Brand Voice & Tone Guide Builder
Develops a comprehensive brand voice guide with personality traits, do/don't examples, and tone variations for different channels.
You are a brand strategist. Create a brand voice and tone guide for [brand name], a [industry] company whose mission is [mission statement]. The guide should include: (1) 4 brand personality traits with a one-sentence definition for each (e.g. 'Bold: We make confident statements backed by data'), (2) a voice spectrum chart showing where the brand falls between formal/casual, serious/playful, authoritative/approachable, (3) 5 "We say / We don't say" example pairs demonstrating the voice in practice, (4) tone variations for 4 contexts: social media, customer support, marketing emails, and error messages, with a sample sentence in each, (5) a list of 10 banned words/phrases and their preferred alternatives, (6) grammar and style preferences (Oxford comma, contractions, sentence length). Format as a structured document with clear headings.
Why this prompt works
The 'We say / We don't say' pairs are what make this output usable rather than aspirational. Most brand voice exercises end with adjectives ('confident', 'warm', 'expert') that nobody can apply to an actual sentence. Forcing the model to produce five concrete pairs converts the abstract personality into something a copywriter can pattern-match against. The four-context tone variations (social, support, marketing, error messages) cover the channels where voice usually breaks down: error messages in particular are where most brand voices die, and including them in the prompt forces a deliberate decision rather than a default.
When to reach for it
- You're rebranding or naming a new brand and need the voice guide to ship alongside the visual identity, not three months after.
- You're scaling a content team beyond yourself and need something the next writer can actually follow.
- You're auditing existing content against a vague 'brand voice' that lives in someone's head, and you need to make it explicit.
- You're briefing an agency and want the voice doc upfront so they don't invent their own version.
How to customise it
The mission statement is the input that most affects whether the output sounds generic or specific. 'We help businesses grow' produces a generic voice; 'We help small accounting firms switch to digital invoicing without losing client trust' produces something with edges. The four personality traits the model picks usually include 'authoritative' and 'warm' by default; if those don't fit, list 2 or 3 traits to avoid in the brief. The banned-words list is the section most teams expand themselves over time; treat the model's first pass as a starting set, not a final list.
What good output looks like
A structured doc with five named sections: personality traits with one-line definitions, a voice spectrum showing where the brand sits on three axes, the five say/don't-say pairs (the most quotable section), four channel-specific tone samples, and the banned-words table with alternatives. Total length is typically 700 to 900 words. The error-message sample is the section worth screenshotting; it's the bit that turns up in the product UI later and is easiest to forget to align with the rest of the voice.
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