Brand Voice vs Tone of Voice: The Difference, With Examples

Mailchimp's content style guide settles this in one line: "You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes" (Mailchimp). Everything else in this post is what that line means in practice, with examples, and with our own voice rules as the worked example.

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

Brand voice is your brand's character in words: what it believes, what it notices, how it sounds when it is being itself, and what it would never say. It doesn't change between a sales email and an apology. Tone is how that voice adjusts to the moment: lighter in a social post, more careful when something has gone wrong, more precise in a contract.

Think of someone you know well at a job interview and at dinner with friends. They choose different words, but you would recognise them in either room. What stays the same is their voice. The adjustment is tone.

What are the four dimensions of tone of voice?

Nielsen Norman Group's Kate Moran gives four, each a scale with two ends (NN/g, 2016):

formal to casual
serious to funny
respectful to irreverent
matter-of-fact to enthusiastic

A tone is a position on all four at once. A brand's voice sets the range it is willing to move within. Ours will go as casual and funny as the moment allows, but it never goes past respectful into cruel.

Brand voice vs tone: four examples

Here is one brand voice, ours, saying one thing in four places: our free Boring Marketing Detector exists. The first, second and fourth we wrote for this post. The third is the tool's real error message.

A LinkedIn post (casual, funny, a little irreverent): "We built a free tool that reads your marketing copy and flags every sentence a competitor could have written. It quotes you back to yourself, which is the rude part."
The tool page (formal enough, matter-of-fact): "Paste up to 4,000 characters of copy. The Boring Marketing Detector lists stock phrases, vague claims and generic sentences, then rewrites the worst line."
The error message (serious, respectful): "The check didn't come back. Try again in a minute."
An email to a client before a call (warm, enthusiastic but not breathless): "We ran your homepage through the Detector before our call. Some of what it flagged is worth keeping, and we'd like to show you which."

Same voice in all four: plain words, short sentences, no hype, a dry edge where there is room for one. Only the tone moves.

What should a brand voice document include?

Adjectives alone won't do it. "Warm, confident, playful" describes a tone range, and every competitor could claim the same three words. A voice document a writer can actually use answers harder questions:

What do we believe about our industry that some of our competitors wouldn't say out loud?
Which words do we use, and which do we never use?
Which sentences would we never write, even if they would sell?
What does our best writing look like? A few real examples beat a page of rules.
How does our tone move by channel, and where does it stop?

Our own voice rules, as an example

A trimmed version of the document we write against. The full one sits in our internal brand file.

Four principles, each with a test. Knowledgeable: would a working marketer learn one thing they didn't know? Creative: could 10,000 other agencies publish it unchanged? If so, it isn't ours yet. Engaging: do the first two lines earn the third? True: could we defend every sentence on a call with the person it describes?

A few things we never do. We never open with a warm-up like "in today's fast-paced world". We never use "leverage", "seamless" or "cutting-edge". We don't give a number without its source, or claim a client or a result we can't show. We never pretend something is finished when it isn't.

And one rule that exists only because of our name: one beer pun per page at most, in a headline or a button, never inside an explanation.

How do you check copy against your brand voice?

Read it aloud, and listen for any sentence that sounds like a slide. Swap in a competitor's name, and if the sentence still works, it isn't your voice. For the mechanical part, our free Boring Marketing Detector flags stock phrases and sentences any business could publish, and quotes each one back to you.

Questions

Is tone of voice the same as brand personality?

No. Personality is the character: the traits you would use to describe the brand as a person. Voice is that personality in words. Tone is how the voice adjusts to a situation. Personality comes first, voice expresses it, and tone keeps it appropriate.

Can one company have more than one brand voice?

Yes, if it has more than one brand. The Morning Beer and our lab, MorningLabs AI, deliberately sound different: the agency is warm with an edge, the lab is calm and precise. Within one brand, keep one voice and let the tone flex.

What are examples of brand voice?

Mailchimp describes its voice as plainspoken and genuine, with a dry sense of humour, among other traits. Its guide adds that "your tone also changes depending on the emotional state of the person you're addressing." The four examples above show the same thing on a smaller scale.

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