Why No Tone Of Voice Development Is The Real Reason Your Beauty Brand Sounds Like Three Different Companies

Over the last decade, I've asked founders to describe their brand's tone of voice more times than

Usually, you'll get one word back like "We're funny, "We're luxe", or the classic "We're approachable but premium."

Lovely. That's a vibe. It's not a tone of voice, and the gap between those two things is where a lot of new beauty brands come undone.

A tone of voice tells any marketing person you're trusting with your brand, especially writers, (including you at 11pm), exactly how to build a sentence so it sounds like you every single time.

An adjective is a starting point, not a guide

Here's the problem with "we're funny." Funny how? Dry and deadpan, or warm and self-deprecating? Do you make the joke at your own expense or the industry's? Do you swear? Would a pun ever belong in a product description, or would that make you cringe?

"Funny" doesn't answer a single one of those, and it means something different to every single human. For example, my humour is dark AF, and what's funny to me, might be giving "bitch go to therapy" to you.

....jokes on you. I AM!

The person writing your copy, even when that person is you, fills the gaps with their own instinct. Their instinct isn't your brand. It's theirs.

That's how you end up with copy that's technically on-brief and still doesn't sound like you. Every piece points roughly at "funny," and none of them agree on what funny means.

What real tone of voice development contains

A proper voice guide is the set of decisions that turn a mood into repeatable rules.

• Your voice traits and what each one sounds like in a live sentence, not just the label.

• The rhythm of your writing, long and flowing or short and sharp.

• The words you reach for and the words you'd never be caught using.

• How the voice flexes between a cheeky Instagram caption and a considered product description without becoming a different brand.

• A vocabulary list.

• Before-and-after rewrites, so the rules are shown, not just told.

That last part earns its keep for a product brand, because your voice has to survive a hundred product descriptions, an About page, an email sequence and a launch campaign, and still read as one brand across all of it. "Funny" can't carry that weight. A guide can.

If your brand's whole voice currently lives in one adjective, that's the exact thing I map with founders. Comprehensive tone of voice development, before it becomes word soup. Book a virtual coffee.

Why this belongs at the foundation

Most founders leave voice till the end, sum it up in a descriptor and move on, because the product and the packaging (aka money makers) feel more urgent. Fair. The trouble is, every word you write before the voice is mapped is a word written on a guess. Your website's live, your products are listed, you've posted months of captions, and all of it was built on "we're approachable, I think."

Map it first, and the descriptor becomes a document. Every piece of copy after that has rules to follow instead of a vibe to chase. It's the difference between telling a writer "make it feel premium" and handing them the sentence patterns, the vocabulary and the rewrites that make premium real on the page.

So, the test

Pull up your brand's tone of voice, whatever you've got written down. If it's a handful of adjectives, you don't have a tone of voice yet. You have a wish list for one. A guide is what turns "we're funny and a bit unexpected" into copy that lands that way every time, no matter who's writing it, including me, if you'd rather hand it over.

Want to turn your adjectives into a voice? Book a virtual coffee, and let's ditch the guesswork.