How to sustain a credible tone of voice

The strongest brands don’t necessarily have the loudest voices. They simply sound unmistakably like themselves, year after year. Other brands drift over time, shaped by new team members, agencies, AI tools and the relentless pressure of deadlines and keeping up with the latest trends, until the voice that once felt distinctive becomes diluted.

Over the past twenty years I’ve helped organisations define and refine their tone of voice, and one thing has become clear to me: that creating a tone of voice is a project, but keeping it alive is a practice.

Know who you are before deciding how you sound

The first mistake when it comes to creating a tone of voice can happen before a single word has been written. Clients launching new brands regularly ask me to make them sound bold, funny or irreverent, in a bid to make their voice the unique differentiator in an increasingly noisy marketplace. But that’s rarely the answer. Because before you decide what you sound like, you need to be clear on who you are. What do you believe? How do you want people to feel when they interact with you? What role are you trying to play in their lives?

During my time as Head of Copy at Nike EMEA, being bold and provocative worked because Nike had earned the right to speak that way. For decades it challenged sporting convention, championed outsiders and built a brand around the belief that ‘if you have a body, you are an athlete’. The tone worked because it was rooted in what the brand believed. Nike didn’t just sound bold – it consistently behaved that way too, earning the right to speak with that same confidence.

The same applies to brands like Oatly. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has asked me to ‘make it sound more Oatly’. The oat milk brand’s playful, unconventional copy (often dubbed ‘wackwriting’, a style pioneered by Innocent Smoothies back in the late nineties) works because it reflects who they are. Trying to borrow that voice without the same foundations is a bit like turning up to a dinner party dressed in a sunflower suit because someone else pulled it off last week. It might grab attention for a while, but it rarely builds trust. If you’re a bank, a charity or a hotel, for example, constantly trying to be the loudest, quirkiest person in the room can quickly become exhausting for everyone involved. After all, convincing someone to open a bank account calls for a very different approach from persuading them to make their cappuccino plant-based.

That isn’t to say brands shouldn’t have personality. Some of the best examples are brands that express themselves with complete confidence because they know exactly who they are and what they stand for. Reformation manages to be witty and tongue-in-cheek without feeling like it’s trying too hard. Apple communicates with razor-sharp clarity and restraint, while Monzo has built a voice that’s refreshingly straightforward, inclusive and reassuring. None of them sound like they’re chasing the latest trend or trying to stand out for the sake of it. They simply know exactly who they’re talking to, what their audience expects from them and, most importantly, how they want people to feel.

One voice, different conversations

I spend a lot of time talking to clients about the importance of consistency. But consistency doesn’t mean sounding identical in every situation. I often ask clients to think about their brand as if it were a person. I don’t speak to my kids the way I speak to a prospective client, and neither of those conversations sounds anything like the emails I send to my broadband provider after another mysterious internet outage. The tone shifts depending on the situation and the audience – but it’s all still recognisably me. Brands should work in exactly the same way. Your website, social channels, customer service emails, legal copy and push notifications all have different jobs to do, yet they should still feel as though they’re coming from the same organisation.

The trick is knowing how to adapt your voice without losing it, and this is where tone of voice often comes unstuck. In the pursuit of consistency, brands sometimes force personality into places where it simply doesn’t belong. One example that sticks with me is KFC’s rejection email telling unsuccessful candidates they didn’t have ‘the secret recipe the Colonel was looking for’. Recruitment is a vulnerable moment, and I think everyone can agree that a rejection letter isn’t the place for chicken puns. Sometimes the most human thing a brand can do is put the jokes aside and communicate with empathy and humanity.

Speak like a human

Which brings me to the simplest piece of advice I give almost every client: speak like a human. Explain what you do in the same way you would to a friend. Resist the temptation to sound more clever than you really are. Avoid jargon that only exists to impress other people in your industry. Warmth, clarity and confidence will always outlast whatever writing trend happens to be having a moment.

That’s becoming even more important as AI becomes part of more organisations’ content workflows. AI can certainly help with speed and efficiency, but it can’t replace judgement or a genuine point of view. The brands that stand out won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content; they’ll be the ones whose voice still feels recognisably human. That doesn’t mean abandoning the em dash, which has somehow become shorthand for ‘written by ChatGPT’ despite remaining one of my favourite pieces of punctuation, or deliberately sprinkling in typos to prove you’re not a bot (let’s not go there, people.) It means writing sharp, thoughtful copy that reflects a real point of view. That’s what people are craving, and that’s what will cut through.

A tone of voice guide is only the beginning

Finally, if you do invest the time in creating a tone of voice guide, don’t let it become another beautifully designed PDF that’s enthusiastically launched before disappearing into a forgotten folder on someone’s desktop. In my experience, tone of voice guides rarely fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they’re too long, too theoretical or simply too easy to ignore. They get launched with enthusiasm, then quietly sidelined as campaigns pile up, deadlines loom and new people join the business. Before anyone notices, everyone is writing in their own version of the brand.

A tone of voice guide only becomes valuable when it’s practical, concise and constantly used. The best brand voices evolve as businesses grow, audiences change and cultures shift, but they never lose sight of who they are. They’re shared with every new starter, revisited regularly and referred to whenever important communications are being written.

Because in the end, tone of voice isn’t something you create once. It’s something you nurture. The brands that continue to sound confident, credible and unmistakably themselves over many years aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleverest guidelines—they’re the ones that revisit them, refine them and keep them alive.

Jo Matthews is an independent brand strategist and copywriter who has worked with Touchline for the past eight years on a range of its highest-profile tone of voice and brand communications projects. She was previously Head of Copy for Nike EMEA.