Brand Identity · Verbal system · Component
The tone of voice
How the brand writes, expressed as pairs rather than as principles — because a principle nobody can apply to a sentence is not a guideline.
The deliverable
What it is
Tone of voice documents fail in a predictable way: they describe an aspiration in adjectives and give no examples, which leaves everyone writing exactly as they did before.
What makes them work is pairs drawn from the organisation’s own material. A real sentence and its rewrite teaches more than a page of principles.
One level in
What it is made of
Each element is a constituent part of the component. Follow one to see the attributes it carries.
The rules
The specific constraints on how the brand writes.
3 attributes: Rule · Scope · Strictness
LearnThe surfaces
Which written surfaces the voice covers.
3 attributes: Surface · Written by · Covered
Learn
Draw the pairs from your own published material. Invented examples let everyone believe the problem is elsewhere.
The other components in verbal system
The vocabulary
What the organisation calls its own things, settled once — because three names for one feature is a brand problem before it is a documentation problem.
LearnThe naming rules
How new things beneath the brand are named, decided in advance — because a convention decided per launch is an argument rather than a decision.
Learn