Defining brand voice usually gets outsourced to an agency workshop or handled through abstract adjective lists that sound reasonable in a meeting and prove nearly useless the moment someone actually sits down to write something. A genuinely practical brand voice definition can be built internally, in an afternoon, using a structured exercise that produces something writers can actually apply rather than another vague document.
Why Adjective Lists Alone Fail to Define a Usable Voice
“Friendly, professional, and innovative” describes almost every brand’s aspiration and gives a writer no concrete guidance about actual word choice, sentence structure, or tone in a specific situation — genuine voice definition needs to translate abstract adjectives into concrete, comparative examples that make ambiguous situations resolvable in practice.
Exercise One: The Voice Spectrum Mapping
Rather than isolated adjectives, place your brand voice on several spectrums relative to opposing extremes — formal versus casual, serious versus playful, reserved versus bold, technical versus accessible — and mark specifically where your brand sits on each, ideally with the team discussing and reaching genuine consensus rather than each person assuming a shared understanding that turns out to differ once made explicit.
Exercise Two: The Real Example Sort
Gather ten to fifteen real pieces of existing content (yours and competitors’) and have the team sort them into “sounds like us” and “doesn’t sound like us” piles, then discuss specifically why — this concrete, comparative exercise surfaces genuine, specific voice preferences far more effectively than abstract discussion, since people are often better at recognizing voice in examples than articulating it from scratch.
Exercise Three: The Rewrite Test
Take a single, neutral piece of sample content and have different team members rewrite it in your intended brand voice — comparing the resulting variations surfaces genuine disagreement or ambiguity in the voice definition that abstract discussion alone would miss, since actual writing reveals gaps that talking about writing doesn’t.
Exercise Four: The "What We'd Never Say" List
Explicitly identify phrases, tones, or approaches your brand would never use — a specific type of humor, certain jargon, an overly casual or overly formal register — since defining boundaries by exclusion often clarifies a voice more concretely than positive descriptions alone, giving writers a clear, specific test for what to avoid.
Turning Workshop Output Into a Usable Reference Document
Compile the spectrum placements, sorted examples with reasoning, rewrite comparisons, and exclusion list into the voice section of your broader content style guide — following the same concrete, example-driven structure covered for style guides generally, since abstract adjectives alone were exactly the problem this workshop was meant to solve.
Running This Workshop With a Small Team Efficiently
A small team can run all four exercises in a focused two-to-three hour session, using existing content as raw material rather than needing extensive preparation — the exercises are designed to surface concrete, comparative judgment rather than requiring participants to articulate abstract theory from scratch, which is what makes them genuinely fast to run.
Including the Right People in the Workshop
Include whoever actually writes brand-facing content regularly, not just leadership or marketing strategists — the people doing daily writing have practical, ground-level intuition about voice that pure strategic thinking sometimes misses, and their buy-in to the final definition matters for actual adoption afterward.
Revisiting the Voice Definition Periodically
As new team members join or the brand evolves, periodically re-run elements of this exercise (particularly the rewrite test) to check whether the documented voice still matches genuine current practice, or whether drift has occurred that warrants either correction or a deliberate, acknowledged update to the documented definition.
Where This Fits the Broader Strategy
A concrete, example-driven voice definition built through structured exercises gives writers something genuinely usable, unlike abstract adjective lists that sound reasonable but resolve nothing in practice. For the complete strategic framework, see our complete guide to brand building in the digital age.
A workshop built around real examples and actual rewriting exercises produces a genuinely usable voice definition in an afternoon — far more practical than another meeting spent debating which adjectives sound right in the abstract.
