When language becomes inconsistent or bland, teams lose confidence. Marketing starts to dilute. People make up their own rules – or stop trying.
Tone of voice development is about establishing a shared language that puts you back in the driving seat: energising your teams, building trust, and inspiring customers.
Brand tone of voice
workshops help you:
Communicate more effectively and stand out in your market
Bond your team so they feel engaged and inspired
Create a playbook to inform all your marketing materials
Raise the consistency and quality of your marketing
It’s not about imposing an identity from the outside. It’s about uncovering what’s there.
How we help
We guide you from
confusion to clarity
About what your tone of voice actually is and how to use it. This includes researching your market; auditing your current copy; and facilitating a high-energy workshop with brand voice exercises to help uncover the quirks and qualities that make your organisation unique.
Who it’s for
Founders, directors, marketing leads
If you’re a founder or marketing leader, you know the frustration of endless rewrites; of seeing an email or a blog post created by one of your team and thinking, ‘Where on earth did that come from?’
This work is for:
- Marketing leads who want everyone writing with one clear, compelling voice.
- Founders who want their brand voice to reflect their passion and vision.
Why it matters
Language is the last great
competitive advantage
Having a distinctive brand voice helps you stand apart from your competitors so you can reach more customers. But the process itself is valuable too: helping you and your fellow decision-makers clarify what really makes you unique and bonding your team around a shared identity.
What you get
Clarity on your brand voice. Confidence in how you use it.
You get:
- A clearly defined brand tone of voice, developed with your team.
- Practical guidelines with examples of how to write – and how not to.
- Copy showing your tone of voice in action.
- A team that’s aligned, confident and excited to put it into practice.
In more depth
Witness the transformation
From different departments making it up as they go along – customer support = stiff and formal, social media = wacky and energised – to everyone understanding the parameters so your audience have a consistent experience across all channels. Brand tone of tone of voice is a marketing tool, but really it’s about giving you clarity and confidence in all your communications, internal and external, and helping you make progress towards your business goals.
Don’t just take
our word for it
The results from working with Olly Davy went well beyond our expectations. The process resulted in us creating a really clear and impactful message. More than this, Olly helped clarify our deeper motivations and goals, so that we came away feeling inspired and driven to succeed in our business.
Ben Mann, Co-founder,
Megaphone Creative
The answers to
your questions
Think of tone of voice as the written personality of your organisation. Defining it and using it helps you sound consistent, confident, and distinctive. It’s not a luxury – it’s your competitive edge in a crowded market. Rarely is a company distinctive because of what it does or sells. But your brand personality and the stories in your company – those are unique.
Have you ever taken the time to check how your copy stacks up against your rivals’? Bosses often can’t recognise their own copy when shown unbranded alongside other companies’ blurbs. It’s easy to write a list of adjectives about how you want your brand to sound. It’s harder to bring that to life on the page and embed it so your people take ownership and use it long-term. Our process – involving research, a workshop, writing, and training – is about making sure:
- Your people are involved and have ownership over your brand voice
- Once defined, your brand voice is applied to test and develop it
- Your wider team are onboarded so they’re invested in using your brand voice
Not taking the time to define your tone of voice leads to a confusing customer experience with different departments doing their own thing. So you’ll find your social media goes waaay out there with hundreds of emojis. While your customer support emails are super formal and avoid taking any responsibility. It’s horrible. Meanwhile, managers are constantly rewriting and giving feedback, and your teams lose confidence in their ability and the brand.
We help you uncover the tone of voice – aka verbal identity aka written personality – that already exists within your organisation. This might not be what visitors to your website see, but it exists.
We scour your existing materials and work with a cross-department group in a workshop to find the qualities that make your business and its culture, customers, products and services, special.
The workshop is hands-on and collaborative – inviting input from your team via guided exercises, and looking at examples from your market and other notable brands.
It could be that you use storytelling techniques in a space where competitors share mainly dry facts. It might be that you’re funny and warm, whereas rivals are serious and ‘professional’. Or simply that, in a sector awash with jargon, you take time to empathise with the reader and communicate using everyday language.
It might be energetic, all about helping people have fun and get things done. It could be purposeful – solving tough problems with PhD level expertise. It could be rebellious – shaking things up and refusing to toe the line. It could be cool, calm and collected; no need to shout, just quietly and confidently getting things done.
Defining your unique verbal identity helps you stop taking language for granted and start using it to get ahead.
Ideally a cross-section from around the company: marketing, leadership, sales, with a particular focus on customer-facing roles. Senior people set the tone and encourage adoption and behaviour change. People from finance or legal have unexpected and useful insights that help stress test the value of this work. But, regardless of department, people who know your culture and have strong opinions will have the most to contribute in the workshop.
Absolutely. We run successful online sessions with breakout rooms, live exercises, and group discussions. The vibe is different, obviously, but the results are just as good.
The workshop itself is usually a half- or full-day session. The whole process (including writing and training) takes four to eight weeks depending on the scope. We can agree a timeline that works for you.
Great. We’ll work with them, building on the work you’ve done already and exploring new important areas. We often find that existing guidelines focus on logo use and brand colours; rarely is tone of voice properly covered. This is an opportunity to make sure your brand guidelines are as useful and valuable as possible.
You have a clear definition of your tone of voice with real examples; practical guidelines to support writing; an aligned, energised team ready to use your voice and take on the world; the option for us to test your voice with a live writing project (like your website) or train your wider team.
We help you sell this work into senior leadership and encourage people to take part so they help build the voice rather than just receiving it. We offer onboarding sessions and team training after the workshop. Clear guidelines, with tone of voice champions to promote and update them, means less fear and more creative freedom.
Yes, but not because they’ve suddenly become gifted wordsmiths. Tone of voice helps raise the standard of writing in your organisation because it gives your people a clear framework to refer to and confidence in using it. If you’ve heard of creative constraints, you’ll know what we’re talking about. The blank page is terrifying. Knowing the principles that underpin your brand’s tone of voice means you always have somewhere to start. Before you even get to tone of voice, there are some simple, powerful, and often forgotten principles that, when applied, can improve any business writing. Download them for free here.
