# How To Build a Brand Voice So Premium That Customers Chase You **Channel:** Joanna Wiebe **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrIPapQ1ggo **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/wrIPapQ1ggo ## Chapters - 0:00 — Why Adjectives Fail Brand Voice - 3:49 — Find a Person Behind the Voice - 7:25 — Define Who You Fight For - 10:32 — Show Conviction Without Caging It - 14:52 — Protect Voice as Your Lasting Moat ## Transcript **[0:00] Speaker A:** Disney and Harley Davidson have almost nothing in common, and yet both are worth a fortune and people tattoo their logos onto their skin. That's not because of the product, their price point, or even their logo. It's because of their unique brand voice. Now, I have built brand voices for startups and for challenger brands, and if you are trying to get noticed, your voice is the first decision you need to make and the one that affects every decision that follows. So, here are the six things you need to know to find your brand voice. The first step to finding your brand voice is to ditch the adjectives. They are a trap, not a voice. I ran a messaging workshop for a Fortune 500 company recently. Now, they sent me their brand guide in the pre-work phase. 60 pages. 59 of those pages covered the visual brand. **[0:49] Speaker A:** The last page had four words on it. Bold, authentic, friendly, human. That was the brand voice guide. That was it. And here's what happens when you try to use it. You look at some copy, like a headline, and you ask yourself, "Is this bold?" Sure, we can call it bold. "Is it authentic and human?" Well, it was written by a human, so yeah. "Is it friendly?" Not unfriendly. You convince yourself you're on brand when you've actually decided nothing. The only conversation those four adjectives can ever generate ends with someone saying, "Well, you know, we'll know it when we hear it." Which sounds reasonable until you realize that sentence is the sound of your brand voice dying. Take Mailchimp. Everyone **[1:31] Speaker B:** cites them as a voice when what? Go to their site and strip out the illustrations. Send better email, sell more stuff, reach more customers with SMS, discover new ways to drive sales, send high-quality content with ease. If you took the chimp out of the logo, nothing there would identify it as uniquely Mailchimp. Mailchimp was once a challenger brand with a real voice. Today, it has become white noise and bland adjectives are what got it there. Now, Marty Neumeier, one of the sharpest minds in branding, said it plainly, "A brand is not your logo. It's your reputation and it's always moving. It's the gut feeling someone gets when they think about you. And that feeling is built through storytelling, through the words you choose and how you put them together." So, brand voice is not decoration you just layer on at the end. You don't write a page of copy and then say, "Okay, cool. **[2:19] Speaker B:** Now make it sound like us." The voice has to come from a truth at the heart of your brand and adjectives can't get you there because they describe nothing and rule out nothing. Bold, authentic, friendly, human, every brand on earth could claim all four and most of them do. Adjectives fail because they're too easy to bend to your will, too easy to mean whatever you need them to mean in the moment, which means they mean nothing. And adding more of them won't help. More adjectives just give you more like mush to wade through. That is how you become category wallpaper, unnoticeable, forgettable, no moat. And that Fortune 500 brand I mentioned, they're sadly losing share every month they hide behind weak adjectives and no courage. So, here's what to do. Pull up your brand voice guide or whatever you have that's supposed to tell you how your brand sounds and burn it. **[3:11] Speaker B:** No, okay, I'm kidding, kind of. But truly, if your brand voice guide is a short list of adjectives, ask yourself one question for each one. Does this actually change how a sentence gets written? Does it change the word choice, the rhythm, the length? If the answer is no, it's the core. Get rid of it. Then, run a lineup test. Take a paragraph of your copy, remove your logo, and drop it alongside three competitors. Can anyone pick yours out as yours? That exercise will show you exactly what category wallpaper looks like and whether or not you're already part of it. Chances are you are. So, if adjectives are out, what works? **[3:49] Speaker B:** It's not a concept or framework, it's something much more specific. The second step is to find your person. Your brand voice lives in a specific human, not just a concept. Early in my career, I was working with the PR lead at Intuit. Her name was Jen. We were talking about how the brand voice needed to come to life across copy, press releases, everything. Jen said something I have never forgotten. She said, "It's not a list of adjectives, it's Nieas." Nieas was a person