Tone of Voice Workshop: 7 Exercises to Discover Your Brand's Authentic Voice
Ever read your own website copy and think, "This doesn't sound like us at all"? Or noticed how your team's emails, social posts, and sales decks all seem to be speaking in completely different languages?
You're not alone. And the fix isn't complicated — you just need a proper tone of voice workshop.
In this guide, I'll walk you through a collection of practical exercises that help brands uncover their authentic voice. Because your brand already has a personality – these workshops simply help you extract it, define it, and make it consistent across all your touchpoints.
Let’s dive right in.
Why your brand voice actually matters (not just to copywriters)
Before we roll up our sleeves, let's be crystal clear about why this matters to your bottom line.
Your brand voice isn't just fluffy marketing speak — it's the verbal identity that distinguishes you in a crowded marketplace.
Research from Lucidpress shows that consistent brand presentation increases revenue by an average of 33%. That's because when your audience recognises your brand through your words alone, you've achieved something powerful.
Think about brands with distinctive voices:
Innocent Smoothies with their playful, slightly cheeky tone
Apple with their confident simplicity and lack of technical jargon
Mailchimp with their friendly, helpful, slightly quirky personality
These brands didn't just stumble into these voices by accident. They have invested in developing brand voice guidelines that make sure every piece of communication feels unmistakably theirs.
But what exactly are we talking about when we say "brand voice"? Your brand voice encompasses your brand tone and brand personality. Your brand tone is the attitude with which you convey your values and beliefs; it's the way you speak. Your brand personality is your brand's traits and characteristics. Together, they create a distinctive verbal identity that helps you connect with your audience on a deeper level.
Preparing for your tone of voice exercises
Before diving into exercises, let's set ourselves up for success.
Who should be in the room?
Ideally, include:
Marketing team members
Customer service representatives (they speak to customers daily!)
Sales team members
Product/service specialists
At least one founder or C-level executive
Materials you’ll need
Post-it notes or digital equivalent
Whiteboard or digital canvas
Competitor materials
Your existing content across channels
Customer feedback or testimonials
2-3 hours of uninterrupted time
The content audit
Review all your current content and give it a ranking based on how well it communicates the characteristics of your brand identity and how authentic it feels to your brand. This preliminary work helps you understand the voice and tone your brand already has as it has developed organically (but has never been refined or defined).
Be thorough and examine:
Content from multiple channels – your website, social media, newsletters, and press releases
Content produced by each department – sales, product, engineering, marketing, support, and leadership
Content in different formats – long-form, short, video, audio, and written
Customer-facing and internal content
Now, let's get into the good stuff — the exercises that will help you establish your brand's verbal identity.
Exercise 1: Brand personification
Think of your brand as a person. What would it sound like? What would it say? How would it say it?
This brand voice exercise helps you define your brand's unique voice by personifying its company's personality, which is essentially the brand's personality.
Imagine your brand at a dinner party. Who would it be? How would it interact with others?
Let's look at some examples:
If Apple Inc. were a person, it might sound innovative, passionate, and slightly rebellious.
If Delta Airlines showed up, they'd be the dependable, well-traveled guest who effortlessly helps the host take care of everyone.
JetBlue makes everyone chuckle by sharing the latest memes on their phone.
American Airlines is the formal one who knows exactly which utensils to use at every course.
Southwest's casual and approachable vibe puts everyone at ease.
By giving your brand human characteristics, you start to visualise how it should communicate. This helps tremendously when creating brand tone of voice guidelines later.
Workshop activity: Have everyone write down 3-5 personality traits they feel represent the brand, then discuss and cluster similar ideas. This becomes the foundation of your brand personality development.
Exercise 2: The opposite approach ("we're this, but not that")
This exercise involves defining what your brand is not, which in turn helps define what it is.
Creating a "we're this, but not that" list is a simple yet effective way to clarify your brand's identity.
For instance, a luxury brand determined that its brand voice is not casual or slangy. By knowing what it isn't, the brand can focus on being sophisticated and refined.
