Latest / Marketing Made Simple with Fexingo: Branding, SEO, and Digital Strategy for Beginners / Why Brand Voice Matters More Than Visual Identity
Transcript
- Lucas: You know how every branding conversation starts with 'what's your logo?' or 'what's your color palette?' — and I think we've done episodes here on visual identity before. But there's this whole other dimension that doesn't get nearly enough attention. Luna: Let me guess — brand voice. Lucas: Exactly. The words you use. The sentences you write. The way you sound when a customer reads your website, your emails, your social posts. I think voice might actually be stickier than your logo, in terms of how people remember you. Luna: Yeah, I can think of brands where I couldn't describe the logo but I could absolutely do their voice. Like, Mailchimp — I couldn't draw their monkey thing from memory, but I know exactly how they talk: friendly, playful, a little weird. Lucas: That's the exact example I wanted to use. Mailchimp published their voice and tone guide publicly years ago, and it's become basically a textbook for how to do this right. They literally say: 'We don't use jargon. We write for a seventh-grade reading level. We sound like a smart friend, not a textbook.' And that guide informs everything — from their error messages to their legal pages. Luna: It is remarkable how consistent they are. You can read a Mailchimp email and a Mailchimp blog post and a Mailchimp error screen, and they feel like the same person wrote them. Which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Lucas: If today's episode is useful to you — if you walk away with something you actually apply — that's kind of the whole point. These conversations stay ad-free because listeners support the show. So if you've gotten value from Marketing Made Simple, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo keeps it going. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to make sure we keep doing deep dives like this without any sponsor interruptions. Totally optional, but genuinely appreciated. Lucas: Alright, so back to voice. I want to make this super concrete. Let's talk about how you actually build a voice guide, because I think a lot of people hear 'brand voice' and think it's about writing a mission statement, but it's way more operational than that. Luna: Okay, give me the step-by-step. Pretend I'm a one-person marketing team and I need something I can actually use this afternoon. Lucas: Step one: define your core personality traits. Not in vague adjectives like 'professional' or 'trustworthy' — everybody says that. Pick three words that are specific enough that you could argue about them. Mailchimp uses 'fun but not silly, confident but not cocky, smart but not stodgy.' Another great example is Slack — their voice is defined as 'smart, friendly, and irreverent.' Luna: Irreverent. That's bold. How do you operationalize irreverent in a business messaging app? Lucas: Slack does it through small touches. Their loading messages say things like 'We're connecting to your workspace, but not in a weird way.' Their error pages say 'Something went wrong. It's not you, it's us. ' That irreverence is baked into error states — the moments when users are already frustrated. And it works because it's consistent and it's genuinely helpful, not just cheeky for the sake of it. Luna: I love that. So step one is three specific adjectives. Then what? Lucas: Step two: write the 'voice spectrum.' For each trait, describe what it looks like in practice, and also what it should NOT be. So for Mailchimp's 'fun but not silly,' they say 'use humor that's unexpected but never at the expense of clarity. Avoid puns that distract. Don't try to be funny in error messages.' That guardrails part is actually more important than the positive description. Luna: Because without the 'not' part, people default to their own interpretation. One person's 'friendly' is another person's 'overly familiar.' Lucas: Exactly. Step three: give concrete before and after examples. This is where most voice guides fail — they stay abstract. A good voice guide will say 'instead of writing 'We regret to inform you that your subscription has expired,' write 'Your subscription ran out. Here's how to get back in.' Show the transformation. If you don't show real sentences, people won't know how to apply the principles. Luna: I've seen this done really well at a company called Help Scout — they're a customer support software company. Their voice guide includes side-by-side columns: 'Corporate speak' versus 'Help Scout voice.' And the before is exactly the kind of thing you'd find in most SaaS products — 'Leverage our robust feature set to optimize your workflow' — and the after is 'We make it easier to do your best work.' Night and day. Lucas: That's the gold standard. And once you have those three pieces — personality traits, guardrails, and before and after examples — you've got a working guide. But the