on the project management team, a kind of cultural ambassador inside the company. And just like that, Nieas became shorthand for what Intuit sounded like publicly. Not four words on a page, not some idealistic concept, a person. So, when writers were unsure, the question wasn't, "Is this bold and human?" It was, "How would Nieas say this?" You can see this working in bigger brands, too. **[4:39] Speaker B:** Mint Mobile is owned by Ryan Reynolds. The voice of their copy is Ryan Reynolds, a person who, when he speaks, is things like dry humored, self-aware, slightly bumbling. Those adjectives are not the voice. Ryan Reynolds is the voice. So, when Mint decided not to run a Super Bowl ad, they ran a print ad instead. In Ryan Reynolds' voice, it said, "I'm new to this whole business thing, but I'm pretty sure that if I spend $5 million on a Super Bowl ad, you, the customer, are going to have to pay for that. So, instead, I'm running this print ad." Now, you can hear Ryan Reynolds. That is what a brand voice actually sounds like, a voice, a real voice. Here's why this works. Researchers Reeves and Nass found that conversational copy, copy that sounds like a specific human talking to you, lifts trust over corporate copy every time. **[5:30] Speaker B:** Not surprising. We've seen this ourselves. We worked with a brand that helped women find clothes that fit their body, whatever that body shape was. The control headline was, "Find clothes you'll love." No voice, no person. We tested it against a headline that read, "Big bum, thick waist, not-so-perky boobs." And it beat the control by a landslide because it sounded like a real person who actually saw the customer. Now, two things will kill this. The first, building your voice by committee. Averaging everyone's opinion gives you something neutral, beige, AI-generated, and forgettable. Same as averaging anything. The second is picking an aspirational type instead of an actual person. We want to sound like a TED Talk is useless. We want to sound like Simon Sinek in that first TED Talk. Okay, now you have something to work with, but don't summarize it on a page. Hold an all-hands, watch the TED Talk together, and have the whole company come up with and then own how the brand sounds. **[6:29] Speaker B:** Now, the reason founder-led brands are everywhere right now is not a trend. It's because a person is the one thing competitors cannot copy-paste. Features, fonts, adjectives, all of that can be lifted overnight. A human point of view, a human voice, cannot. If your brand is in need of a voice people can actually hear, book a call with us. We work exclusively with challenger brands and their founders. The link is in the description below. Find the person in your organization who already is the brand. If you're a founder with a team of five, it's probably you. Write three sentences as that person or get them to write three sentences. Then, open your current homepage copy up and hold the two side by side. If there's a gap, that gap is the work. And if you're using AI to write copy, do not feed it a style guide. **[7:18] Speaker B:** Instead, feed it a detailed profile of that person, who they are, how they think, what they'd never say. That's what gets you somewhere. **[7:25] Speaker B:** But a person just standing there is still boring. The voice ignites when you know who you're fighting for. The third step is to find your fight. The spine of your voice is a who with something to fight for. When I work with a brand to find their voice, I always start with the founder. In most cases, the founder was the first customer. They saw something so broken, they were willing to bet their own money on fixing it. That conviction is where the voice comes from. We did this with Wistia. They were an underdog coming into a crowded video hosting market. We said, "Look, you're not an advocate for the business owner who buys from you. You are an advocate for the videographer, the person who's going to use this every single day and currently feels unseen. So, get on their side first." That meant everything they built pointed at one thing, making a videographer's life easier. **[8:14] Speaker B:** It's not going to be undercutting competitors on price, not listing features. The community they built, the free training, the workshops, the swag, all of it oriented around what videographers actually care about, because that's what brand advocacy looks like. It's a decision about who you exist for. Once you make that decision, the voice follows. You stop guessing what to say, how to say it, and you start listening how they talk, what they're going through, what they're thinking. The message underneath everything becomes, "We're absolutely fascinated by our customers." And customers feel that. Eight emails tested against their existing eight in a proper AB split test run by the internal growth team at Wistia, this was the result: a 350% increase in paid conversions just