Brand voice is often treated as something decorative—like selecting a font or a color palette. A superfluous layer; the icing on the cake. Companies often design entire websites with “lorem ipsum” text, figuring they’ll fill in the blanks later.
But brand voice isn’t just “stuff” to be filled into empty content buckets. It’s literally the heart and soul of your business. It’s the meat of your proposition—what you have to offer, why it matters, and how it makes a prospect’s life better.
What’s more, voice is a reflection of your organization’s deepest held beliefs and values. An articulation of the change you seek to create in the world, and in the lives of your audience. What you’re fed up with, what injustice you’re committed to correcting, what’s missing in the market that you seek to rectify.
For these reasons, brand voice isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic asset that shapes how people understand and connect with your company—across every touchpoint.
The art of sounding like yourself.
I was in a local convenience store when I ran into an old friend. At the time, I was wearing sunglasses and sporting a beard. “Carl, how ya doing?!” I said. “Oh,” he replied, pausing for a moment and smiling. “I didn’t recognize you until I heard the voice. How ya been, Paul?”
Just like voice identifies people, voice is a powerful identifier for brands too.
Most times, voice is already there, just waiting to be unearthed, polished off, and put on the page. That’s because it stems from attitudes and viewpoints already present in the organization.
Take, for instance: the website we just wrote, designed, and developed for local Memphis real estate legend Dede Malmo’s new firm, MalmoMemphis.
Throughout the site, we incorporated Dede’s authentic voice into the copy—ideas and expressions that signal his unflagging commitment to customer success.
Phrases like, “I go all in,” “I personally see it to completion,” and my favorite, “My hours are 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year,” give readers a strong sense for who Dede is and why they’d want to do business with him.
Far from inconsequential, these deft touches make all the difference when it comes to presenting your business to the market.
The true value of voice.
Your audience is skeptical. They’re bombarded with pitches and products on a daily basis, from billboards to social posts. We live in a world where so many of our interactions are attempts to influence us. As a result, we have our guard up. We’ve become hardened. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the noise.
But when a brand does break through and reaches you, it’s like angels from heaven. They seem to “get” you, they intimately understand your situation or the problems you’re looking to solve. And they convince you they have the capability to actually help you. To make your life better. To help you become a more fulfilled version of yourself.
This kind of belief can be supported by great design—fresh colors, beautiful typography, captivating images. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what you’re saying and how you’re saying it that truly pulls someone into your world and gets them to say “yes” to what you’re offering.
A strong brand voice makes your message clear, consistent, and credible. It signals your values, your intent, and your confidence. It helps audiences feel like they know you — and want to keep listening. In that way, it’s not just a communications tool. It’s a trust engine.
Inconsistency confuses customers.
It’s easy to keep a brand voice consistent when you’re a small company. But the problem of clarity and consistency becomes greater as companies scale. You have product people developing product messaging, brand folks developing executive talk tracks, performance marketing teams crafting paid ad copy, and social teams writing LinkedIn posts. As a result you end up with an AWS website and a Wendy’s social media account.
What often results is a hodge-podge of communications that doesn’t add up to customers who are encountering your organization in different channels. They’re looking for a coherent sense of who you are, but they’re experiencing the opposite: a fragmented personality. It’s like trying to make sense of a person in real-life who keeps shape-shifting—loud and boisterous one moment, quiet and soft-spoken the next. You don’t know who you’re dealing with. And so, you withdraw. It’s not safe. You can’t trust them.
Voice is your trust signal—protect it.
In a world of endless choices, a brand’s voice has the power to differentiate and create reassurance. The best brand voices convey knowledge, authority, and a genuine interest in the well-being of their audience. They may evoke these reactions in any number of ways, from humor to seriousness, compassion to boldness. But however a brand expresses itself, the goal is to create a sense of trust with the audience.
MarketSmiths helps organizations define their voice and uphold it across channels. By serving as our clients’ content agency of record we’re able to bring a level of consistency to brand communications that companies often struggle to achieve on their own. This is due to our team-based approach—every copywriter working on a brand here is paired with a content strategist who oversees every piece of work that goes out, ensuring that it adheres to the voice principles that have been outlined and contributes to a growing body of clear, impactful, and consistent communications.
That’s how trust is earned. That’s how a brand is developed. Voice isn’t just window dressing—it’s the very architecture of your offering.
Learn more about how MarketSmiths can help you develop a brand voice that resonates.
