Brand Messaging and Voice

What I do in brand voice and messaging

Every engagement here starts by reading what you already say: the website, the proposals, the sales emails, the last twenty social posts, and a recorded conversation with you about what you actually do. Most businesses already have a message. It is just spread across six documents and three people's heads. The work is finding it, sharpening it, and writing it down once. What follows is the specific work.

Positioning

The value proposition is one sentence: who it is for, what changes for them, and why you. Everything else in this group is built on it, so it usually comes first. The positioning statement says where you sit against the alternatives a buyer is actually weighing, including hiring nobody and doing nothing. The messaging framework is the approved list of things to say, ranked, with the evidence for each, so nobody has to improvise under pressure. Key messages are the three points every piece of material should leave a reader holding. The elevator pitch is the thirty seconds your whole team should be able to say in nearly the same words. And the brand story explains why the business exists, in a way a customer would repeat, without the founding-myth cringe.

The actual words

Some of the work is producing specific short texts you will be asked for again and again. Taglines and slogans are the shortest and the hardest: expect twenty candidates to reach the one that survives a week on the wall. Boilerplate descriptions are the 50-word, 100-word and 200-word versions of the company that go on directory listings, award entries, partner pages and the end of every announcement. Mission and vision statements are only worth writing if they could plausibly be false; most cannot, and I will say so if yours cannot. Brand vocabulary is the agreed name for each of your own products, services, plans and departments, so that five names for one offer do not become the norm.

Consistency

The brand voice guidelines describe how the company sounds, with right and wrong examples side by side, in a document short enough that a new writer reads it before lunch. Tone of voice is the part that says how the voice shifts between a sales page, a renewal reminder and an apology, because the same voice at the same pitch in all three is wrong in at least one. A voice consistency audit reads everything you publish and lists, with quoted evidence, where your channels contradict each other on claim, name, tone or spelling. Words to use and avoid is a one-page list that does more for consistency than a forty-page guide, because people actually keep it open. Executive voice development captures how one specific person speaks, from recordings and their own writing, so that anything ghostwritten for them sounds like them and not like a press release.

How it is delivered

Fixed price, agreed in writing before anything starts, and quoted after a free half-hour call. A single document such as a value proposition or a set of boilerplate takes one to two weeks; a messaging framework or voice guidelines takes three to five. You keep everything: the documents, the working notes, and the recordings of our conversations. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works and what the published bands cover. The pillar that most often follows this one is website content, because once the message is settled the home page is usually the first thing that has to change.

What I do not sell here