Some examples to get you thinking:
We're confident, but not arrogant
We're helpful, but not patronising
We're expert, but not jargony
We're friendly, but not overfamiliar
This exercise creates boundaries for your brand's verbal identity, making it easier to maintain brand voice consistency.
Workshop activity: Create a two-column table. In the first column, list qualities your brand embodies. In the second, list qualities that go too far or misrepresent your brand. Aim for 5-7 pairs.
Exercise 3: Social media voice audit
Read your social media posts out loud. Yes, actually out loud.
This exercise, borrowed from fiction writers who test dialogue this way, quickly reveals whether your brand communications sound natural and authentic. If you cringe, stumble, or it simply doesn't sound like how people actually speak, you've identified an opportunity for improvement.
At a previous job, the brand had an unofficial habit of declaring itself "thrilled" to do everything — thrilled to receive invoices, thrilled to send a draft, thrilled to attend a conference. It got disingenuous very quickly.
This exercise is invaluable when developing voice and tone that actually resonates with humans, not just marketing robots.
Workshop activity: Select 10 recent social media posts, marketing emails, or other customer-facing content. Have team members take turns reading them aloud, then discuss what sounds authentic versus what makes people wince.
Exercise 4: Tone of voice dimensions
To refine your brand voice, it's crucial to understand where it sits within the Nielsen Norman Group's four dimensions of tone of voice.
These dimensions act as sliders, allowing you to balance your voice between two extremes, to find the perfect pitch for your brand's personality. Here's how to use each dimension:
Formal vs. casual
Determine the level of formality your brand requires. Are you a financial institution that needs to inspire trust through a formal tone, or a youth-focused brand that can afford to be more casual and laid-back? Adjust the slider between formal and casual to match the expected communication style of your audience.
Serious vs. funny
Decide if your brand benefits from a serious approach that underscores your expertise and reliability, or if a humorous tone can make your brand more relatable and engaging. Remember that humour needs to be used judiciously, as what's funny to one person might not be to another.
Respectful vs. irreverent
This is about knowing when to show reverence and when you can afford to be a little irreverent. While respect is non-negotiable, some brands can pull off a maverick charm by respectfully pushing boundaries. Your brand might honor traditions in one breath and playfully challenge conventions in the next.
Matter-of-fact vs. enthusiastic
Consider whether your brand should stick to just the facts or if you can express things with zest and zeal. An enthusiastic tone can be energising and show passion, but sometimes a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner is appreciated for its clarity.
This framework essentially creates a tone of voice matrix that helps you pinpoint exactly where your brand communications should fall.
Workshop activity: Create a scale of 1-10 for each dimension. Have team members independently rate where they believe the brand should fall on each scale, then discuss any significant differences in perception.
Exercise 5: Card sorting for brand identity
Card sorting for brand identity involves sorting descriptive words into categories. This visual exercise aids in organising the attributes that represent your brand's identity, helping to clarify your brand's voice and personality.
Here's how to conduct this exercise:
Create a set of cards with various attributes (e.g., "innovative," "trustworthy," "playful," "expert")
Ask participants to sort these attributes into categories like:
Core attributes (must always be present)
Secondary attributes (present in certain contexts)
Aspirational attributes (want to embody more)
Not our brand (attributes to avoid)
This exercise is particularly helpful for selecting brand personality traits that align with your brand.
Workshop activity: Prepare 30-40 attribute cards in advance. Spread them out and have the team collectively sort them into the categories above. Take photos of the final arrangement for your records.
Exercise 6: Jargon amnesty
Go through a selection of public content. This might include emails, web pages, social media posts, product literature, letters or packaging. You will identify words, phrases and terminology that should be, at most, for internal use only.
Banks are a great example that we touched on earlier. Banks are still saying things like "remittance" and "cleared funds" while their customers say things like "payments" and "available money."
Be ruthless.
Decide which language can be simplified, and agree as a team on a single word or phrase that you will use universally in its place. Then decide on which language is necessary for internal use, for example some technical or legal language fits the bill, and agree as a team on which simpler public-facing alternative you can replace it with.
