How I Find a Brand's Voice in the First 30 Minutes

Brand voice is not something you build. It's something you uncover.

Most people come to me thinking they need to create a brand voice, like it's a new piece of infrastructure to install. What they actually need is someone to help them hear the one they already have, the one that comes out when they stop trying to sound like a business and start talking like a person.

Here's how I find it. Usually within the first 30 minutes.

THE FIRST QUESTION I ASK

Not "what are your brand values?" Not "who is your target audience?" Those questions come from a brand brief and they produce brand brief answers.

The first question I ask is: what do you most want people to understand about your business that they usually don't?

That question does something different. It bypasses the polished pitch and gets to the thing that actually matters to the person in front of me. The frustration. The gap between what they do and how the world perceives it. The thing they have been trying to explain for years without quite landing it.

That gap is where the voice lives.

WHAT I LISTEN FOR

Not what someone says. How they say it.

Does their energy shift when they talk about a particular type of client? Do they get more specific and animated when they describe a specific outcome? Do they become careful and formal when they are describing what they think they should say, and then loosen up when they forget to perform?

The difference between those two modes is the difference between the brand voice they've been using and the one that actually works.

THREE THINGS THAT REVEAL BRAND VOICE QUICKLY

The story they default to.

When asked for an example, what do they reach for first? That story usually contains the emotional core of the brand. The values, the relationship with the customer, the moment that made the work feel worth it. Build the voice from that, not from an abstract list of adjectives.

The words they use with their best clients.

Not in a proposal. Not in a pitch. In a conversation with someone they love working with, someone who gets it without needing to be sold to. That register, that vocabulary, that level of ease, is the brand voice. The rest is armour.

The opinion they always edit out.

Almost every client I work with has a sentence they've been sitting on. An honest take on their industry. Something they genuinely believe that they're not sure they're allowed to say. More often than not, that sentence is the most compelling thing in their entire marketing and it belongs in the first line of their About page, not in a private journal.

WHY MOST BRAND VOICE EXERCISES DON'T WORK

They start with adjectives. "Professional but approachable. Playful but credible."

Every brand in existence describes itself that way. Adjectives don't create differentiation. They describe a feeling without producing one.

Brand voice exercises that work start with story. With specifics. With what the brand actually believes and how the person behind it naturally talks about things they care about.

The adjectives come at the end, as a description of what's already there. Not as a starting point.

IF YOUR VOICE ISN'T WORKING

It usually means one of two things: you're performing a version of your brand instead of actually being it, or you haven't yet articulated what you believe clearly enough to make it consistent.

Both of those are fixable. And they're faster to work through with someone else in the room.