Brand Voice Examples (and How to Find Yours)
Five real brand voice examples, from Mailchimp to Who Gives a Crap, plus four tone dimensions and a step-by-step way to find your own voice and keep it when AI helps you write.
Mailchimp sums up its voice in a handful of short lines, and the first is "We are plainspoken." That makes it one of the clearest brand voice examples to borrow from, because every trait is specific enough to disagree with. Below are five brands, a way to place any voice on four dimensions, and a process for writing down your own.
What brand voice is, and how it differs from tone
Brand voice is the personality your writing has everywhere, while tone is how that personality adjusts to the moment. Shopify defines it as "a brand's public identity and how it expresses its values, point of view, and attitudes."
Mailchimp's style guide puts the split in one line: "You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes." Someone relieved to have finished a campaign needs a different tone from someone confused and asking for help on Twitter, yet both should recognise the same company.
Think of how a person talks to close friends at dinner and then to their boss in a meeting. Same person, different delivery.
Brand voice examples from real companies
The five brands below each lean on a different trait. Read them for the way a single adjective gets turned into actual wording choices.
Mailchimp: plainspoken and genuine
In its content style guide, Mailchimp lists four traits: "We are plainspoken." "We are genuine." "We are translators." "Our humor is dry." The overall aim is to inform and encourage, giving expertise with clarity, empathy and wit.
The guide is also candid about limits. Mailchimp's tone is generally informal, but clarity matters more than entertainment, and humour belongs only where it comes naturally. If you're unsure, "keep a straight face."
Diaspora Co. and Molekule: transparent and authoritative
Shopify labels Diaspora Co. as transparent: open about what it does, yet approachable, with a casual touch in its wording. Molekule gets the opposite label, authoritative, because it uses industry and scientific terms to show it knows its subject.
Two very different ways to earn trust. One does it by being open, the other by sounding like the expert in the room.
Who Gives a Crap and BLK & Bold: cheeky and earnest
Who Gives a Crap is the cheeky one, silly and direct. BLK & Bold sits at the other end of the spectrum, forthright and sincere.
Side by side, these brand voice examples show how a brand personality turns up in copy, not in a mission statement.
| Brand | Voice trait | What it sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | Plainspoken, genuine | Clear, informal, dry humour only when it fits |
| Diaspora Co. | Transparent | Open and approachable with a casual touch |
| Molekule | Authoritative | Industry and scientific terms to show expertise |
| Who Gives a Crap | Cheeky | Silly and direct |
| BLK & Bold | Earnest | Forthright and sincere |
The four tone dimensions you can place any voice on
Nielsen Norman Group describes tone of voice as four spectrums, and any voice sits somewhere on each of them. Plotting your own on the four is a quick way to see where it differs from the brand voice examples above.
- Formal versus casual
- Serious versus funny
- Respectful versus irreverent
- Matter-of-fact versus enthusiastic
The dimensions are separate, and Kate Moran notes that "casual and conversational are not necessarily synonymous." Irreverence also has a target: most irreverent tones are irreverent about the subject matter, rarely about the reader. Duke Health's hospital copy is formal and respectful, while a Progressive Insurance heading is casual and tries for humour.
The same error message shows the shift. "We apologize, but we are experiencing a problem" is formal. "We're sorry, but we're experiencing a problem on our end" is casual, and adding "Oops!" makes it enthusiastic.
Does it matter to readers? In the group's test, 50 American respondents rated paired samples for four made-up industries where only tone varied. The differences in friendliness and formality were statistically significant, though small, roughly half a point to one point on a five-point scale.
How to find your own brand voice
Finding your voice is a five-step job: know your audience, restate your values, choose describing words, write them into a chart, then share it. Shopify's process runs in that order, and the first three steps are research, not writing.
Start with your audience, mission and values
Define who you're writing for using customer analytics, surveys, competitor study, market research and buyer personas. Then revisit your mission statement and values to clarify the "why" behind the business.
