Brand voice template: the fields that make it usable
A brand voice template is only as good as the decisions it forces. Most are a page of adjectives ("friendly, bold, authentic") that no writer can actually act on, because "friendly" tells you nothing about whether to open an email with "Hey" or "Dear." A usable template replaces adjectives with rules, examples, and words you will and won’t say. It’s the verbal half of a fuller brand guidelines template, and the section most of those leave thin.
Here’s the template, field by field, with what to write in each. Fill every field with something specific enough that two writers, or a writer and an AI tool, would make the same call.
What a brand voice template should contain
A brand voice template is a structured document that defines how your brand writes, in enough detail that anyone (or anything) can reproduce it. The seven fields that earn their place:
- Voice in one line
- Core beliefs and point of view
- Voice attributes, each with a do and a don’t
- Tone shifts by context
- Vocabulary: words we use, words we avoid
- Mechanics: grammar and formatting rules
- Before-and-after examples
1. Voice in one line
One sentence that captures how you sound and, ideally, why. "We write like a sharp friend who happens to know banking," the kind of line Monzo built its well-known tone of voice guide around, does more work than a paragraph of attributes. If a new hire read only this line, they should already be 60% of the way to sounding right.
2. Core beliefs and point of view
Voice without a point of view is just a tone setting. List three to five things your brand actually believes about your category, the opinions that make your writing yours. This is the field most templates skip, and it’s why their content sounds interchangeable. Beliefs give a writer something to argue, not just a register to imitate.
3. Voice attributes, each with a do and a don't
Pick three or four attributes, but never leave them as bare adjectives. Each one gets a "this, not that." Intercom‘s style guidance works because it pairs every principle with a concrete example of what it does and doesn’t mean. So instead of "Confident," write: "Confident: we make a clear recommendation and stand behind it. We don’t hedge every sentence with ‘it depends.’" The do-and-don’t is what turns an attribute into something a writer can follow.
4. Tone shifts by context
Voice is constant; tone moves with the moment. Spell out how you shift. The same brand should sound different in a celebratory launch email than in an apology for an outage or an error message. Map two or three high-stakes contexts (onboarding, support, failure states) and note what changes and what stays fixed. This is the difference between a voice that adapts and one that sounds tone-deaf when something breaks.
5. Vocabulary: words we use, words we avoid
Two columns. The words and phrases that sound like you, and the ones that never make it past the door. A bank might say "money" and ban "leverage your assets." This is the most machine-friendly field in the template, a literal list a tool can check against, and the fastest way to scrub the generic out of a draft. Add a third column for tricky terms with house spellings and capitalizations.
6. Mechanics: grammar and formatting
The unglamorous rules that keep writing consistent: Oxford comma or not, sentence case or title case in headers, contractions or none, em dashes or never, how you handle numbers and dates. Shopify‘s Polaris content guidelines are a good model here, precise enough that a designer and a writer produce the same microcopy. These feel trivial until you see one paragraph written five ways across a single site.
7. Before-and-after examples
The most valuable field, and the one most templates omit. Take three real sentences, show the flat version and the on-voice rewrite, side by side. Examples teach what rules can only describe. If you want a sense of how distinct brands read on the page before you draft your own, these brand voice examples are a useful reference, and the broader definition of brand voice covers why beliefs sit underneath all of it.
The field every template is now missing: machine-readable
Fill in those seven fields and you have a real brand voice template. But here’s what changed: the template now has a second reader. It used to live in a PDF that humans skimmed once and forgot. Today, half the writing happens in AI tools, and those tools can’t open your PDF. So the careful work you did sits in a doc nobody pastes into the prompt box, and the AI defaults to generic anyway.
That’s the field worth adding: a machine-readable version your tools can actually use. Boomvoice takes the seven fields above and turns them into a voice profile your AI tools read automatically, so the template stops being a document people ignore and becomes the instructions every tool follows. Same template. One reader you forgot to write for.
Frequently asked questions
What should a brand voice template include?
Seven fields: voice in one line, core beliefs and point of view, voice attributes with a do and a don’t each, tone shifts by context, a vocabulary list of words to use and avoid, mechanics and grammar rules, and before-and-after examples. The examples and the do-and-don’ts do the most work.
What's the difference between brand voice and tone?
Voice is constant: the personality and beliefs that stay the same everywhere. Tone shifts with context: lighter in a launch, gentler in an apology. A good template defines the voice once, then maps how tone moves across a few key situations.
How do you make a brand voice template work with AI tools?
A PDF template can’t be read by an AI tool, so writers end up pasting fragments into prompts. Convert it into a machine-readable voice profile, the format Boomvoice produces, so every connected tool reads the same voice automatically instead of starting from a blank slate.
Filling those fields well is its own skill; this guide to how to describe tone of voice shows how to write entries a writer or model can actually act on.
And if you want a filled-in version to copy from, these brand guidelines examples show the difference between a usable entry and one that just looks tidy.
Short on time, a brand voice generator can draft the first pass of these fields for you, as long as it outputs something a tool can read.
Until that profile is wired in, a solid prompt to make ChatGPT write like a human is the stopgap, though it fades the moment the session resets.
Turn the template into something your tools can read.
A brand voice template in a PDF is a document your AI tools can’t open. Boomvoice turns those same fields into a machine-readable profile every tool reads automatically.
Build your voice profile → boombrand.ai
