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Brand Voice Guidelines: How to Write Them So Your Team Uses Them

Published on October 24, 2026

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Brand voice guidelines are a short document that tells everyone who writes for your business how it sounds: the personality, the word choices, the habits to keep and the ones to avoid. Good ones fit on a page, give examples instead of adjectives, and change slightly by channel without changing the character behind them. Below is how to build that document, with a worked example and the Canadian details most templates skip.

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TL;DR

Voice is your constant personality. Tone is how it flexes by situation, such as a sales email versus a complaint reply.
Pick three or four voice traits and define each with a “we are / we are not” pair and a real before-and-after sentence.
Keep it to one page. If a new hire or an AI tool cannot write on-brand copy from it, it is too complex.
In Canada, add rules for English and French copy, and for CASL-compliant email and text messages.
Review it twice a year against real content, not against opinions.

What brand voice is, in plain words
Why guidelines matter more than good intentions
The parts of a brand voice guideline
A simple framework you can finish in an afternoon
Brand voice examples, described by type
Small word choices change how people feel
The Canadian layer most templates miss
Keeping the voice consistent as content grows
Our perspective
Where Courimo fits
A one-page template to copy
FAQ
Sources

What brand voice is, in plain words

Your brand voice is your personality expressed in writing and speech. A practical branding guide from a Canadian consultancy describes it as how your brand communicates across all channels, shaping the emotional connection and the consistency of your messaging.

Two ideas often get mixed up:

Voice is who you are. It stays the same on your website, in a proposal and in a social caption.
Tone is the mood you adopt for the moment. You sound more reassuring in a refund email than in a launch announcement, but you still sound like yourself.

Think of a good accountant. She speaks differently to a nervous first-time client than to a colleague at a conference, yet you would recognize her anywhere. That recognizability is the goal.

Why guidelines matter more than good intentions

Without a written standard, voice drifts. The founder writes the website, a freelancer writes the blog, an employee handles social media, and a sales rep improvises emails. Customers meet four companies.

There is research behind caring about this. A study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that strategic consistency across channels produces more positive brand attitudes than simple message repetition. In other words, you do not need to say the same sentence everywhere. You need to sound like the same company everywhere.

Authenticity matters too. Research on perceived brand authenticity identifies credibility, integrity, symbolism and continuity as the dimensions consumers evaluate, and continuity is exactly what a voice guide protects. Skeptical readers notice when a warm, human voice on social media turns into stiff legalese in an invoice.

The parts of a brand voice guideline

Most useful guidelines contain the same six parts. You can shrink them to a page.

1. Who you are talking to

Start with the reader, not the brand. Write two or three sentences on who they are, what they need when they read you, and what they are worried about. A voice for a Laval dentist’s patients differs from one for a Toronto logistics firm’s procurement managers, even if both want to be “professional”.

2. Three or four voice traits

Pick traits that are specific enough to rule things out. “Professional” and “friendly” fit every company. “Direct, practical, a little dry” does not.

For each trait, write:

What it means in one sentence.
A “we are / we are not” pair, for example: we are direct, we are not blunt.
One real sentence that shows it.

An overstuffed list is a warning sign. The same Canadian guide notes that organizations fail when they try to be everything for everyone, which dilutes the brand’s core character.

3. Tone by situation

A small table does more than a page of prose. Here is an example for a fictional Montreal accounting firm:

Situation	Tone	Sounds like	Avoid
Website homepage	Confident, clear	“We file your taxes and explain every line.”	Jargon, buzzwords
Sales proposal	Precise, reassuring	“Here is what is included, and what is not.”	Vague promises
Late-payment reminder	Calm, respectful	“A quick note about invoice 1042.”	Guilt, capital letters
Social media	Light, helpful	A short tip with one clear point	Forced humour
Apology	Plain, accountable	“We made an error. Here is the fix.”	Passive blame

4. Word list

List words you use and words you ban. Include product names, how you capitalize them, and whether you say “customers”, “clients” or “members”. Add contractions (yes or no), emoji (where), exclamation marks (rarely) and your stance on slang.

