Guide
Brand voices
A brand voice is how BrandKind knows what your writing should sound like — nothing to do with audio, it is a written description of how your organisation writes. It is the only control you have over tone and audience — there is no separate audience setting — which makes it the one thing genuinely worth investing time in.
Why the brand voice carries everything
Most tools of this kind give you a row of dials: formality, tone, audience, reading level. BrandKind deliberately does not. Dials produce writing that sounds like it was assembled from settings, and they multiply into combinations nobody tests.
Instead there is one mechanism. If you need writing aimed at residents and writing aimed at councillors, you build two brand voices. That is more work up front and considerably better afterwards, because each voice is a real description of a real way of writing rather than a point in an abstract space.
Two ways to make one
| Captured | Written by hand | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is made | BrandKind reads examples of real writing and works out the pattern. | You describe the style yourself, in prose. |
| What it needs | A web address showing how you write, plus any extra material. | A clear idea of your own style and the words to express it. |
| Typical quality | Good, often better than the writer expected. | Variable. Depends entirely on how well you write the description. |
| When to use it | Almost always. | When nothing you have written is online, or the brand voice does not exist yet. |
Capture first
Capturing a brand
Give it an address.
A page showing how you actually write. You can type a bare domain and it will assume a secure address; if you paste one with a scheme, that scheme is kept exactly as typed, so an older http-only site still works.
Add extra material if you have it.
This is optional and worth doing. A homepage is a weak source of brand voice — it is usually sales copy, and often written by an agency years ago rather than by you. Pointing at a real article, a recent newsletter or a piece you are proud of gives BrandKind something honest to learn from.
Wait for it to read.
It takes a couple of minutes and is recorded in History as a capture run, so you can see it working and see why it failed if it does.
Read what it found, and correct it.
You get a description of the brand voice back, in plain language and fully editable. Read it as a claim about your writing rather than a result to accept. Where it is right, leave it. Where it has over-fitted to one page — insisting on a formality that was only in that article — change it.
Name it and save.
Name it for the job it does, not for its source. “Resident-facing service updates” is a name someone can choose from a list six months from now; “Website capture 2” is not.
Preview before you trust it
A brand voice can be asked for a sample — a short passage written in it, so you can see how it reads before putting a real brief through it. Do this whenever you create or meaningfully change one.
Samples are real runs
Words the brand voice must get right
A brand voice can carry a glossary: terms that must be spelled a particular way, product names that must not be paraphrased, jargon that must never appear. Every run using that voice honours them.
This is the right place for the things a style guide would cover — house spellings, the difference between your product names, the words your sector uses that your readers do not. It is a better tool than repeating the same correction in every brief.
Keeping a brand voice current
Refreshing
A captured brand voice can be re-captured from its source later. Worth doing when the source has changed substantially, or when a house style has moved on. Refreshing re-reads and re-proposes; your edits are not silently thrown away without you seeing the new version first.
Editing
Any brand voice can be edited directly at any time. Changes apply to future runs only — existing pieces keep the voice they were written in, and History keeps the name a voice had at the time even if you later rename or delete it.
How many to keep
Fewer than you would expect. One brand voice per audience, not one per campaign. Twenty near-identical brand voices produce inconsistent output and a list nobody can choose from; three well-maintained ones do the job. If two differ only in subject matter, that belongs in the brief, not in a second brand voice.
When not to use a brand voice at all
A single run can use one-off custom instructions instead of a saved brand voice — you type the style directly into the generate screen and nothing is saved. A run uses one or the other, never both.
Reasonable for a genuine one-off in a register you will never need again. Not a substitute for a brand voice: nothing is reused, nothing improves, and there is no record of what produced a result you liked.
Who can change brand voices
Creating, editing and deleting brand voices is limited to admins and managers. Members can use any brand voice in the workspace but cannot alter one, which stops a shared brand voice drifting because someone tuned it for a single piece. Viewers can do neither. See Team and access.
When a brand voice is not working
- Everything sounds the same regardless of brand voice. Check the run actually used the brand voice you meant — a run started with custom instructions ignores brand voices entirely.
- Brand fit is consistently low. The brand voice describes writing you do not actually produce. Re-capture from a better source, or edit out the parts that were never true.
- Brand fit is erratic — high on some topics, low on others. The brand voice is over-fitted to one subject. Broaden it, or split it into two.
- The capture failed. The source could not be read — commonly a site that blocks automated readers or an address that does not resolve. Try a specific article rather than the homepage.