What Ghostwriting for a Global Ecommerce Brand Taught Me About Brand Voice at Scale

Source: ChatGPT

Believe me, I wish I could tell you who I've been ghostwriting for these past three months or so. It would make my life a lot easier if I could, but sadly, the client involved insists on anonymity. Suffice it to say, they're one of the biggest ecommerce brands out there and definitely a credit I wish I could put on my website. Oh well.

What I can tell you, however, is that the experience writing for this particular ecommerce giant has been educational to say the least. I can’t link to any of the work I've done, but I can share what the experience taught me—because the lessons apply to any organization trying to sound human at enterprise scale.

I went into this work thinking I had a pretty solid understanding of what brand voice meant. To me, brand voice meant tone guidelines, approved adjectives, and a neatly formatted PDF that lives somewhere in a company or organization's shared drive. Turns out I had a lot to learn.

Brand voice at scale is about restraint, not expression

At smaller companies, brand voice usually means finding a personality and projecting it outward. From a writing standpoint, this means a lot of creative flourishes. As a small business of one, I myself am still fine tuning my own brand voice and trying to amplify it, and that involves throwing pieces of language at the wall and seeing what will stick.

But with large enterprise-scale entities, brand voice isn’t about finding and projecting a brand voice but rather protecting one.

As a writer in this context, every sentence I crafted has had to balance:

• clarity and warmth

• authority without arrogance

• confidence without claims that might raise legal eyebrows

That leaves very little room for flourish. Not because creativity is unwelcome, but because consistency is the real creative constraint at scale. A global brand doesn’t want your best line. It wants the right line, every time, everywhere.

You’re not writing for readers alone — you’re writing for systems

In enterprise environments, content doesn’t just pass through editors. It has to run the gauntlet of brand teams, legal review, product stakeholders, SEO considerations, and regional and cultural filters. The SEO aspect of the work I do for this client is worth its own blog post; never in my life have had more exacting keyword lists to work with.

All that changes how you write.

You learn to:

• anticipate objections before they’re raised

• phrase ideas in ways that survive multiple interpretations

• remove ambiguity without flattening meaning

The work becomes less about “sounding good” and more about holding up under pressure. And then about eating a lot of humble pie when your copy invariably goes through the meatgrinder after all that work.

Voice lives in patterns, not personality

One of the most valuable lessons was realizing that brand voice at scale is rarely about clever turns of phrase. Instead, it’s all about sentence length patterns, how often you say “we” versus “you,” what it explains versus what it assumes, and how it handles uncertainty

This was really hard at the outset, but over time I started to feel the voice more than I saw it. At this point in the work, I know instinctively when a sentence is wrong, even if I can’t immediately say why.

Actually, that’s not instinct at all. That’s pattern recognition. And writing brand copy at scale is all about adhering to specific patterns, a pattern that predates you and will probably outlast your tenure with the company.

The best ghostwriting disappears — by design

In most writing, invisibility is a failure. In ghostwriting, it’s success.

The highest compliment I received during this project wasn’t praise for a particular post. It was silence — content moving through review smoothly, stakeholders recognizing themselves in the writing, and nothing “standing out” in the wrong way.

At this level, good writing doesn’t draw attention to itself. It sounds inevitable. As if the company itself sat down and typed it.

Scale demands humility

As I mentioned in my last post, ghostwriting in general requires setting your ego aside. Writing for a major brand, especially one that doesn’t want you talking about it, is especially humbling. You don’t get credit. You don’t get bylines. Heck, I don’t even get to provide links to it in my portfolio and say “I did this!”

What you get instead is trust.

Trust that you’re able to handle complexity.

Trust in your ability to carry the voice.

Trust that you’re capable of writing something that millions of people may read.

That’s a different kind of reward — and a more durable one. It doesn’t necessarily translate into bragging rights on LinkedIn, but it’s deeply gratifying on a level that few of my past writing projects have been.

The takeaway

Brand voice at scale isn’t loud, quirky, or particularly expressive. It’s deliberate, consistent, and crystal clear.

Writing for this particular client has taught me that clarity, consistency, and restraint aren’t limitations but rather tools that allow a massive organization to sound like one coherent human being. After 20 years of writing experience, I thought I had encountered everything under the sun, but this was new and it was a considerable challenge.

I continue to craft content for this client. The more of it I do, the easier it gets, and the smoother the feedback process becomes. At the best of times, I get into a flow state and feel as though I’m embodying the brand, like an oracle giving voice to a disembodied spirit. At the best of times, it’s its own reward.

Whether you’re a large brand or a small one, I would love to capture your voice and help amplify it. Contact me here and let’s geek out on all things brand voice!