Branding is the process of nurturing a living organism. It’s composed of the DNA of several different visions twined together, shaped by many creatives across the organization. The result is a braided, colorful rope of ideas. From that creative experience comes a unique and evolving identity.
Brand is intrinsically linked to lived experience. One of the most enduring influences in this process is the writer’s voice in branding. That’s why brand creation must thrive as a living process.
Brand creative newsletter Whiteboard Walks compares a brand’s living growth process to an “ecosystem.” The author, “Sean,” describes branding as a broader ecosystem, incorporating insight, the experiences of both customers and employees, and strategic reinvestment.
Observing our own world experience reveals that all ecosystems undergo a natural process, known as “succession,” in which they evolve. A brand, as a living thing, undergoes its own natural succession.
Branding is a Living Process, Not a Fixed Identity
A brand undergoes character development. It doesn’t have a fixed identity because this would limit its growth. Acknowledging this development from green shoots to a lush garden is essential.
Leadership coach Debbie Gregory called the personal brand process “the power of knowing who you are.” Knowing the core of who your brand is as an entity is more abstract. However, the core is the same. Identity is constantly growing from that core recognition of self.
Brand identity is in a constant state of discovery. This continuing discovery from a core of identity is brand essence.
Why Brand Voice Consistency Matters Through Change
Your customers will come to identify the brand by its unique characteristics. While their relationship with your visuals will be more direct, something deeper happens over time. They’ll start to notice the unique qualities that define your voice.
Think of some of the world’s oldest and most iconic brands. Take Coca-Cola, for example. This brand started out as a medicine and went on to become the world’s most popular soft drink. The brand retains elements of the “classic” Coca-Cola visuals even in its modern iterations.
Many people instantly recognize Coca-Cola by its distinctive red-and-white visual identity. A Coca-Cola ad permanently changed the appearance of Santa Claus. While more subtle, this brand’s voice is distinctive due to its heritage. Coca-Cola’s message, its “brand essence”, is happiness. Harmony, happiness, and timelessness are the characteristics that narrate all Coca-Cola adverts.
Language as the Thread That Holds Branding Together
Speaking with the Creative Review, Zosia Swidlicka, founder of Opening Line, explained that brand language is “a thread” that connects every single aspect of a company.
Swidlicka stressed the importance of language from a brand’s inception. The author explains how failing to express a brand through words is “failing to say anything.”
Understanding the Writer’s Voice in Branding
A writer’s voice is like a snowflake or a fingerprint. But it’s human, genuine, and one-of-a-kind. It blends technical elements, such as syntax choices and vocabulary, with personality, tone, and experiences.
Defining the Writer’s Voice in Branding
Script Mag compared the writer’s voice to a musician’s “sound.” Instrumentation composed in a specific way will make Howard Shore or Hans Zimmer stand out among composers. If you know their work while reading this, you can hear those differences in your head. This is how a writer works their voice into branding. They are the cellists, and the brand is the music.
How Voice Differs from Style and Tone
A writer’s voice surpasses style and tone. The author can write in a heavier tone, or a different style, and still be recognized as themself. Think of some of your favorite books. Let’s use J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings versus Tolkien’s The Hobbit, for example. The same author writes both of these books. One, however, is a fantasy war epoch, and the other is a children’s story, with distinctive differences in tone and word choices.
In the Writer’s Room: Building A Brand’s Character Arc
Vital Card is a credit card and fintech app that rewards users for building good credit habits. What today boasts a strong metallic card and a futuristic app began in a very different place. Its voice and character first took shape in the home theater of an investment banker’s mansion just outside of Phoenix. I know because I was Vital Card’s writer at the time.
Our CMO gathered the whole team around the theater and gave us sticky notes. He told us to imagine a word that we associated with the kind of character we wanted the brand to become..
We hung drawing boards on the wall, covering them with slogans, connecting words and phrases with more sticky notes and Sharpie-written statements. We thought of it as starting a movement. To us, it seemed our words and the brand they were forming would create something meaningful for financial literacy.
From those words and Sharpie-scrawled messages came a slogan that is still used in Vital’s messaging. It began with single words and phrases, inspiring an entire character arc centered around Vital Card.
Using Storytelling for Brands from Day One
Storytelling is fundamental to branding. Creative branding experts agree: 99% of us want to form relationships with our preferred brands. They want to live the story with you from day one.
When ideating your brand language, consider your customer’s desires and the outcome they have when using your product. Instead of coming up with something new, come up with something real.
Voice vs. Tone: What Writers Control in Branding
Writers control the articulation of that brand. The brand itself dictates the tone. I can convey the joy or sophistication of this character through my unique narration. I just can’t change the brand essence while I’m doing it.
We give this invisible person a voice. So the writer, in a sense, becomes the brand in the same way a method actor becomes a character. Sometimes, when a person leaves a company, you can sense a noticeable shift in the tone of the emails. It’s like noticing when a character in a show has been recast.
Aligning Tone of Voice in Marketing with Brand Strategy
When I worked with Vital Card, our CMO was always stressing the importance of snatching a social media scroller’s attention span straight from the stream of doom scrolling.
Brand is a steady, strategic positioning of who your company is to the consumer.
