Brand voice is the consistent personality a business uses when it writes — the patterns of word choice, sentence rhythm, and attitude that make a paragraph recognizable as yours before the reader sees the logo. Most small businesses don’t have one. They have a homepage written in 2019, a blog written in 2024 by three different freelancers, and an “About” page written the week before launch by whoever was free.
The result reads like four different companies sharing one URL.
Voice vs. tone — they’re not the same thing
Two terms get conflated constantly. Voice is the constant — the underlying personality, the way the brand sounds in any context. Tone is the variable — how that voice adapts to the situation. The same brand should sound recognizably itself in a sales page and in a refund-apology email, but the dials shift.
Mailchimp publishes a public style guide that names its voice in three words: plainspoken, genuine, and a bit dry-humored. Adobe lands on Authentic, Wise, Welcoming. The shared move: three adjectives, not seventeen. A voice that’s “professional, friendly, approachable, modern, innovative, trustworthy, and bold” describes everyone and constrains no one.
The four dimensions you can actually test
The Nielsen Norman Group, after studying brand voice across hundreds of pages of marketing copy, found that voice can be reduced to four spectrums:
- Funny vs. serious
- Formal vs. casual
- Respectful vs. irreverent
- Enthusiastic vs. matter-of-fact
Treat each as a slider from one to five. A Santa Fe boutique law firm might land at serious-3, formal-4, respectful-5, matter-of-fact-3. A juice bar on Cerrillos Road might be serious-2, casual-5, respectful-4, enthusiastic-5. Plot two competitors on the same axes and the differences become visible — and disputable, which is the point. A team can argue about whether a sentence is “casual enough” only when “casual” has a number attached.
This is also the dimension where most “brand voice” exercises break. People pick adjectives like “approachable” that float free of any specific tradeoff. The Nielsen Norman dimensions force a choice: more formal or less, more enthusiastic or less, every word.
What voice looks like in actual sentences
Same product description, three voices:
Version A (formal, matter-of-fact, serious): “Our pasta sauce is made from San Marzano tomatoes grown in the Sarno valley. We use a slow-reduction method to preserve flavor.”
Version B (casual, enthusiastic, respectful): “We’re a little obsessed with San Marzano tomatoes — the ones from the Sarno valley, where the volcanic soil does most of the work. We cook them slow, we don’t add much, and we ship in small batches.”
Version C (casual, irreverent, dry-humored): “Yes, the tomatoes are from Italy. Yes, we slow-cook them. No, it’s not because we’re ‘artisanal’ — it’s because shortcut sauce tastes like shortcut sauce.”
None of these is “better” in the abstract. They are three different brands. The bug shows up when one brand publishes all three across different pages.
How do you know if your brand voice is working?
The Nielsen Norman researchers ran the classic voice tests — likability, believability, and fit with the product category — and found that the strongest predictor of perception was fit, not likability. A funny tone in a casket-sales context lowered trust no matter how clever the line. A serious, matter-of-fact tone made financial software feel more credible, even when readers said the funny version was “more enjoyable.”
So a working brand voice is not the one your team enjoys most. It is the one that matches what the reader already feels about your category, then slightly stretches it. That is the test: would a stranger, given three pages of your writing and no logo, correctly guess what business you are in and roughly how to feel about it? If they can’t, the voice isn’t doing its job yet.
A test you can run this week
- Pull ten pieces of your existing copy — homepage hero, three blog posts, a job listing, an “About” page, the last marketing email, two social posts, a service page.
- Strip the logos and the brand name. Black out anything that identifies the business.
- Hand it to five people who don’t work for you. Ideally three customers and two strangers.
- Ask three questions: What kind of business is this? How would you describe its personality in three words? Does this sound like one company or several?
The third question is the one that usually exposes the problem. If most readers say “several,” the voice is fragmented — almost always because nobody wrote it down before three different people started filling pages.
Writing it down without writing too much
A useful voice document runs about two pages. It contains: three voice adjectives with one-sentence definitions, a “we sound like this / not like this” pair for each one, a short list of words to use and to avoid, and a one-page situational matrix — how the voice adjusts in a sales page, a refund email, a press response, a careers post.
What it should not contain: a personality archetype quiz, a fictional “brand persona” with a fake name and demographic, twelve adjectives, or any sentence that contains the word “ethos.” Those exist to fill a deck, not to help a writer choose between two words at four o’clock on a Tuesday.
A working example, locally
When the visual identity for Slate Stern came together — a Santa Fe attorney handling personal injury, business litigation, and property rights — the voice work happened in parallel with the mark. Legal services skews formal and serious by default, but Slate’s actual practice was local, personal, plainspoken, and needed copy that read more like a careful neighbor than a billable hour. The voice document was short: serious, restrained, direct. No exclamation marks. Sentences that ended cleanly.
Brand voice work doesn’t require a six-week engagement. For most small businesses, two careful sessions and a written cheat sheet get you 90 percent of the way there. Patrick Iverson, working from Santa Fe with clients in Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and beyond, treats voice as part of every brand strategy and identity engagement — usually the cheapest deliverable in the project, and the one clients refer back to most.