Throw your tone of voice guide in the rubbish

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Let me start with a kind of embarassing story.

Years ago, I brought on a new client. They wanted me to write some blogposts for them. To prepare, my contact sent me all sorts of helpful stuff - examples of other content they'd produced, and (importantly) a guide to their brand tone of voice.

Here's the embarrassing part: I read most of those documents, but completely forgot about the tone of voice guide. I just blasted into the blogposts without really thinking about it.

And guess what - they were really happy with them! I worked with that client for another two years. And one of their first pieces of feedback was that I had "really nailed their tone of voice."

I write this story not to brag, but rather to explain how tone of voice matters a lot less than you think it does. Here's why - and what you can do about it.

Fretting over tone

If you google "brand tone of voice" you'll find a zillion results about how important it is to have a unique tone of voice, how it makes you stand out - blah, blah blah.

It makes sense on the face of things. There's lots of competition for pretty much everything out there. You need to stand out. And one way to do so is to write your copy in a unique way that really reflects your brand.

But here's the reality: "unique tone of voice" tends to just be a code word for "good writing." The only difference is that a unique tone of voice is really time consuming and expensive to put together.

Here's a couple of examples to show you what I mean:

Not really that unique

A couple of years ago, Uber publicly launched their brand guidelines with quite a lot of fanfare (then, inexplicably, quietly pulled it down for reasons that are beyond me). Included in those guidelines was a tone of voice guide.

(Shouts out to Twitter follower @C_Asherton, who helped me track down the Internet Archive version of that guide).

Anyway, here's some of the tips from that guide:

Do you see the problem here? These aren't really unique to Uber at all. Rather, they're just best practice for writing in general.

And I haven't cherry picked. The rest of the guide has stuff like "use bullet points for lists" and "be as clear and succinct as possible."

There's nothing wrong with this. It's good advice! But it's also not unique. It's just good general advice - whether you're writing for Uber, your local power company, or even a letter to your nana.

Here's another one, from Mailchimp's tone of voice guide:

Once again - good advice! In fact, lots of it is exactly the same as Uber's!

And if you hunt around for other brands' tone of voice guides, you'll find the same thing repeated over and over. Be concise. Avoid jargon. Active voice. Etc, etc.

You should be fretting about other things

I'm exercised about this because tone of voice guides take time and money to put together. This time and money could be spent on other things. This is especially true if the end result is going to be a list of best practice writing tips that aren't really unique to your brand at all - which it inevitably is!

On top of this, your tone of voice is just a small piece of the overall puzzle - and in my view, an irrelevant one. Reality is, if you have a super unique tone of voice, but you talk about things that aren't relevant to your customers, then that tone of voice is a waste of time. Nobody's going to read what you have to say.

What's more, the barriers to entry for a tone of voice are essentially nonexistent. If you spend ages creating a super unique tone of voice, and it gets you lots of cut through, there's really nothing stopping a competitor from just stealing it.

(That's assuming you somehow create a unique tone of voice, rather than just a glorified set of best practice writing tips - which is something even the big household tech brands struggle to do).

And none of this even considers the mammoth task of implementing a brand tone of voice and making sure people follow it. In a large company, your best case scenario is going to be that you get everyone to follow - you guessed it - a series of best practice writing tips.

So rather than go through a huge, expensive process to develop your own tone of voice, just crib some best practice tips from the guides I linked above. You can also download this four-step persuasive writing checklist that I put together a year or so ago.

Follow those practices, hire come competent writers and forget about it. If you want your copy to be unique, write about unique things that your customers care about.

And forget about your tone of voice. You've got bigger fish to fry.

Let me know how you get on.

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