What I’ve Learned About Voice: Lessons from 17+ Years of Messaging Work

Every brand has a voice. But not every brand knows it has a voice—or what to do with it.

This rule applies to literal voices as well as metaphorical ones. My wife Allison is an accomplished vocalist and voice teacher, who trains voices of children and adults for a living. She’ll be the first to tell you that everyone—truly everyone—has a singing voice in them. They may not know it, or how to use it, but unless you’re born without a vocal cord it’s your birthright to sing.

As for me, over the past nearly two decades I’ve helped organizations find, refine, and sometimes completely reimagine how they sound in the world. I’ve built voice guidelines from scratch, evolved legacy tones without losing trust, and navigated enough stakeholder “Can we make it sound more professional but also more human?” requests to know that voice is often misunderstood, underestimated, or treated like a coat of paint instead of a load-bearing structure.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Voice is not tone. And it’s definitely not personality.

Think of your favourite singer. Their voice is immediately recognizable while their tone of voice is highly variable. Therein lies the difference between voice and tone.

I’ve always thought of brand voice as the fundamental posture a brand takes in the world: what it believes, how it behaves, how it makes people feel. Tone is how you adapt that voice to different situations: formal, excited, apologetic, playful. Voice is your baseline. Tone is modulation.

When brands confuse the two, they end up chasing trends or using “playful” language where empathy would serve better. As a rule, if you have to try really hard to sound a certain way, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree.

2. Good voice work starts with clarity, not creativity.

The most compelling brand voices aren’t necessarily clever. They’re clear. Purpose-led. Unmistakably themselves. Think of a brand you like. You probably can’t recall their specific words in any given moment but it no doubt made you feel good in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. That’s a brand voice that works.

Before you write a single tagline or headline, you need alignment on who the brand is, what it stands for, and what its audience needs from it—not just what it wants to say. A voice that isn’t anchored in strategic clarity is just style.

3. Internal alignment is more important than external approval.

I’ve worked on voice projects where everyone nods along during workshops—and then completely defaults back to old habits two weeks later. Why? Because they didn’t see themselves in it. Because it didn’t feel true.

Achieving organizational buy-in when it comes to a brand voice is easier said than done. Doing so requires really getting to know an organization, talking to people across it, and establishing a consensus on its values. As I said earlier, every brand has a voice but they don’t necessarily know what it is. A style guide helps, but everyone has to be on side with it, and this requires some workshopping.

If your content team doesn’t believe in the voice you define, or if it feels disconnected from how leadership actually communicates, it won’t last. Voice has to be usable. Believable. Rooted in how the organization actually shows up.

4. Consistency always beats originality.

A brand voice isn’t a novelty act. It’s about recognizability—can your audience tell it’s you, even when your logo’s not on it?

The best voice systems I’ve come across or been involved in building don’t aim for endless reinvention. They aim for repeatable patterns that reinforce trust over time. They help junior content creators write confidently, help execs speak with purpose, and help your brand show up with clarity no matter the platform.

5. Voice should evolve—but never drift.

Voice isn’t static. As your brand matures, expands into new markets, or responds to global shifts (like pandemics and whatnot), your voice needs to stretch. But stretching is different than shape-shifting.

I always recommend doing a voice audit every couple of years—compare what you say you sound like to what’s actually going out into the world. Is the voice drifting? Are your teams still aligned? A healthy voice system grows with your brand; it doesn’t bolt on after the fact.

Voice in Action: A Case Study

A number of years ago, I worked with Covenant Health’s Palliative Institute on a campaign to raise public awareness of palliative care and advance care planning—two rather challenging subjects to communicate about with clarity, empathy, and cultural sensitivity.

Most of the messaging out there on the subject was textbook institutional: clinically accurate but emotionally distant. The audience, primarily older adults from a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds navigating end-of-life decisions, deserved something better than what we were seeing.

I led a series of voice workshops with internal teams and community partners to reframe the brand’s voice around three pillars: compassionate, plainspoken, and invitational. Instead of “advance care planning is an important part of your healthcare journey,” we started saying things like, “It’s okay to talk about what matters most.”

As a team, we created dozens of pages of content, social copy, and video scripts using the new voice framework. The result was the Compassionate Alberta website, whose engagement level more than doubled in six months post-launch. Community organizations began sharing our content organically. And most importantly, people told us it “felt like someone finally said it in a way that made sense.”

That’s the power of voice—not just as a creative asset, but as a tool for empathy, accessibility, and trust.

Final thought: Voice is a leadership tool.

Not just a content thing. Not just a marketing thing. Voice is a leadership signal. It tells your community, “Here’s who we are. Here’s how we show up. You can trust us.”

And when it’s done well, voice doesn’t just help your audience recognize you—it helps your people recognize themselves in the work.