This exercise is essentially a brand language audit that identifies where your communication might be creating unnecessary barriers with your audience.
Workshop activity: Create three columns: Jargon/Complex Terms, Customer-Friendly Alternatives, and Context (when to use each). Fill this out as a team, focusing especially on industry terms that might confuse outsiders.
Exercise 7: Dream company spokesperson
This exercise is good for getting people to think about tone of voice. And it creates a useful debate about how your brand should communicate. It's also easy. But it's bad for actually designing, codifying and implementing your tone of voice. Use it as a warm up.
Start with this question: If money were no object, which public figure would be the best spokesperson for our business and why?
You'll get lots of different responses and it'll be interesting to revisit the answers in a year's time to see how things have changed.
While this won't directly determine your brand's conversational brand voice, it provides insights into how your team perceives the brand's personality and communication style.
Workshop activity: Have everyone secretly write down their choice of spokesperson with a brief explanation why. Share answers and look for patterns in the types of personalities chosen.
What’s next? Creating your brand style guide
After completing these exercises, you'll have all the raw material needed to create comprehensive brand tone of voice guidelines.
A brand style guide is a comprehensive list of do's and don'ts that ensures consistency in your brand voice. It covers language, tone, and other rules for how your brand should communicate, making it a valuable tool for maintaining consistency in your brand's voice.
Your brand language guidelines should include:
Brand voice overview - A summary of your brand's personality and how it manifests in communication
Tone dimensions - Where your brand falls on the four dimensions we explored
Vocabulary guidelines - Words to use and avoid
Grammar and style preferences - Sentence length, punctuation styles, formatting preferences
Examples - "Sounds like us" vs. "Doesn't sound like us" samples
Channel-specific guidance - How tone might shift slightly between social media, website, emails, etc.
Creating these guidelines is essential for establishing brand voice consistency, especially as your company grows and more people communicate on behalf of your brand.
Implementing your brand voice findings
Having a brilliant workshop and detailed brand voice guidelines means nothing if they sit in a drawer (or more likely, a forgotten Google Drive folder).
Here's how to make sure your brand dialogue strategy gets implemented:
Train your teams - Run sessions to familiarise everyone with the new guidelines
Create templates - Develop templates for common communications that embody your brand voice
Regular audits - Schedule quarterly reviews of brand communications to ensure consistency
Celebrate good examples - Recognise team members who embody the brand voice well
Refine over time - Your brand voice will evolve; revisit your guidelines annually
Remember, distinctive brand voice creation isn't a one-time event. Your verbal brand identity should grow and evolve with your business, while maintaining its core characteristics.
Brand voice vs. brand tone: understanding the difference
As you implement your workshop findings, it's worth clarifying an important distinction that often causes confusion.
Brand voice is your brand's personality and perspective. It remains consistent across all communications. Think of it as your brand's character.
Brand tone is how that voice adapts to different situations while remaining recognisably "you." Your tone might shift depending on:
The channel (social media vs. formal report)
The audience (existing customers vs. new prospects)
The context (celebrating success vs. addressing a problem)
Understanding this difference helps you maintain brand voice consistency while allowing appropriate flexibility in tone for different contexts.
The exercises I've outlined help you discover and document your authentic brand voice, but the real magic happens when this voice becomes so ingrained in your organisation that it flows naturally in every customer interaction, social media post, and marketing campaign.
When your brand voice is clear and consistent, you don't just sound better — you build stronger relationships with your audience. And in a crowded marketplace, that authentic connection is priceless.
Ready to find your brand's authentic voice? These workshop exercises are your starting point for creating a distinctive verbal identity that resonates with your audience and sets you apart from competitors.
Want to turn these exercises into action?
I can help you run a comprehensive tone of voice workshop, develop your brand voice guidelines, or simply review your current communications to identify opportunities for improvement.
Book a discovery call to discuss how we can bring your brand's voice to life.
