Brand Voice Is Infrastructure, Not Expression

Most brand voice problems don’t start where teams think they do.

They show up downstream — in inconsistent copy, endless rewrites, tone debates, or AI outputs that sound technically correct but unmistakably wrong. The instinctive response is to fix what’s visible: add clearer guidelines, tighten workflows, introduce templates, or bring in better tools.

That response is understandable. It's also usually ineffective.

Because brand voice is not an expression problem. It's a decision problem.

I see this most often in PR and communications teams managing multiple contributors, agencies, or tools — where output increases, but confidence in the results quietly drops.

Why “better execution” doesn’t fix voice issues

When teams struggle with brand voice, they often assume the issue sits with writing quality or compliance. Someone isn’t following the guidelines closely enough. Someone doesn’t quite “get” the tone. Someone needs more feedback.

So the system compensates: more approvals, more examples, more detailed instructions, more process.

This can temporarily reduce risk, but it rarely creates clarity. In many cases, it makes the problem worse.

Because none of these fixes address how decisions are actually being made.

If people don’t understand how to decide what sounds right for the brand, no amount of execution support will produce consistent outcomes. It will only produce faster inconsistency.

The hidden cost of subjective voice decisions

In most organisations, brand voice lives in one of three places:

1. In a set of high-level guidelines that describe tone, but not judgement
2. In the heads of a small number of experienced people
3. In a mix of both, loosely enforced through review

All three rely heavily on subjectivity.

Over time, this creates a predictable pattern: one or two people become informal voice guardians, review cycles lengthen, and decisions that should be straightforward turn into debates about taste.

Someone “just knows” when something feels off.

Someone else rewrites it, but can’t explain why.

Gradually, that person becomes the bottleneck — not because they want to control output, but because they're holding the voice together by instinct.

This is fragile.

As soon as you add more contributors, external agencies, new channels, or AI tools, the system starts to strain.

Subjective judgement does not scale. It multiplies friction.

Why AI exposes the problem faster

AI hasn’t created brand voice problems: it's simply revealed them.

When teams introduce AI into a system where brand voice isn’t clearly defined, the results are predictable: outputs are fluent, fast, and fundamentally misaligned. The response is often to write longer prompts or impose tighter controls.

Again, this feels logical. Again, it misses the point.

AI doesn’t need more instruction: It needs better decision criteria.

If brand voice isn’t defined as a decision system, AI will amplify whatever ambiguity already exists — at speed.

Brand voice as infrastructure

This is the shift most teams miss.

Brand voice is not a layer you apply to content once the system is running. It's part of the system itself.

When voice is treated as infrastructure, it does three things:

• It makes decisions legible, not personal
• It reduces reliance on individual taste or seniority
• It allows scale without constant correction

In practical terms, it moves brand voice out of people’s heads into a shared operating logic.

That logic doesn’t tell people what to write.

It tells them how to decide.

Getting the order right

Workflows, templates, governance models and tools all matter. But they're downstream mechanisms. They assume that something upstream is already stable.

Teams that address voice upstream tend to simplify rather than add process. Governance becomes lighter, not heavier, because fewer decisions need escalation in the first place.

When the order is reversed — when teams try to scale before voice is properly defined — they spend the rest of the year compensating. More process, more reviews, more friction.

The result isn’t better brand expression. It’s organisational drag.

Getting brand voice right early is not about perfection. It’s about orientation. Once decisions are clear, execution becomes lighter, faster, and more resilient.

Until then, every system you build is working harder than it needs to.