Your Brand Voice Document Isn’t Working
There is a chasm between B2B brands and consumer brands when it comes to brand sophistication. For example, most B2B brands have a brand voice document somewhere. It probably says something like: be friendly, be professional, be human.
Those aren’t a brand voice. They’re aspirations. And for years, vague aspirations were easy to hide behind because the gap between “be professional” and what professional actually sounds like on a Tuesday morning in a sales email was never visible enough to matter.
Then AI writing tools arrived. And when you drop “be friendly and professional” into an LLM writing prompt, you get the same generic output every other brand gets. The tool can’t interpret an aspiration. It needs an instruction.
Brand voice is the consistent personality and communication style an organization expresses across every channel, every format, and every person or tool writing on its behalf. Vague guidelines produce vague content. Specific guidelines produce a recognizable brand.
After 25+ years building brand strategy for healthcare, commercial real estate, and B2B organizations, one language pattern holds, even in the age of AI: The brands that communicate most consistently are the ones whose voice guidelines are specific enough to actually follow.
Brand Voice vs. Brand Tone, and Why the Distinction Matters
Brand voice and brand tone are related but distinct, and confusing them is one of the most common reasons voice guidelines fail in practice.
Brand voice is consistent. It’s the personality your brand expresses in everything it writes: the combination of word choices, sentence structures, formality level, and overall communication style that makes your content recognizable as yours.
Brand tone shifts depending on context. A proposal sounds different from a LinkedIn post. A crisis statement sounds different from a product launch email. The tone adapts to the situation. The voice stays the same underneath it.
The practical implication: Your guidelines need to address both. A voice section that defines the core personality. A tone section that shows how that personality expresses itself differently across formats and situations. Guidelines that collapse the two into one vague descriptor, “confident and approachable,” end up governing neither.
What Goes Into B2B Brand Voice Guidelines
Most brand voice guidelines fail not because they’re missing components, but because the components they have are too abstract to use. We need clarity and a repeatable point of view. Here’s what specific looks like.
- Voice personality traits. Three to five descriptors that define how the brand communicates, paired with what it does not. Confident but not arrogant. Direct but not blunt. Expert but not jargon-heavy. Each trait needs a contrast to be usable. Without the contrast, “confident” means whatever the writer decides it means.
- Words and phrases to use. Vocabulary that is on-brand: terms the organization owns, phrases that reflect its positioning, language its audience recognizes and uses themselves.
- Words and phrases to avoid. Overused industry jargon, hyperbolic claims, filler phrases, and language that undercuts the brand’s positioning. This list is as important as the approved vocabulary, and most brands skip it entirely.
- Tone variations by context. How the voice adapts across different formats. Website copy, sales materials, LinkedIn posts, email, and proposals all require different tone calibrations within the same voice.
- Writing style rules. Sentence length preferences, punctuation conventions, formality level, use of humor, and formatting norms. The more specific, the more useful.
- Before and after examples. The single most useful element in any brand voice guide. Show what off-brand sounds like. Show what on-brand sounds like. The contrast makes the guidelines actionable rather than aspirational.
One very easy gut check is to attach your brand voice to a recognizable celebrity with a specific tone. Does your brand sound more like Matthew McConaughey or Samuel L. Jackson? Aubrey Plaza or Zooey Deschanel? David Attenborough or Ricky Gervais?
It sounds silly, but this will help.
Why Most Brand Voice Guidelines Don’t Get Used
Most brand voice guidelines fail for the same reason: They’re written for the board of directors, not for the writer.
They describe what the brand values rather than showing what the brand sounds like. They use abstract and affable language, “authentic,” “human,” “bold,” without defining what those words mean in practice. And they assume the writer has enough context to translate a personality trait into an actual sentence.
The fix is specificity. Guidelines that include actual sentence examples, actual vocabulary lists, and actual before-and-after comparisons get used. Guidelines that describe the brand philosophically get filed and forgotten.
A brand voice guide is only as valuable as its adoption rate. If writers aren’t using it, it’s not a voice guide. It’s a document.
