Brand voice documents fail in one of two ways. Either nobody writes one, and every post sounds like whoever was on duty that day. Or someone writes forty pages, and nobody reads them.
Five lines is the size that survives. Here they are, with the questions that produce them.
1. Who we talk to
One sentence naming the reader. Not a persona with a stock photo, a sentence you would say out loud: “Video editors at small studios who ship client work every week.”
If you cannot write this line, nothing below it will hold.
2. What we sound like, in three adjectives
Pick three, and for each one name the failure it protects against. “Direct, so we never bury the point. Warm, so direct never reads as cold. Specific, so we never sound like a template.”
The failure clause is the useful part. Adjectives alone are decoration.
3. What we never say
A short banned list. Words, phrases, and moves. “Never ‘revolutionary’. Never a rhetorical question as an opener. Never a claim without a number or a name behind it.”
This line does more work than the other four combined, because it is the one people can check a draft against in ten seconds.
This line does more work than the other four combined, because it is the one people can check a draft against in ten seconds.
4. How we handle a mistake
One sentence for the day something goes wrong. “We say what happened, what we did about it, and when it will be fixed. No passive voice.”
You write this line on a calm day so you do not have to invent it on a bad one.
5. One post that is exactly us
Link to a real post you are proud of. Not a description of the ideal, the actual thing. New writers learn more from one example than from four rules.
Where to keep it
Somewhere the writer sees it while writing. A pinned note, the top of the content calendar, the system prompt of whatever drafts for you. Markowill stores these as the brand voice a workspace learns from, and rereads them on every draft. But a pinned note works too. What matters is that the five lines are in front of the person typing.