5. Grammar and mechanics

Keep this short: active voice, sentence length, Canadian spelling (“colour”, “centre”) versus American, date and currency formats, and how you write headlines. Decide once so nobody has to guess.

6. Before-and-after examples

This is the part people actually read. Take real copy from your own site and rewrite it in the voice. One pair is worth ten adjectives.

Before: “Our solutions leverage best-in-class methodologies to maximize stakeholder value.”
After: “We run your bookkeeping so you can stop dreading month-end.”

A simple framework you can finish in an afternoon

You do not need a branding retreat. Work through these five steps with the two or three people who write the most.

Collect ten samples. Pull your best and worst writing: web pages, emails, replies to reviews, a proposal. Mark what feels like you and what does not.
Interview the audience. Read customer reviews and support emails. Note the words customers use for your product. Those words belong in your voice.
Choose the traits. Circle the adjectives that come up repeatedly in the “feels like us” pile. Cut to four at most.
Write the rules. For each trait, add the “we are / we are not” line and one example.
Test it. Give the page to someone who has never seen your brand, or to an AI writing tool, and ask for a product description. The Canadian branding guide mentioned above makes this point: a one-page “Brand Bible” works better than a long manual, and if an intern or AI tool cannot produce on-brand content from it, it is too complex.

If you also need the visual side documented, our collection of public brand guidelines with copyable templates shows how companies lay out logo, colour and typography rules next to voice. For the positioning that sits underneath the voice, see our brand positioning statement guide.

Brand voice examples, described by type

Readers often ask for examples of brand voice. Rather than quoting famous companies, here are four archetypes you can recognize and adapt. Each pairs a personality with a believable line.

The expert guide. Calm, precise, plain-spoken. Good for law, finance, engineering. “Here are your three options, and the one we would choose.”
The friendly neighbour. Warm, local, casual. Good for restaurants, clinics, retailers. “Come in out of the cold. The coffee is on.”
The straight-talking challenger. Short sentences, opinions, a little humour. Good for startups and consumer apps. “Your old software is slow. Ours is not.”
The quiet premium. Restrained, elegant, few adjectives. Good for design, hospitality, high-end goods. “Made in small batches. Ready when it is ready.”

Notice that none relies on a long list of adjectives. Each is defined by what it does with sentence length, word choice and attitude.

Small word choices change how people feel

Voice lives in details. Consider “we” versus “you”. Experiments published by researchers at the University of Florida found that minor language variations, such as “we” versus “you and the brand”, shifted consumers’ attitudes toward brands, but the effect depended on the relationship the customer already had with the brand. “We” feels close when closeness is expected and can feel intrusive when it is not.

The practical lesson: do not copy a pronoun rule from another company. Decide it for your audience, then test it. A long-standing customer newsletter can say “we”. A cold outreach email may land better with “you” first.

The Canadian layer most templates miss

Most voice templates are written for a single-language, single-market company. If you operate in Canada, two additions are worth a paragraph each in your guide.

English and French

In Quebec, language is both a brand decision and a legal one. According to Éducaloi, public signs and commercial advertising must generally be in French, and other languages can appear alongside only if the French is markedly predominant. Check current requirements for your own situation, and ask a lawyer or the Office québécois de la langue française when you are unsure.

For your voice guide, this means:

Write the French voice from scratch. Do not translate the English line by line. Humour, formality and the “tu” versus “vous” choice differ.
Document which French you use, and keep a bilingual glossary of product names and key terms.
Name an owner for each language so both versions get the same care.

Email and text messages under CASL

Voice in email carries legal duties. Under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, anyone sending a commercial electronic message must, according to the CRTC’s FAQ, obtain consent, provide identification information and offer an unsubscribe mechanism. The regulator’s enforcement advisory on records of consent states that the burden of proving consent falls on the sender.

