Here's something I've noticed over the years: the companies that worry most about their tone of voice are usually the ones with the least clarity about what they're actually trying to say.

They'll commission a set of guidelines. Someone will produce a document with a personality spectrum, some do's and don'ts, maybe a few before-and-after copy examples. It'll get presented, signed off, and filed somewhere sensible. And within six months, everyone is back to writing exactly the same way they did before.

I used to think people were just bad at following guidelines. After twenty-odd years, I've realised the guidelines were never the problem.

The problem is that most companies try to define how they sound before they've settled what they're saying.

Tone of voice is how you express things. But if the underlying message is vague, borrowed, or contradictory, then tone is just decoration on top of confusion. You can write "confident but approachable" into a brand book until you're blue in the face, but if your positioning is unclear, your people will still default to the same language about quality, innovation, and customer focus that every other business in the sector already uses.

I call it professional beige. And it's everywhere.

The data backs this up. Research from Lucidpress and Demand Metric found that 95% of organisations have brand guidelines, but only around 25% enforce them consistently. 60% of all marketing materials don't even conform to the guidelines that exist. That's not a discipline problem. That's a signal that the guidelines don't give people enough to work with.

The test that tells you everything

Here's something I do early in almost every engagement. I ask five or six people in different roles to explain what the company does and why someone should choose them. Different roles, different levels.

If I get five or six different answers, which I usually do, we don't have a tone of voice problem. We have an identity problem that's been dressed up as a messaging challenge.

And the commercial cost of that is real, even if it's hard to put a single number on.

Sales teams that can't articulate differentiation will default to competing on price. Marketing teams without clear messaging will produce more content rather than better content, because volume feels like progress when clarity is absent. Pitches fall flat not because the service is weak but because the story around it doesn't land. I've watched companies lose six-figure opportunities for exactly this reason. Not because they lacked capability, but because they couldn't explain why they were the right choice in language that actually meant something.

None of that gets fixed by telling people to write shorter sentences or use more active verbs.

Why "friendly" is overrated

There's a popular instinct in branding to prioritise warmth and personality. Make it more human, make it friendlier. I hear it constantly. But research from the Nielsen Norman Group found something that should give every CMO pause: when they tested how tone of voice affects brand perception, trustworthiness explained 52% of the variability in whether someone would recommend a brand. Friendliness? It added just 8% on top.

In other words, people don't choose you because you sound nice. They choose you because they trust you. And trust comes from clarity, consistency, and specificity, not from personality adjectives in a brand book.

This is why the most effective companies I've worked with treat tone of voice as the last step in a sequence, not the first. They start with the harder questions. What is our actual position in this market? What do we do that competitors can't or won't? Who specifically are we for, and what do those people need to hear from us? What's the gap between how we see ourselves internally and how clients actually experience us?

Only once those questions are answered, genuinely answered rather than papered over with aspiration, does tone of voice become useful. At that point, the guidelines almost write themselves, because the personality of the brand isn't being invented. It's being expressed.

The consistency payoff

When it works, it really works. Lucidpress found that consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by up to 33%. Companies with genuinely enforced guidelines are three to four times more likely to report strong brand visibility than those without. But here's the bit that gets overlooked: consistency isn't about policing a document. It's about giving people something clear enough to be consistent with.

If your tone of voice guidelines could belong to any company in your sector, they're not doing the job.

"Professional yet personable" could describe an accountancy firm, a recruitment agency, or a SaaS platform. It tells the writer nothing. Useful tone guidance draws from real decisions the business has made about its identity. Are we the established authority or the disruptive challenger? The precise specialist or the versatile generalist? Those choices produce language that sounds like one company and no other. Without them, you're just describing a pleasant personality that could apply to anyone.

So what should you do?

Before investing in how your brand sounds, ask whether you've actually settled what it's saying. If the answer is no, or if it's technically yes but the reality is a set of statements so broad they could describe half your competitors, start there. The language will follow.

Get the sequence wrong and you'll produce another document that lives on a shared drive and changes nothing. Get it right and your company will start to sound like itself without being told to.

That's the difference between a tone of voice and an actual voice.