Brand voice and tone guide
A guide that shows how your brand writes, with examples your team can copy.
GradaxEuropean companyOrder outright
Founded 2014·Built and operated in Europe·2 to 6 weeks
About this service
A voice guide that says 'friendly but professional' changes nothing, because every brand believes it is both. We read what you publish, interview the people closest to customers, and write a guide built on before-and-after examples for each channel. The test is whether a new hire sounds like you in their first week.
Adjectives do not make a voice
Almost every voice guide we are shown describes the brand as approachable, confident and professional. None of those words help a support agent answer an angry customer, or tell a junior marketer whether a joke belongs in a product email. A principle that rules nothing out is not a principle.
Each principle we write is a choice with a cost. 'Plain over clever' means giving up wordplay in headlines. 'Direct about price' means stating costs that competitors hide. Next to every principle sits a real sentence from your own material, rewritten, so the rule is shown rather than described.
Same voice, different tone
Voice stays fixed; tone moves with the situation. The brand that is playful in a launch email cannot be playful when apologising for a delivery that never arrived. Most inconsistency comes from people getting this right instinctively in some situations and wrong in others.
The tone map covers the moments your team actually writes in: a complaint, a refund, a price increase, a service outage, a new feature, a thank-you. For each, it sets how formal to be, how much to say and what to avoid, with an example written in full.
We build the guide for the people who will use it, not for the brand team. That means a short quick-reference page, examples organised by channel, and a vocabulary list a new hire can check in seconds.
What you get
Everything below is in the price. Nothing here is an upgrade.
- Audit of current writing across channels
- Voice and tone guide of 10 to 20 pages
- Vocabulary and style list
- Before-and-after examples per channel
- One-page quick reference
What changes
- Three or four voice principles, each with a 'this, not that' example
- Tone defined for real situations: a complaint, a sale, a delay, a launch
- A word list: terms you use, terms you avoid, how products are spelt
- Rewritten samples for every channel your team writes in
How it runs
Read
Everything you publish, sorted into what sounds like you and what does not.
Listen
The words your best salespeople and support staff use with customers.
Define
A few principles, each one a choice that rules something out.
Show
Every rule demonstrated with a real sentence, before and after.
Compare the sizes
The standard price for each size. Extras are priced beside it, not hidden behind a call.
| Included | Voice essentials€2902 weeks | Voice and tone guide€5603 to 4 weeks | Guide and rollout€1,1805 to 6 weeks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit of up to 20 samples | Included | Included | Included |
| Voice principles with examples | Included | Included | Included |
| Vocabulary list | Included | Included | Included |
| One-page quick reference | Included | Included | Included |
| Interviews with three customer-facing staff | Not included | Included | Included |
| Tone map for eight common situations | Not included | Included | Included |
| Rewritten samples for four channels | Not included | Included | Included |
| Workshop with the people who write | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Templates for the most-written messages | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Review of team writing one month later | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Order | Select | Select | Select |
Add what you need
Choose the size
Add what you need
Your total€560
ContinueThe standard price, plus whatever you add. Confirmed in writing before anything starts; nothing is charged until you accept it.
Questions
We already have brand guidelines. Is this different?
Usually. Most brand guidelines cover the logo and colours in detail and give words a single page. This is the missing part, built to sit beside what you have.
Can it cover more than one language?
Yes. Voice does not translate word for word, so each language gets its own examples and its own decisions on formality — tu or dumneavoastră in Romanian, du or Sie in German.
Will you rewrite our website too?
Not in this offer. The guide includes rewritten samples; a full rewrite is the website copy service, and it moves faster with this guide in hand.
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Order it
Standardised enough to order on its own. The price is confirmed in writing before anything starts.