You can hear a stiff brand voice from across the room. It says "we are delighted to announce" when it means "it is here". It uses words that sound expensive and mean nothing at all. It reads like it was signed off by six people, because it was.
Loosening up does not mean becoming a meme account. It means sounding like the best version of the people who work there. Here are the stretches we use with clients.
Stretch one: read it out loud
If you would not say a sentence to a customer standing in front of you, do not post it. Read every caption out loud before it goes live. Your mouth is a much better editor than your keyboard.
Stretch two: swap the abstract for the specific
"High quality materials" means nothing. "Wool from a farm forty minutes up the road" means something. Every time you find an abstract word, replace it with a detail only you could know.
Stretch three: write a no list
Every brand voice needs a list of words it will never use. Ours includes a handful of shiny verbs every agency loves, plus anything that promises to change your life. Banning the lazy words forces you to find better ones.
A voice is a set of decisions about what you will never say.
Stretch four: let one person sign off
Committees sand every edge off a sentence. Pick one person who owns the voice, give them a short guide and trust them. Everyone else can suggest. Only one person decides.
Stretch five: steal from your customers
Your reviews and DMs are full of better copy than your website. Collect the phrases customers use to describe you and borrow them, with permission. Nobody sells your product better than the people who already love it.
Do these five for a month and read your feed again. It will sound less like a brand and more like someone worth following.
