Brand · 6 min read
How to write a brand voice bible your content can actually follow
Most voice guidelines are three adjectives and a colour palette. Here's what a voice document needs to actually change how content reads.
"Friendly, professional, approachable" is not a brand voice. It is three words that describe roughly ninety percent of businesses, and no writer — human or AI — can act on them. A voice bible only works when it constrains choices.
Five traits, each with an opposite
Define each trait as a trade-off: "Direct, not blunt." "Warm, not chatty." "Confident, not boastful." The second half is what does the work, because it tells the writer where the line is.
A banned list
- ◆Words you never use — "excited to announce", "solutions", "leverage", "game-changer".
- ◆Structures you avoid — rhetorical question openers, three-word staccato fragments, emoji bullet lists.
- ◆Claims you cannot make — anything you can't evidence, in any format.
Rhythm and length
Specify sentence length, paragraph length and whether you use contractions. These mechanical details change perceived voice more than adjectives do, and they are the only part an AI can follow with precision.
Worked examples
Include three before-and-after rewrites. Examples transfer voice faster than any description, and they give you a reference to point at when something reads wrong.
Aura AI can generate this document for you: answer its brand discovery questions, ask for a voice branding bible, then paste the bible back into the chat so every piece of content it writes afterwards obeys it.
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