What a brand voice is, with five you already recognise.

A brand voice is not a mood. It is a set of decisions about how your company talks, written down clearly enough that someone who has never met you can write a caption that sounds like you.

The test is simple, and it is the only one that matters.

Cover the logo. Can somebody still tell it's you? Then you have a voice. If not, you have a font.

Five you'd recognise with the logo covered

Zomato writes like the friend who is already at the restaurant and slightly hungry. Lower case, jokes that are almost too online, and an assumption that you are in on it. The decision underneath: be a person on the internet, not a company on the internet.

Amul has said the same thing for fifty years: whatever happened this week, said with a pun and a girl in a polka-dot dress. The voice is topical and unfailingly gentle. Nothing is ever cruel, which is why it has survived every political mood in the country.

Zerodha sounds like an engineer explaining something at a whiteboard, with a mild allergy to excitement. No exclamation marks, no “wealth creation journey”, no promises. For a category built on hype, the decision to be plain is the positioning.

CRED made absurd expensive things and never explained the joke. Whether you liked it is a different argument; you could identify an ad of theirs from three seconds of the wrong celebrity being very serious.

The Times of India classifieds, of all things, have a voice: compressed, abbreviated, faintly formal, and unchanged since your parents read them. You can spot one in a screenshot with no context at all.

None of those five is “friendly, professional and approachable”. Each one is the result of somebody deciding what they would rather not sound like.

A voice is made of what you refuse

Most brand voice documents list what the brand is. The useful half is the other one. Ours, written down, includes: never use “seamless”, never make a joke at a customer's expense, never write a sentence that could appear on a competitor's site unchanged, never open with “In today's fast-paced world”.

Refusals are testable. Adjectives are not. Nobody has ever caught a caption for not being “approachable” enough, but anyone can catch a “seamless experience”.

The four questions that get it written down

This takes an afternoon, not a workshop.

1. Who are you talking to, exactly one of them? Not “millennials and Gen Z”. One person, with a job, a budget and a reason to be annoyed.
2. What do you sound like at your best, in a sentence? “The friend who already read the terms and conditions.” “The shopkeeper who tells you not to buy the expensive one.”
3. What will you never say? Five to ten words or moves, banned in writing. Include the ones your industry loves most.
4. Where are the edges? How rude can a reply get? Can you joke about your own product? What happens when someone is genuinely angry?

Write the answers as one page with examples: a good line and a bad line side by side, for captions, for a website page, for an email. A page with examples gets used. A twelve-slide deck about values gets opened once.

How to know it's working

• A new writer's first draft is nearly right, instead of nearly anything.
• Two people writing for you produce copy that sounds like one company.
• You can reject a line by pointing at the page instead of saying “it doesn't feel like us”.
• Somebody screenshots something you wrote, which nobody does to “approachable”.

The uncomfortable part

A voice that everyone in the room likes is usually a voice nobody outside the room will notice. Somewhere in yours there should be a decision that makes one person mildly nervous. Ours is the name. We are called The Dry Text Co. and then we write jokes; the tension is the point, and we would rather explain it than lose it.

If you want one written and tested on your actual pages, that is most of what we do. If you want to write it yourself, the four questions above are the whole method.