Writing Across Channels with a Unified Voice
Copywriters often wear many hats at a startup. In previous experiences, I found myself writing everything from investor pitch decks to card carrier letters
Writing style choices change across formats. You can be wordier in an article than you can be in a copy insert. You can be wittier in an email or an SMS than you can be when writing a letter to investors.
Remember, though, tone and style are not the same as voice. Your unique voice has to be recognizable across all these different channels. You have to make the brand gel with all these different media. It’s a writer’s water Olympics, but it’s necessary to keep your brand consistent.
When Writers Are Brought in Too Late: Common Branding Pitfalls
Branding experts, such as Sarah Hamid, argue that writers should be involved in the branding process as early as possible.
Consequences of Inconsistent Brand Voice
An inconsistent brand voice is like a fake personality; the audience will suss it out. Inconsistent branding causes confusion and undermines credibility. Ultimately, the consequence of a fragmented voice is detachment and loss of interest from the audience, even those who were previously invested in your growth.
Missed Opportunities in Storytelling for Brands
Writer Maya Sayvanova argues that many brands lose opportunities because they strive to be better rather than to be different. She feels that forming a distinctive brand is far more effective than always boasting above others.
Why the Writer’s Voice in Branding Is Your Brand’s DNA
As a brand writer myself, I look at brands differently now. I find myself smiling whenever I think of Dove’s “like a girl,” or Nike’s “Just do it,” or Capital One’s “What’s in your wallet?” Somewhere, in the corner of some cubicle corner of their own Manhattan, another writer scrawled those phrases in Sharpie, didn’t they?
To the kid buying sneakers, or the little girl who wants to look her best, that message means something. Somewhere between a kid on a basketball court and a writer’s Sharpie notes, a brand sat down and did life with us. Doing life with our customers is foundational, enduring, and endgame. You don’t have to pull a rabbit from a hat, but if you can write “like a girl,” if you can “Just do it,” then you’ve completed the mission.
Examples of Strong Writers’ Voice in Branding
Have you ever walked through Times Square at night? All those flashing TV screens are filled with an all-time brand hall of fame. The LEDs sear into your mind, and you can see the many logos even when you close your eyes. However, a brand is more than an image, and strong brand voices can sometimes be more subtle. Some, like Mailchimp, are praised for that subtlety.
Mailchimp uses catchy phrases like “High five! ” or “Rock On!” These phrases have become a fixture of the brand’s common vernacular. Mailchimp is talking like a real person and a friend.
Why Voice Outlasts Visual Identity
A brand’s voice outlasts its visual identity because logos are in a constant state of evolution. Keep in mind, though, that many logos are still recognizable in a way that voice isn’t. A brand’s voice, however, must be consistent and distinctive to be recognizable. Because the voice is an abstract figure of the brand, the voice can’t be compromised.
Practical Ways to Elevate the Writer’s Voice in Branding
One way that brands can amplify the importance of a writer’s role in branding is to codify early efforts. Brands often make mistakes early on by not documenting and making clear notes in the living archives of the brand’s baseline.
Embedding the Writer’s Voice in Brand Guidelines
A writer’s unique voice will influence how the initial copy brand code book comes into being. This is how beloved brands like Mailchimp become bigger than competitors.
Building Systems for Brand Voice Consistency
Early record-keeping in spreadsheets or platforms like Asana plays a critical role in brand development—something branding experts emphasize at every stage.
Involving Writers in Cross-Functional Teams
At Vital Card, I contributed to multiple teams beyond copywriting, including product, compliance, and engineering. One example: we encountered a bug affecting Mastercard’s True Name functionality, which risked displaying trans users’ legal names instead of their preferred names.
While the dev team worked on a fix, I suggested a temporary workaround—neutral greetings like “Hello!” or “Good morning!” inspired by apps like Evernote. It resolved the immediate issue and sparked a new direction. The team embraced the idea, turning greetings into a fun, dynamic feature that became a signature part of the app’s early identity.
Sometimes, simpler is just better. The product team loved the idea of the new fun greeting so much, likening it to the message you get in Hall’s cough drop wrappers, that they decided to keep it for the whole alpha series of Vital. Even after True Name got fixed, greeting text changed to something fun and different depending on the time of day, and became a memorable part of that earliest iteration of Vital Card’s fintech app.
Training Stakeholders on Tone of Voice in Marketing
Your investors, executives, and legal teams will all have a say. At Vital Card, our brand was so small that stakeholders were often invited to branding meetings so they could see the process firsthand. Branding experts also recommend hosting workshops and providing brand guides to train each brand stakeholder in the brand’s continuity and development. For Vital, this became such a necessary part of the process that they even hired a consultant to host weekly sessions with us on the brand persona and brand voice process.
Why the Writer’s Voice in Branding Deserves a Central Role
At their core, brands are built by people. A human voice distinguishes a brand as something living and timeless. Writers provide immaterial value to this living process.
As a brand takes its tone and turn of phrase from a human author, it builds a concrete foundation that can last for decades or more. The voice is the link that connects emotional expression with strategic craft. Investing in the writer’s voice in the brand ultimately guarantees a future of brand resonance.
About the Author
Rachel Brooks writes a variety of business articles and website copy on topics such as technology, computer software, marketing, advertising, and more. To learn more about Rachel or to have her write for your brand, sign up for nDash today!