Brand Voice Examples and a Guideline Template

A brand voice is the personality that stays the same in everything a company writes. Tone is how that voice adjusts to the moment: an outage notice and a launch post can share one voice and still sound different. Below are three real brand voices with the source for each, and a template you can fill in for your own in an afternoon.

The short version: a useful voice guide names three or four traits, each with what it does not mean ("confident, not arrogant"), shows how you open and close, lists words you use and avoid, and gives before-and-after examples. Anything vaguer than that, such as "friendly and professional", describes every company and guides nobody.

What is a brand voice?

It is the set of choices that make your writing recognisable before anyone reads the logo: sentence length, how directly you address the reader, what you joke about and what you never say. A voice is written down so that ten different people, or an AI drafting for you, produce copy that sounds like one company.

Brand voice examples

Mailchimp

Mailchimp's content style guide describes its voice as plainspoken, genuine, dry, subtle and clear, and sets its humour with paired limits such as weird but not inappropriate, smart but not snobbish. It also separates the two ideas cleanly: the voice stays steady from day to day, while the tone shifts with how the reader is feeling, and clarity always comes before a joke.

Atlassian

Atlassian's design system names three traits: bold, optimistic, and practical with a wink. Each comes with a job: give teams just enough support at the right time, highlight what helps people move forward, and stay direct, adding personality only when the moment suits it.

Skryvo

Our own voice profile, which Skryvo built from five approved writing samples, reads like this: short declarative sentences averaging 14 words with longer ones for contrast; direct second-person address; openings that start with a statement or a concession; closings that end on a call to action or a judgement; no exclamation marks, no rhetorical openers, nothing hyperbolic. It is a profile you could hand to a new writer, which is the test of a voice guide.

What makes a brand voice guide useful

• Traits with limits. "Witty, not silly" is usable; "witty" alone invites anything.
• Mechanics, not adjectives. Sentence length, person ("we" and "you"), contractions, punctuation you never use.
• Openings and closings. These carry more of a voice than the middle of a piece.
• Words to use and avoid. Include the industry clichés you refuse to write.
• Before and after. One rewritten paragraph teaches more than a page of description.

Brand voice guidelines template

1. Who we write for: one sentence on the reader and what they need from us.
2. Our traits: three or four, each as "X, not Y", with one line on what it means in practice.
3. How we sound: typical sentence length; we/you/I; contractions yes or no; emoji and exclamation marks.
4. How we open: two real openings we would use.
5. How we close: two real closings.
6. Words we use: five to ten, including product terms.
7. Words we avoid: five to ten, including clichés of our industry.
8. Tone by situation: launch, apology, how-to, social reply: one line each on what changes.
9. Before and after: one paragraph rewritten into our voice.

How to find your brand voice if you do not have one

Collect five pieces you are proud of, ideally written by different people. Read them aloud and note what they share: how long the sentences run, how they start, what they never do. Those shared habits are your voice; the template turns them into rules. This is also roughly how Skryvo builds a voice profile: it reads your website and the samples you upload, writes down the patterns it finds, and shows them to you to review and edit. How the brand voice works.

Write the guide for the person who joins next month, test it by asking them to rewrite one of your old posts, and fix every rule they could not follow.