Walk through any corporate website and you’ll find a graveyard of dead language: “innovative solutions,” “next-generation technology,” “world-class service.” These phrases died from overuse years ago, but companies keep propping them up like they’re a marathon showing of Weekend at Bernie’s1.
Brand voice is the distinctive personality and perspective through which a brand communicates across all touchpoints. Think of it as the narrative architecture that instantly establishes the brand’s world and sets a consistent, recognizable tenor for every customer interaction.
Sadly, most brand voices are really bland voices.
Bland makes customers scroll past your content without stopping. Bland makes your emails disappear into the digital ether, unopened and unloved. Bland makes your social media posts invisible against the infinite scroll of sameness. Bland makes your website visitors bounce away in 3.2 seconds, looking for something—anything—that doesn’t sound like a committee wrote it.
Bland makes your employees cringe when they have to explain what your company does at parties.
Bland kills businesses. And not quickly—that would at least be merciful. When bland becomes your brand, your brand disappears slowly because you sound like everyone else. Then you’re forgotten.
Meanwhile, in creative writing workshops across the country, students learn that on the page—whether that page is deckle-edged or composed of pixels—a clear and compelling voice makes writing come alive.
Creative writing teachers (ideally) build a space for students to experiment, to fail, to find their unique way of seeing the world. They understand that voice isn’t something you manufacture in a corporate boardroom with whiteboards and Post-it notes.
Your brand has a voice, too. Yours might be suffocating under layers of committee approvals, legal reviews, and the crushing weight of “best practices.” But it’s there, gasping for air. Do you have something unique to say? Are you brave enough to let it breathe?
Fiction Techniques That Change Brand Voice
Great fiction writers have mastered specific techniques that help make their words unforgettable, and these techniques can be used to create brand copy that resonates on a deeper level. Here are just a few examples of how a brand might learn from a few of our American literary masters:
Toni Morrison’s sensory language: Morrison uses concrete sensory details like “the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory” to convey complex emotional states through specific, tangible impressions rather than abstract descriptions. Does your brand voice rely on concrete sensory details, or a bunch of buzzwords?
Raymond Carver’s dialogue: Certain brands can benefit from copy that sounds like real speech. Remember, people don’t actually speak in long, frilly monologues. Instead, they use fragments, pauses, and interruptions. Like Carver’s body of working-class short fiction, it may not be for everyone, but a bone-simple approach might strike the right chord for selling certain brands: “Look, our fabric softener…it’s not magic. But it does makes clothes softer.”
Flannery O’Connor’s revealing imagery: O’Connor could convey a character’s complexity through one specific image, such as the wooden leg in “Good Country People,” which speaks to Hulga’s spiritual emptiness, intellectual pride, vulnerability, and self-deception. Can your brand benefit from making such details—maybe even slightly askew details—more memorable and entertaining? “Eco-friendly packaging” is what every company calls it. Maybe you should opt for “reincarnated cereal boxes finding new purpose.”
Joan Didion’s precision: There’s a reason the best writers admire Didion. She regularly captured an entire worldview in a single, perfectly evoked moment: “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” Does your brand voice stir feelings in your audience? Does it delight them? Does it require surgical precision? Maybe “Our new razor is the best on the market” becomes “Shave nine minutes off your morning routine.”
James Baldwin’s emotional truth: Baldwin transformed personal pain into universal insight. “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.” His books didn’t just tell you that racism is bad; he showed readers the full weight of it. Can your brand move beyond surface-level messaging to tap into deeper human truths? Instead of saying you understand your customers, try demonstrating that understanding. Show, don’t tell.
A Nearly Real, Completely Fictional Scenario
Let’s say Maria owns a small bakery, the kind with sourdough loaves that crackle when you break the crust. Her bread actually tastes like bread, not the edible cardboard shipped frozen to grocery stores with a list of ingredients longer than a CVS receipt.
Maria wants her bakery’s website to sound “more professional,” so she jots down a list of phrases used liberally across her industry. She ends up writing sentences like: Artisanal baked goods crafted with time-honored techniques. Commitment to excellence in every loaf. Premium ingredients sourced from local purveyors.
All technically true, but that copy could appear on almost any bakery’s website—and probably does.
Before making the changes herself, though, she hires a friend to edit what she’s written. When the freelancer asks Maria to talk about her bread, she tells the story of getting up before dawn that day—she couldn’t sleep, anyway—so she decided she might as well make something beautiful. She talks about her sourdough starter, which she named Fernando twelve years ago. She has strong opinions about humidity levels and an obvious love for customers who drive twenty minutes out of their way because they, too, are tired of disappointing bread.
The freelancer smartly recognizes the need to capture Maria’s true voice: Real bread. Four ingredients, no compromises. Warning: May ruin all other bread for you.
After the website launches, Maria’s sales double.
Quirks aren’t bugs. They’re features. What makes you weird is what makes you memorable.
Voice Through Constraints
Poet Robert Frost famously criticized free verse poetry by comparing it to “playing tennis without a net.” In essence, Frost believed that poetry should have structure—rhyme and meter—to provide artistic discipline and challenge. To him, writing without those constraints made crafting poems too easy and less meaningful.
Constraints can force creativity, even when developing a brand voice. They push you past generic “solutions” toward something uniquely yours. Creating your own constraints—a net or set of boundaries for your communication—might lead to something wonderful.
Write a product description using only questions. Describe your company without using a single adjective. Explain your service in exactly 62 words.
With these (and other) constraints, the idea is that you’re not locked into preexisting ways of conveying your brand. If nothing else, you’ll find the words that most matter to your company and brand so you can begin to use them.
Here’s another exercise. Try rewriting your “About Us” page with these limitations:
- No words ending in “-tion” or “-ing”: This will help you begin to rely on concrete verbs and nouns instead of abstract concepts.
- No sentences longer than fifteen words: Eliminate corporate jargon and get to the point. Short sentences are easier to quickly understand.
- Include one specific failure: Build trust by showing how you’ve learned from your mistakes. People connect with companies that admit they’re not perfect.
- End with what you’re still figuring out: Demonstrating humility and ongoing improvement makes your company seem approachable. Nobody has all the answers, and we don’t trust those who say they do.
Start Where You Are
Remember, your brand already has a voice. Are you developing that voice intentionally? Every email, every product description, every response to a customer complaint reveals your brand’s personality.
Begin with one constraint: Choose one rule related to how you shape your brand’s voice and apply it everywhere for a month.
Find your rhythm: Read your copy out loud. Does it sound like how your company’s leaders—or, better yet, your customers—actually talk? Or does it sound like it was written by an alien insect in an Edgar suit?
Identify your truth: What do you actually believe about your industry, your customers, your work? Start there.
Stop worrying about saying the wrong thing, and start communicating like you have something worth saying.
Because you do. Don’t you?
1. This reference to Weekend at Bernie’s—a 1989 comedy film about two salesmen who must pretend their dead boss is still alive to avoid being killed themselves, which leads to increasingly absurd situations in which they manipulate his corpse—is incredibly dated, even older than the reference I made earlier this year to Adaptation (2002), which my (thankfully alive) boss called a “pretty obscure, 23-year-old pull.“
If your brand voice is really a bland voice, we can help.
You Might Also Like:
- The Power of Storytelling—Writing
- Reading as a Competitive Edge
- The Importance of Communication
- The Ultimate Guide to B2B Digital Marketing
- Ernest Hemingway’s Best Business Advice
- Getting It Right
Sign up for Bird Feed, our monthly newsletter, to receive articles like this in your inbox.