Next, gather brand voice examples from existing brands or characters you admire and pick words that describe the personality you want. Shopify's test question is a good one: does the brand have a distinct point of view? Its reasoning is that clarity builds trust, since customers feel it when a brand has "a clear, consistent point of view."
Build a brand voice chart with sounds-like and doesn't-sound-like examples
A brand voice chart, sometimes called a voice style guide, turns those adjectives into rules. It holds sounds-like and doesn't-sound-like examples, sample copy and preferred terms.
The chart only works if people use it, so give it to everyone who communicates with your audience on the brand's behalf. Brand voice guidelines are worth nothing sitting in a folder, and the best brand voice examples in your chart are the ones your team can copy.
If you're stuck on what to write about once the voice is set, our list of blog post ideas is a decent place to start.
How to keep your brand voice when AI writes your posts
Photo by Moe Magners on Pexels
AI can hold your voice if you give it your voice to work from. Content Marketing Institute's four-step method starts with documenting it: the author prompted GPT-4o to define five voice attributes in a table with definitions, do's and don'ts, and had a usable draft in about a minute.
Then audit that draft against your own chart. Look for traits that conflict with the voice you want, or that sound like a competitor or like your industry in general. The AI's version was less concrete than the author's manual chart, which has three or four specific do's and don'ts per attribute and writes each attribute as a brand statement starting with an active verb.
After that, feed the tool what it needs: your voice guidelines with do's and don'ts, your most successful content, your style guide, and, if your voice is changing, text examples or links to owned content that show the voice you want. The sample chart warns against impersonal language, overly technical jargon, inaccurate information, invented stories and copied content.
The author's own view is that AI should support human creativity, not replace it. It works best as an instrument, not the composer.
That's the thinking behind our AI blog post generator, which reads your website before it writes so the draft starts from your wording. We tuned it on real WordPress sites until every post scored 81 or more out of 100 in Rank Math, and every account gets 4 complete posts, free for life, with no card. Whether Google penalises AI content is a separate question, covered in our piece on how Google treats AI-written posts.
Common brand voice mistakes to avoid
The commonest mistake is a voice that could belong to anyone, and copying brand voice examples word for word is the quickest route there. If your traits resemble a competitor or the industry at large, they aren't doing any work.
Vague traits come next. "Friendly" tells a writer nothing, whereas a trait written as an active statement with a few do's and don'ts gives them something to follow.
Forced humour is another. Mailchimp's own advice is to keep a straight face when in doubt, and Nielsen Norman Group's finding that irreverence usually targets the subject, not the reader, is a useful guardrail for anyone tempted to joke at their audience's expense.
Last, keeping the chart to yourself. A voice that only the founder can hear will drift the moment someone else writes a post, whether they use a keyboard or a prompt.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between brand voice and tone?
Voice is your brand's constant personality, and tone is how it adjusts to the situation and the reader's mood. Mailchimp's guide says its voice doesn't change much from day to day, but its tone changes all the time.
How many voice traits should a brand have?
Among the brand voice examples above, Mailchimp's style guide lists four traits. The Content Marketing Institute's AI exercise asked for five attributes, each with its own do's and don'ts. Pick a number you can write specific examples for.
Can I use AI to write in my brand voice?
Yes, if you give it your voice guidelines, your best content and your style guide to work from, then check the output against your own chart. Treat it as an instrument and keep a person in charge of the result.
Should my brand voice ever change?
Day to day it shouldn't, since the point of a voice is consistency. If you do deliberately change it, give your AI tool text examples or links to owned content that show the new voice.
Sources
- Voice and Tone — Mailchimp
- The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice — Nielsen Norman Group
- Brand Voice: What It Is and How To Create Yours — Shopify
- Harness AI To Harmonize Your Brand Voice: A Step-by-Step Guide — Content Marketing Institute