by advocating for and sounding like the customer. That result didn't come from executing on better copy necessarily. It came from choosing someone strategically. **[9:09] Speaker B:** And choosing someone strategically means being willing to lose someone else. Now, there's research showing that polarizing brands, brands with a clear point of view about who they're there for, consistently outperform neutral ones. In a lineup of bottled waters, all five brands that had a brand voice or a personality outperformed the one water that was branded neutrally or without a voice. The lesson is that it may not even matter what your voice is as long as you have one. So, the customer or even the employee who says, "I don't get why Wistia is so focused on videographers. Why not just talk about hosting costs?" They don't get it. They won't get it. Let them go. A brand that's an advocate for someone will always outlast a brand that's trying to please everyone because advocacy has conviction behind it, and conviction is what gives a voice its spine. **[9:57] Speaker B:** So, finish this line. We are an advocate for blank against blank. Okay. For Wistia, it was, "We are an advocate for videographers against the tyranny of slow posting platforms built for documents." For a biomarker brand like Vital's Vault, it could be, "We are an advocate for unseen patients who are told they're imagining things against doctors who are too busy to care." For a real estate brand like Tom Ferry, it could be, "We are an advocate for ambitious real estate agents against shotty sales tactics that hurt person-driven brands." If you can't complete that line with specificity, you have foundational work to do on your brand voice. **[10:32] Speaker B:** But, knowing who you're fighting for is only half of it. The other half is how you show up. The fourth step is to find your conviction, not your volume. I said pick a fight in the last point, but picking a fight doesn't mean starting a screaming match. Take Liquid Death and Virgin. Both have a voice. Now, Liquid Death came onto the scene screaming. That is their mode, their energy, their whole thing. Virgin is something else entirely. Cheeky, certain, sexy. It doesn't raise its voice to prove it exists. It just shows up every time with the same underlying conviction. Now, both brands work, but only one of them is measuring itself by how loud it can get. Then, look at a brand like Vital's Vault again, a challenger in the biomarker space up against well-funded competitors. Their founder is different. Their founder has a conviction that most brands would be too cautious to say out loud, that medicine has failed women. **[11:21] Speaker B:** It wasn't until 1993 that clinical research in the US was required to include women. The reason women were excluded for all of medical history? Women's bodies are too complicated to study. So, women have been gaslit, dismissed, told they're imagining symptoms that are very real. Now, the conviction is the spine of everything Vital Voices does going forward. No screaming required, just a clear conviction about who has been let down and why that has to change. There's a study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute showing that distinctiveness and consistency drive brand memory more than intensity does. So, a brand that shows up with conviction every time will outlast a brand that's trying to be the loudest thing in the room. The mistake most brands make here is confusing conviction with edge. We want to sound edgy, funny, Gen Z, but edgy is just another adjective. It's a costume, it's not a conviction. **[12:11] Speaker B:** Conviction is what you believe in so deeply that it cannot help but show up in an email the same way it shows up in a Super Bowl ad. It doesn't need a volume dial. It just needs to be real. Now, Patagonia has built one of the most recognizable brand voices in the world on exactly that, a very distinct conviction of the planet that shows up consistently in everything they do. And it works whether you're a law firm, a luxury house, any of it. The question isn't how loud or flashy should our brand be. It's what do we believe in so deeply that it will resonate loudly everywhere we show up. If you have a genuine advocate internally, someone who actually burns for the customer you're serving, that answer already exists. The drivers behind your brand voice are already there. You just have to name them. **[12:57] Speaker B:** The fifth step is to release your brand voice, not cage it. Chanel has been pearls, tweed, and a very specific idea of sophistication for over 100 years. That brand is ironclad. And so, when a new executive joins Chanel, they are required to stay silent in meetings for 90 days. Three months of a very clever executive paid very well just quietly listening, watching how decisions get made, absorbing the brand before they're allowed to try try shape it even a little. That is what it looks like to