The stakes are real: Gap Inc. agreed to pay $200,000 over messages sent to Canadians without the required consent, and which allegedly did not consistently include an unsubscribe option.

Add a short “email and SMS” block to your guide: a standard footer, a friendly but unmistakable unsubscribe line, and a note on where consent records are kept. A warm unsubscribe sentence is still part of your voice.

Keeping the voice consistent as content grows

A guide only works if it is used where content gets made.

Put it where writers are. Pin the page in your shared drive, your content calendar and your freelancer briefs.
Add a checklist to every brief. Five questions: Who is reading? Which trait leads? Which words are banned? What is the call to action? Is the footer compliant?
Audit twice a year. Pick ten recent pieces across channels and score them against the traits. Researchers working on web content have shown that dynamic content such as social posts and emails tends to drift from the brand’s static pages, and that sentence-level checks can catch it. You can do a human version with a spreadsheet.
Watch what customers say about you. Comments and reviews show whether the voice lands. Our note on why social media monitoring matters covers what to track.

Our perspective

We see the same pattern with small and mid-sized businesses. The website was written by a founder in a burst of energy, the Google Ads copy was written by whoever ran the campaign, and the social posts came from a third person. Each piece is fine alone. Together they do not sound like one company, and prospects feel it before they can say why.

So our advice is unglamorous. Write less, and write it from real content. Start with your top three landing pages, your best-performing ad and your most-replied email. Find what they share, then write that down. Voice guidelines made from a workshop wall of sticky notes rarely survive the first busy month. Guidelines made from copy that already converts do.

We also treat voice as a performance question, not a decoration. A clear voice makes ad copy sharper, makes SEO articles easier to read, and makes video scripts easier to approve. If a guideline cannot help someone write a better headline on Tuesday morning, it is not finished.

— Ruthwik

Where Courimo fits

If you have the voice on paper but not enough hands to apply it, that is where we step in. Courimo is a Montreal-based digital marketing agency, and we write and produce in English and French across our search engine optimization services, website development, Google Ads campaigns and video production. If you want a view on where your current content stands, start with a conversation through our homepage.

A one-page template to copy

Paste this into a document and fill it in. Keep every answer to a sentence or two.

Our audience: who they are, what they need, what worries them.
Our purpose in one line: why we write at all.
Voice trait 1, 2, 3: name, meaning, we are / we are not, example sentence.
Tone by channel: website, email, social, support, proposals.
Words we use / words we avoid.
Mechanics: spelling, contractions, dates, currency, headline style.
Languages: who owns English, who owns French, where the glossary lives.
Email and SMS: footer text, unsubscribe wording, consent records location.
Before and after: two rewritten examples from our own content.
Owner and review date: who updates this, and when.

If it runs past one page, cut the adjectives first.

FAQ

What is the difference between brand voice and tone of voice?

Voice is your brand’s consistent personality: the traits and vocabulary that make you recognizable. Tone is how that voice adapts to a situation, such as a celebratory launch versus a service apology. Define voice once, then document tone by channel or scenario.

How long should brand voice guidelines be?

As short as you can make them while still being usable. One page is a strong target, and a Canadian branding guide recommends testing it by asking whether a newcomer or an AI tool can write on-brand copy from it. Add appendices for detail, but keep the core page readable in two minutes.

How do I find my brand voice?

Start from evidence: your best-performing content, customer reviews and the words customers use. Pick three or four traits that show up repeatedly, then test them by rewriting a few real sentences. If the rewrite feels like you, keep the trait.

Do small businesses really need written guidelines?

Yes, as soon as more than one person writes for the business, including freelancers. The document can be tiny. Its job is to stop drift between your website, ads, emails and social posts.

Do I need a separate voice for French and English in Canada?

You need one personality expressed in two languages, not a word-for-word translation. Write the French version natively, keep a shared glossary, and confirm legal language requirements for your province before publishing, especially in Quebec.