Brand voices

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.

The action is called Capture a brand wherever it appears — in the sidebar, at the top of the Brand voices list, and on the empty list when a workspace has no voice yet. Each one opens the same page.

1. 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.

2. 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. Once you open the extra fields, the Capture button moves below them, so everything you add is read before anything starts.

3. Wait for it to read.

   It takes a couple of minutes and is recorded in Runs as a capture run, so you can see it working and see why it failed if it does.

4. Check which pages it used.

   BrandKind always reads the homepage, then looks for the brand’s real writing: articles first, an about page, and a few product or service pages. It leaves out legal and policy pages, accounts, baskets and checkouts, contact and search pages, and tag, category and numbered listing pages. A page it reads that turns out to hold too little writing, or to repeat another page, is left out as well.

   The result lists every page under Pages behind this voice — the ones used, the ones left out, and the reason for each. Tick the pages you want, untick the ones you do not, add a page of your own, and choose Re-run with these pages to capture again from your selection. You can choose up to six pages; the homepage is always read. Pages need to be on the website you are capturing. An address typed without https:// has it added for you; one that starts with http://, carries a port number or sign-in details, or belongs to another site is turned down straight away, with the reason, rather than after the capture has run. Once six are chosen the remaining tick boxes and Add page switch off until you untick one. A writing sample or guidelines you added the first time are carried into the re-run when BrandKind still has them, and the page says so beside the button when it does not. If BrandKind could not find enough of the brand’s own writing it says so there, and asks for better pages or a pasted sample rather than leaving you to discover it in the first post.

5. 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.

6. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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. Open the Persona tab and look at Pages behind this voice to see what it was built from, then re-capture from better pages 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.