guard a voice you have earned. Once you've got it nailed, yes, guard it, but that doesn't mean you lock it in. Chanel didn't lock in always pearls, always feminine, always the same. They brought in Kristen Stewart, a completely different look from anything in Chanel's past, and she is entirely on brand. She wears it her way. She brings it into today. **[13:46] Speaker B:** The voice is still Chanel, but it's a living, breathing voice. Marty Neumeier's point is worth coming back to here. Your brand voice doesn't live in your brand guide, it lives in your audience's gut. You can shape it. You can release it, but you cannot own it outright because your customers are co-creating it. This is where most organizations trip and fall. The voice gets handed through legal and brand approval processes, and suddenly nothing moves without a committee sign-off. Every new channel becomes a threat. Every piece of content is a risk, and the voice, which was supposed to be living and breathing, starts to suffocate. People can feel it. A brand being controlled too tightly reads as stiff, cautious, inauthentic. The harder you grip, the faster the voice dies. But the flip side is also true. Don't lock in anything before you've tested it. If you've decided you're an advocate videographers, but it's landing wrong in the market, undo it. **[14:34] Speaker B:** Use trial reels and short-form content to try out voices without much risk. If something feels very risky, use a service like 5-second test to validate or invalidate it quickly with a small private group. Stay in touch with your audience. Keep listening. Guard the voice once you've earned the right to guard it, not before. **[14:52] Speaker B:** Challenger brands in particular should be experimenting constantly, not guessing and then etching that guess in stone. So, once you build something worth guarding, the last thing to ask becomes, "Will this actually work?" The sixth and final step is to protect what you've built. Your voice is the one asset nobody can touch. Disney, Harley-Davidson, Apple, three brands that couldn't be more different, and three brands nobody has ever successfully copied. Disney's conviction has always been around childhood and the magic of it. Harley-Davidson's is freedom, the outlaw, the open road, the refusal to be told how to live. Apple started as a challenger and that 1984 commercial was its conviction on full display. We are challenging the status quo. So are you. If you took away what any of those brands sound like, if they all went flat tomorrow, we might not notice for a decade. That's what happens with brands you grow up with. **[15:41] Speaker B:** The memory would hold, but eventually we would notice because what they've built goes beyond recognition. It's a feeling that belongs to people and once it's gone, it is almost impossible to rebuild. Most brands de-prioritize voice because they believe their real moat is something else. Their technology, their audience, their unique mechanism. And yes, those things matter, but they often have a shelf life. Someone smarter or better funded will eventually build what you built faster than you'd like to believe. The features that set you apart today are someone else's road map item for next quarter. A voice does not work that way. It can't be lifted from a pitch deck, vibe coded overnight, or reverse engineered from a product teardown. And if a competitor tries to copy it directly, the market notices. It reads as hollow, derivative, embarrassing. The original wins. Which means that while everything else you built is being studied and replicated, your brand's voice is the one thing sitting completely outside of that equation. **[16:35] Speaker B:** It costs nothing to build and it cannot be bought at any price. Now, here's the gut check. What would a competitor have to spend to rebuild your recognition and loyalty from zero? Not just your awareness, your loyalty. That number is what your brand voice is worth. If the answer is nothing because you don't have a brand voice yet, then you know where to start. If it's a billion, now you've got to make sure your voice doesn't get lost or diluted by team members who think it's just four adjectives in a 60-page guide on logo treatment. The thing is, your copywriters are responsible for a lot, not just brand voice, but they're largely untrained. It's frustrating for you and for them and it's leaving so much growth on the table that I'm confident you're stressed even thinking about it. So, put them in training with me. **[17:21] Speaker B:** Not a course, actual hands-on training. Start with a copy of my book and then book a call to discuss the transformation you want in your copywriters and content strategists. There are links to both in the description below. So, those are the six steps on the path to a breakthrough brand voice, the one asset your competitors can never touch. If you want to go deeper on this, check out the links below.