accounts… – can use to sound like your brand every single time.
We’ll dig into your brand, customers and competition, build your voice and messaging with you, and then document everything as guidelines anyone can use. Then we’ll set up a custom copybot that writes in your new voice (and not a bad AI karaoke version of your voice) from day one.
- KICK-OFF WORKSHOP
- VOICE OF CUSTOMER RESEARCH
- MESSAGING & POSITIONING
- BRAND VOICE
- HOUSE STYLE
- FULL VERBAL IDENTITY GUIDE
- CUSTOM AI COPYBOT
- TEAM TRAINING
A VOICE THAT DOES YOUR BRAND JUSTICE
We know that brand voice has a wee bit of a reputation as a fun, nice-to-have finishing-touch kinda thing. You pick three adjectives, throw in a few puns and a few branded phrases and call it a day.
And sure, some brand voices are exactly that.
But you know how Oatly and Bold Bean Co and Patagonia always feel like they’re saying something on-brand? That’s because their voices do more. It’s not just word choices or syntax that make their voice pop. It’s that every word comes from the POV or worldview or thing that they stand for.
Once that’s at the core of everything, every word the brand writes makes their whole brand make sense to everyone, whether they read an Instagram post or an email or skim your website.
Oh, and on a practical level, it means everyone who writes for you (your team, your freelancers, robot overlords…) writes from the same idea of who you are and with the same tone of voice.
TLDR: better copy, clearer brand identity, far fewer rounds of “can we make this sound more like us?” Boom.
How we nail and document your voice
Cards on the table: we don’t really “create” brand voices. Most of the time, about 80% of your brand voice already exists in your team’s heads, the stuff you’ve already written and your customer reviews. It just hasn’t been pulled out, sorted through and written down yet.
So what we do is part therapy, part archaeology. (We say the archaeology bit so that we can feel like Indiana Jones. The therapy part is real though: several clients have called our kick-off calls “brand therapy”, including a certified therapist. Alas, nobody has ever compared us to Harrison Ford.)
Basically, we go deep on your brand, your story, your mission and turn that into a voice that feels like only your brand could have.
DEVELOP YOUR UNIQUE VERBAL IDENTITY
We dig into your story, customers, competitors and reviews until we find the red thread that ties it all together. Then we workshop that red thread into your brand’s big POV, the core of everything you write.
From there, we ask two questions. How would a brand that believes all of this talk? And how would it communicate so customers just get the brand, without having to read everything it’s ever written? Those answers become your voice and verbal identity.
CREATE YOUR BRAND VOICE BIBLE
We treat voice docs like a designer treats brand guidelines. They’re in-depth, they’re comprehensive and they cover how your voice, messaging and language shifts and changes so you’re always saying the same thing.
Expect to get back 70+ pages of rules and guidelines on how to write copy that always sounds like your brand.
When they’re done, anybody (even Dave in Finance) should be able to pick them up and write for your brand.
MAKE SURE AI (AND YOUR TEAM) CAN WRITE IN YOUR VOICE
Most brands use AI for at least some of their copy. And most of them have noticed it struggles to sound like them. We’ve spent 3 years trying, testing, failing and figuring out how to document a voice in a way AI can use. (We’ve also trained marketing teams at brands like KatKin and Octopus to do the same.)
So at the end of the project, we’ll set up a custom copybot in whichever AI tool your team already uses, built on your new voice and written in your voice (not a bad AI karaoke version of it). Then we’ll train your team to use it, and to be the guardians of your voice from there on.
“An absolute game-changer. Hugely transformational for us.”
max reynolds, founder, Beachbum
MESSAGING STRATEGY·VERBAL IDENTITY·BRAND VOICE·AI COPYBOT
Beachbum operate in a crowded category where every brand says the same thing. We did VOC analysis and competitor mapping to reveal that Beachbum's core customers weren't buying gear, they were buying belonging and joy. That finding turned into a full verbal identity system with positioning, voice guide, full site rewrite, retail decks, Klaviyo flows and an on-brand copybot. Revenue was up by almost 70% within 3 months.
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Let's have a chat about your copy and see if we can help. Prefer to email us? Drop a line to hello@dowordsgood.com