real test is whether you can hand it to a new hire or a freelance copywriter and have them produce on-brand copy without a ton of back and forth. Luna: So how do you know if your voice is actually working? Is there a way to measure it beyond 'feeling right'? Lucas: Great question. There's a diagnostic I like that comes from the content strategist Kate Kiefer Lee, who actually led Mailchimp's voice work. She suggests running an audit on your last ten pieces of content — emails, homepage, a couple of blog posts, a support article. Then ask three questions: one, is the voice consistent across all of them? Two, does it match the audience's expectations? And three, is it readable at an eighth-grade level? Luna: That readability benchmark is one of those things that sounds easy but most brands fail. I ran our own website through a readability checker once and it was at college level. We had to rewrite about half of it. Lucas: And that is not unusual. Most B2B companies write at a graduate level because they think it makes them sound credible. But research from the Nielsen Norman Group has shown that users actually perceive simpler writing as more credible and more trustworthy. They equate clarity with competence. The harder you are to read, the less people trust you. Luna: That's counterintuitive but makes total sense. If I have to struggle to understand what you're selling, I assume either you're hiding something or you don't understand it yourself. Lucas: Right. So the fix isn't 'dumb it down' — it's 'make it easier to understand.' Shorten sentences. Use active voice. Replace jargon like 'leverage' and 'synergize' with plain English. Your audience isn't less smart than you; they're just busy. Luna: Let's talk about a brand that has a very distinct voice but it's also polarizing. I'm thinking of Liquid Death. They sell canned water, and their voice is heavy metal parody — all dark humor, skulls, 'murder your thirst' — it's aggressively not what a water company sounds like. And it works because it's so distinct. Lucas: Liquid Death is a great case because it proves that voice can be a competitive advantage even in a commodity category. Their water is essentially the same as any other purified water. But the voice — the irreverence, the shock value — makes it shareable. People post about the can. They buy it as a gift. The voice creates the brand. Luna: But if you're a plumber or a tax accountant, you probably can't pull off 'murder your thirst.' So how do you find a voice that's distinctive but appropriate? Lucas: That's the million-dollar question. And I think the answer is: start with your audience's language, not your own. Listen to how your customers talk about your product in reviews, in support tickets, on social media. Those are the words they're comfortable with. Mirror those words back to them. If your customers say 'setup was easy,' don't say 'our onboarding process is seamless' — say 'set up is easy.' Luna: That's the mirror test. I've heard that called 'audience voice matching.' And it's powerful because it builds trust through familiarity. You sound like someone they already know. Lucas: Exactly. And you don't need a huge budget to do it. Start with a spreadsheet. List the top ten phrases your customers use. Then write your homepage headline using those exact words. See how it feels. It might feel too simple, but that's usually the right track. Luna: One last thing: consistency across channels. I've seen brands that have a great voice on their blog but then their customer support emails sound like a different company. Or their LinkedIn posts are buttoned-up even though their website is casual. How do you prevent that split personality? Lucas: It comes down to governance. The voice guide has to be shared with everyone who writes on behalf of the company — not just the marketing team, but support, sales, even product UI copy. And someone needs to be the voice steward, at least initially. That could be a content manager or even a founder in a small company, whose job is to review copy and ask 'does this sound like us?' Luna: Yeah, that review process is the only way to catch drift. Because people naturally fall back into corporate-speak or their own default style. You have to retrain them. Lucas: And it's worth the effort. A consistent voice is one of the few things that can cut through the noise. Your logo might get lost in a feed, but the way you write — the rhythm, the vocabulary, the personality — that's something only you can do. And when a customer recognizes your writing without seeing your name, that's when you know you've nailed it. Luna: I want to test that on myself. I'm going to take three random emails from my inbox tomorrow and see if I can identify the sender by voice alone, without looking at the logo. I bet I can. Lucas: Do it. And if you can't, that's a signal that those brands don't actually have a voice — they have a template. And that's the gap we're talking about today.