Brand messaging versus brand voice, and how to tell them apart

What each term covers

Brand messaging is the set of things you have decided to claim: what you do, who for, what makes it different, what you promise. Brand voice is the character of the writing that carries those claims.

That distinction is easy and every article on this subject gets it right. The useful question is what to do next, and here I part company with most of them.

My position is that a brand voice is a set of rules somebody could break. 'Friendly, professional, approachable' is not a voice, because no sentence ever written has violated it. If your voice document does not let a colleague point at a paragraph and say that breaks rule 3, you have written adjectives and called it a voice.

The order matters too. Most businesses work on voice first because it is enjoyable, and leave the messaging vague. A distinctive voice attached to an unclear claim produces writing that sounds like someone but does not say anything.

Voice stays, tone moves

There are 3 terms here and the third gets left out.

Messaging is what you say. Voice is your consistent character across everything. Tone is how that character adjusts to the situation.

The NHS digital service manual puts this well enough to borrow. Its voice is described as neutral and factual, authoritative but calm and reassuring. Its tone then moves: serious and reassuring when the subject is a diagnosis, more conversational for something like exercise or diet. The character does not change. The setting does.

A useful check is whether your voice survives bad news. If your writing only works when you are announcing something good, it is a campaign style rather than a voice.

Brand personality has a framework, and it has critics

The vocabulary most people use here comes from Jennifer Aaker's 'Dimensions of Brand Personality', Journal of Marketing Research, 1997. She proposed 5 dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness, built as a measurement scale on the model of the Big Five in personality psychology.

It is worth naming, because a great deal of brand voice writing is Aaker's framework with the citation removed.

It is also worth attaching the disagreement. Azoulay and Kapferer, in 'Do brand personality scales really measure brand personality?', Journal of Brand Management 2003, argued the definition is too broad and takes in things that are not personality traits at all. Their example is hard to argue with: 'upper class' sits inside the sophistication dimension, and social class is not a personality characteristic. They also found the structure discriminates poorly between brands within the same category, which is the exact job a small business needs it to do.

Use the 5 dimensions as vocabulary for a conversation. Do not use them as a measuring instrument, and do not report a score.

What a voice decision looks like in 6 UK organisations

This is the artefact. Each of these is a real voice decision, taken from what the organisation publishes about its own writing or from its live copy. The last column is the point: every genuine voice decision costs you something, and if you cannot name the cost you have not made one.

Organisation	The decision you can see	Where it comes from	What it costs them
GOV.UK	Metaphors are not allowed, on the grounds that they slow comprehension. Plain English is mandatory, and words like empower, transform and deliver are on the avoid list	GOV.UK style guide	Every trace of personality. GOV.UK is deliberately unmemorable, and accepts that
NHS	Avoids the word 'should', because it can sound patronising, and phrases guidance as something to discuss with your doctor rather than an instruction	NHS service manual	Directness. Telling people what to do is shorter and would sometimes be clearer
Monzo	Humour is rationed by an explicit rule, a pinch rather than a dollop, and jokes must never be at the reader's expense. Apologies are worded as a sincere apology rather than a formal one	Monzo tone of voice	Consistency of fun. Most of the app is written plainly, so the brand cannot lean on wit
Starling	Speaks as 'we' about a mission rather than as 'you' about your needs, and describes the bank by what it believes rather than by product features	Starling about page	Immediate relevance. A reader looking for a feature list has to go somewhere else
Scope	Presents itself as many voices rather than one, and states that it does not shout	Scope brand guidelines	Volume and speed. Amplifying other people's words is slower than issuing your own
Shelter	Publishes rules on how to write about the people it works with and about the housing emergency, so the language is decided centrally rather than per campaign	Shelter brand guidelines	Freedom for individual campaigns to reach for the most emotive wording available

Notice what none of these are. Not one is an adjective. Each is a decision that rules something out, and the ruled-out thing is often something the organisation would quite like to use.

Two UK banks, same category, different voice

Monzo and Starling are the pair I would put in front of anyone who thinks voice is set by your sector. Same country, same category, same regulatory constraints, comparable customers.

Monzo writes to you about your money and rations its humour with a stated rule. Starling writes as we about what banking should be, and carries its personality in dry asides rather than in warmth. Neither is more correct. They are 2 different answers to the same question, which is what makes voice a decision rather than a convention.

If you cannot articulate how you differ from the nearest business in your category, that is a messaging problem showing up as a voice problem. I set out the underlying distinction in identity and self-concept in consumer behaviour, which covers why declaring a personality does not give you one.

How to write yours down

There are 3 parts, and none of them are adjectives.

The words you use for your own things. One name per service and per stage of your process, written down, used everywhere. This overlaps with governance rather than branding, and I cover the record in content governance.

The rules with a cost attached. Aim for 5 or 6. Each one should rule out something tempting: no exclamation marks, no jokes about the customer's situation, never claim a result without the evidence beside it, no industry term unless it is the shortest accurate word. If a rule costs nothing to follow it is not doing anything.

The tone map. List the 4 or 5 situations you write in, such as a first enquiry, a price, a delay, an apology, a refusal, and say how the voice shifts in each. The apology and the refusal are the ones that reveal whether a voice is real.

The clarity standard sits underneath all of it, and is the same one in plain English as a conversion tactic.

What I have watched go wrong

The failure I have seen repeatedly, across more than 20 years in communications and marketing, is a voice document that describes a personality nobody in the organisation has.

It usually happens when the document is written by whoever is most comfortable writing. The voice comes out sounding like that person, everyone else finds they cannot produce it, and within a few months the published content splits into 2 registers: the polished pieces by the author of the guide, and everything else.

I have no measurement to offer on that, and I have never compared organisations that avoided it. What I take from it is a preference for rules over character description. A rule can be followed by someone who does not share the author's instincts. A personality cannot.

Find the rule your last 5 posts obey

Take the last 5 things your business published and try to find a rule that all 5 obey and that a competitor's writing would break. If there is not one, you do not currently have a voice, whatever the document says.

Then write the 3 rules you would be willing to enforce, with the cost of each written next to it. A set of 3 enforced rules beats a page of adjectives, and you can add to them once you have found out which ones people can follow.