Find Your Brand Voice with These 5 Exercises

Most brand voice guidelines are three adjectives on a slide: friendly, bold, innovative. They sound nice and mean nothing, because nobody can check a sentence against a mood.

If you want to find your brand voice in a way your team can actually use, it needs to be measurable, not just described. If your copy also needs a rebuild to actually reflect that voice once you’ve defined it, that’s exactly what my copywriting work covers.

The five exercises below turn vague adjectives into a checkable standard anyone writing for your brand can test a sentence against.

Exercise 1: The Four-Dimension Spectrum to Find Your Brand Voice

Borrowed from a framework Nielsen Norman Group uses in its tone-of-voice research, this exercise forces voice into measurable axes instead of loose descriptors. Pick four spectrums relevant to your brand. A common starting set:

Formal ←→ Casual
Serious ←→ Playful
Matter-of-fact ←→ Enthusiastic
Respectful ←→ Irreverent

For each one, mark where your brand sits, not at an extreme, but at a specific point. A brand that’s “casual but not irreverent” and “enthusiastic but not over-the-top” has already said more than “friendly and bold” ever could, because a writer now has a position to check a sentence against instead of a mood to guess at.

Do this exercise with three people on the team independently, then compare. Disagreement here is useful. It surfaces the gap between how leadership thinks the brand sounds and how the writers actually producing content interpret it.

Exercise 2: Adjective and Anti-Adjective Pairs

Three adjectives alone leave too much room for interpretation. Pair each one with what it explicitly isn’t.

Exercise 3: The Comparison Set

oice is easier to define by contrast than in isolation. Pick three reference points, brands, public figures, even fictional characters, that sit near your voice but miss it in a specific, nameable way.

For example: “We sound like [Brand A], but less corporate. We sound like [Brand B], but more precise. We’re funnier than [Brand C], but never at the reader’s expense.”

Each comparison isolates one dimension your own team might not think to articulate on its own, because it’s easier to notice what’s missing next to something familiar than to describe your own voice from scratch.

This exercise also catches drift early. If a new piece of copy reads closer to Brand A than to your own defined position, that’s a concrete, checkable deviation, not a subjective “this doesn’t feel right” note that’s hard to act on.

Exercise 4: The Word Bank

Build two lists side by side: words and phrasing patterns your brand actually uses, and ones it deliberately avoids.

Use:

Contractions (“we’ll,” “you’re”)
Second person, direct address
Short, declarative sentences for key claims

Avoid:

Corporate filler (“synergy,” “leverage,” “best-in-class”)
Passive voice for anything the brand is responsible for
Exclamation points outside of genuine celebration moments

This exercise turns voice into something a writer can check line by line, not just page by page. A single sentence with three items from the “avoid” list is an objective flag, not a matter of taste, which makes editing faster and takes the disagreement out of revision rounds.

Mailchimp’s public content style guide is a good real-world example of what a finished word bank looks like in practice.

Exercise 5: The Rewrite Test

Take one plain, voiceless sentence and rewrite it across three different contexts: a sales page, an error message, and an apology email. The same underlying voice should be recognizable in all three, even though the situations call for different levels of energy.

Neutral version: “Your payment did not process. Please try again.”

In-voice sales-page energy: “That didn’t go through, let’s get you sorted so you don’t lose your spot.”

In-voice error message: “Payment didn’t go through. No charge was made. Try again, or use a different card.”

In-voice apology: “That’s on us, not your card. We’re looking into it now and we’ll email you the second it’s fixed.”

If all three still sound like the same brand despite the different emotional register, the voice is well-defined. If they sound like three unrelated writers, the earlier exercises need another pass before this one will hold up.

Turning Five Exercises Into a Document That Helps You Find Your Brand Voice

The output of all five exercises fits on a single page: the four spectrum positions, the adjective and anti-adjective pairs, the three comparison points, the word bank, and one worked example of the rewrite test.

That page replaces the subjective brief. A new writer, or an AI system generating first drafts, has a checkable reference instead of a mood board, and every piece of content going forward can be tested against a specific standard instead of someone’s gut reaction to whether it “sounds right.”

The adjectives were never the problem. The absence of anything to check them against was.

Want your brand voice documented into a usable one-pager? Get in touch and we’ll run your team through all five exercises.