How to Build a Brand Voice Guide That Your Team Will Actually Use

Key Takeaways

• A voice guide gets used when it helps someone write the next sentence. Short rules, paired examples and a channel table do that better than a list of adjectives.
• Separate voice from tone. Mailchimp's public guide keeps voice constant and lets tone shift with the reader's state of mind. Shopify's guide does the same.
• Name the situations, not just the traits. Shopify's guide lists eight common situations, such as simple errors and celebrations, with a do and a don't for each.
• Say how much of each trait belongs in each channel. Monzo's guide rates every principle per channel, from "none" to "maxed out".
• Tone differences are small but measurable. In one Nielsen Norman Group test, paired samples differed by about 0.5 to 1 point on a 5-point scale.

Why most voice guides go unread

Most guides fail for the same reason: they describe the brand instead of helping a writer. A page that says "friendly, professional, innovative" gives a writer nothing to decide with. Those three words could describe almost any company, and they do not tell you whether to write "Oops" or "We're sorry" in an error message.

The public guides from companies that publish them point to a different shape. They explain how to write, with rules and examples, and they say how the voice changes by situation. That is the structure below.

Step 1: Pick the traits that exclude something

Mailchimp's public guide describes its voice as plainspoken, genuine, translator-minded and dry-humoured. Each trait comes with a limit. Its dry humour is meant to be subtle and never condescending, and the guide says the team would rather wink than shout. The limit is what makes the trait usable, because it tells a writer what to leave out.

Shopify's voice and tone guidance for app builders frames four traits as pairs, each a "but not": be real, but not too tough or overly familiar; be proactive, but not needy or pushy; be dynamic, but not scattered or impulsive; guide, but don't handhold or prescribe.

Try this: write three or four traits in the form "X, but not Y". If you cannot name a Y that someone on your team might plausibly write, the trait is too vague to keep.

Step 2: Separate voice from tone

Mailchimp's guide says voice stays consistent while tone shifts with the situation and the reader's emotional state. Its advice is to think about whether the reader is relieved or confused before you choose how to sound. Humour is welcome when it fits, and the guide says to stay straight-faced when unsure.

Shopify uses the same split and goes further by listing eight situations with guidance for each:

Source: Shopify's published voice and tone guidance, abridged to six of its eight situations.

You do not need eight rows. Pick the four or five situations your team writes most often and give each one a sentence on how to sound.

Step 3: Write a "this, not that" list from your real copy

The most useful part of a published guide is usually the pairs. Shopify's guide has a Do and a Don't for every situation, including a warning against celebratory wording like "Congrats!" for routine setup steps, and against raw error labels like "bad request" or "invalid".

Monzo's guide has the same habit at sentence level. It asks writers to say "We're sorry" instead of "We'd like to apologise", to apologise once and then focus on the fix, and to use "blocklist" and "allowlist" instead of "blacklist" and "whitelist". Each rule is small enough to check in ten seconds.

To build yours, collect twenty real pieces of copy from the last month: emails, error messages, social posts, a support reply. Mark the five you would be proud to show a customer and the five that make you wince. Write the rule that explains each difference. That is your first draft, and it will be more honest than anything written in a workshop.

Case study: Monzo. Monzo publishes its guide as "Monzo Writing Principles" on its own site, and says it applies to everyone at the company, not only marketing, because all staff are custodians of the brand. The guide has three principles: Straightforward kindness, Everyday magic and Warm wit. Straightforward kindness is the foundation for all writing. The other two are scaled by channel: operational comms such as emails and legal pages are rated maxed out, low and none, while organic social is rated high, high and maxed out. It also states that the guide covers context, content and structure, not only tone. Monzo's page reports no measured results, so treat this as a model for how to structure a guide, not as evidence that it lifts conversion.

Step 4: Add a channel table

Monzo's per-channel ratings are the idea most teams skip. Instead of one voice description that every writer reads differently, the guide says how much of each principle each channel gets. Customer service gets high kindness, low everyday magic and no wit. Campaigns and paid social get all three at high. Notifications have limited space, so the guide says wit can be dropped.

You can copy the mechanism without the labels:

1. List your channels: website, email, support, social, ads, in-product text.
2. List your three traits.
3. Mark each cell as more, less or none.
4. Add one sentence per row on the exception, such as "no jokes in billing emails".

This also settles most arguments. A writer who wants a joke in a failed-payment email can look at the table.

Step 5: Test it with a stranger

A tone shift is easy to feel and hard to prove, so test it. Nielsen Norman Group published a small study in 2016, reviewed again in 2023, with paired website samples that were nearly identical except for tone. It describes four dimensions: formal versus casual, serious versus funny, respectful versus irreverent, and matter-of-fact versus enthusiastic. Fifty American respondents rated friendliness and formality on 5-point scales. The differences were statistically significant, but small, about 0.5 to 1 point, and the author expects similar effect sizes for all but the most extreme variations.

The lesson is not that tone will transform results. It is that readers notice tone, and that a single dimension can be checked cheaply. Take two versions of one email or one landing page section, change only the tone, and ask five colleagues from other teams which one sounds like you. If they split evenly, your guide is not specific enough yet.

Step 6: Keep it short enough to open

Mailchimp's TL;DR page is a good size reference. It boils a larger guide down to a few lines: clear, useful, friendly, appropriate. Then it lists plain style tips: lead with the main point, use active voice and short sentences, give concrete examples, and read your writing aloud.

Aim for the same: one page that a writer can read in two minutes, with a link to a longer reference for edge cases. Put it where people already write, such as the top of your content calendar or the template for your email tool. If you write for search and AI answers, the AEO checklist is a good companion.

For email in particular, tone also has to sit alongside deliverability rules. Email marketing tips for the Gmail and Yahoo sender rules covers the sender rules, so the voice guide can focus on wording.

Where voice meets positioning

A voice guide only works if it says something specific about who you are for. If you have not settled your positioning, start there, because traits chosen before positioning tend to default to generic adjectives. MITPO's positioning tool is one way to work that out first.

What to do this week

1. Collect twenty real pieces of copy and mark five good and five bad.
2. Write three or four traits as "X, but not Y".
3. Write five "this, not that" pairs from the examples you marked.
4. Choose the four situations your team writes most and add one sentence each on how to sound.
5. Build the channel table: three traits against your channels, with more, less or none in each cell.
6. Run one tone test: two versions of one email, five reviewers from outside marketing.
7. Cut the draft to one page and put it in the tool where people write.

FAQ

What is the difference between brand voice and tone?

Voice is the consistent personality of your writing. Tone is how you adjust it to the situation and the reader's mood. Mailchimp's and Shopify's public guides both describe voice as constant and tone as flexible.

How long should a brand voice guide be?

Short enough to read in a couple of minutes. Mailchimp publishes a TL;DR version of its larger guide for this reason. Put the traits, a few paired examples and a channel table on one page, and link out for detail.

How many personality traits should a brand voice have?

Three or four is practical. Monzo's guide uses three principles, and Shopify's uses four pairs. More than that is hard for a writer to hold in mind while drafting.

How do I know the guide is working?

Check that new copy matches it without the author needing to ask. A simple test is to show two versions of a piece to a few readers and ask which sounds like your brand. Nielsen Norman Group's study suggests tone differences are small but measurable.