B2B Brand Voice Considerations That Are Different From B2C
B2B brand voice operates under different constraints than B2C, and the guidelines need to reflect that.
Multiple audience segments read the same content. A B2B brand might be writing for a CFO evaluating ROI, a practitioner evaluating usability, and a procurement manager evaluating risk, sometimes in the same piece. Voice needs to be authoritative enough for the executive and accessible enough for the practitioner.
The buying cycle is long. B2B buyers spend months with a brand before making a decision. Voice consistency across that timeline builds confidence in ways that individual campaigns cannot.
Jargon is a double-edged tool. Industry terminology signals expertise to insiders and creates distance with everyone else. Guidelines need to specify when technical language is appropriate and when plain language serves better.
Trust is the primary currency. B2B buyers aren’t making impulse decisions. Voice that sounds confident, consistent, and credible builds the trust that eventually closes. Voice that shifts between channels introduces doubt at exactly the wrong moment.
How to Develop Your B2B Brand Voice
Knowing how to create a brand voice that actually gets used means starting with the step most organizations skip: writing before-and-after examples before you finalize anything else. Without them, every other component stays abstract.
Start with an audit. Pull ten to fifteen pieces of recent content across different channels and formats. Read them as a prospect would. What personality comes through? Is it consistent? Where does it drift?
Define three to five voice traits with contrasts. For each trait, name what it is and what it is not. Specific is not the same as blunt. Expert is not the same as jargon-heavy. The contrast is what makes the trait usable.
Write before and after examples for each trait. This is the most important step and the one most organizations skip. Show what off-brand sounds like. Show what on-brand sounds like. Do this for at least three different content formats.
Build the vocabulary lists. Preferred terms, prohibited terms, and explicit decisions about industry jargon. These lists do more to shape actual writing than any personality description.
Test it before you finalize it. Give the draft guidelines to three people who write for the brand. Ask them to apply the guidelines to a real piece of content. What they struggle with tells you what needs more specificity.
Brand Voice and AI Writing Tools
Brand voice guidelines have taken on new importance as AI writing tools become part of more marketing workflows. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude generate content based on the instructions they receive. Without explicit voice guidance in those instructions, the output defaults to the same generic prose every other brand gets from the same prompt.
A well-built brand voice guide, with specific traits, vocabulary lists, and before-and-after examples, can be adapted directly into AI prompts. The specificity that makes guidelines useful for human writers is the same specificity that makes them useful for AI tools.
Vague in, vague out. Specific in, on-brand out.
What This Looks Like in Practice
MAX Surgical Specialty Management came to us with a problem that’s more common than most brands admit: Their voice worked in person and fell flat in print. The surgeons and leaders at MAX have a magnetism and directness that made their pitch compelling in a room. On paper, that quality was gone. Their existing marketing had none of the swagger, the East Coast candor, or the genuine confidence that defined the people behind the brand.
We built a brand voice around what MAX actually is rather than what the category typically sounds like. The competitive landscape was, as our own analysis put it, a lifeless and dull sea of dental office sameness: lots of blue, lots of stock photography, lots of interchangeable “partner with us” language. MAX had a real opportunity to stand apart, but only if the voice was specific enough to produce something different.
The resulting guidelines defined a voice that is bold and real, a direct and confident tone with the authenticity of someone who says what they mean and means what they say. Personality traits came with explicit contrasts. Vocabulary lists named what to use and what to avoid. Before-and-after examples showed the difference between corporate-speak and the MAX version of the same idea. The campaign that followed, anchored by the line “For Those Who Refuse to Blend In,” came directly from that foundation. The new brand identity is now fueling MAX’s PR push as they establish themselves as a premier leader in oral and maxillofacial surgery.
The guidelines didn’t just give the creative team direction. They gave everyone writing for the brand, across any channel or format, a clear picture of what MAX sounds like and what it doesn’t.
If you’re not sure your current voice guidelines would pass that test, COHN’s brand strategy practice is built to help organizations close that gap. We’d be glad to take a look.
