How To Build A Brand Voice Guide Your Whole Team Can Write From
A brand voice guide gives the team one standard to draft from.
By Gabriel Tan | July 2026
You run a communications firm in Singapore. Your firm has a voice, and every draft you send carries it. The problem is that the voice lives in your head, and your team cannot copy from your head. A brand voice guide is how you get it out.
Without one, the junior draft comes to you at 9pm and it does not sound like the firm. It sounds like the account executive on a tired night, or worse, like the model she drafted it in. So you rewrite it yourself. Again. The problem is not her talent. It is that nobody wrote the voice down.
Here is the part that should bother you as the person who owns the firm. Your time is the most expensive in the building, and it is going into re-drafting. And you cannot take on the next client while every draft still routes through you for a voice check. The voice in your head is a growth ceiling.
Most communications teams now draft with AI. Claude, ChatGPT, whatever sits open in the browser. The tools write fluently, and that is the trap, because fluent and generic look almost the same at a glance. Generic is what goes out the door when nobody has set the standard the team writes to.
Anthropic's own prompt engineering guidance makes the point plainly: give the model the context first, before you ask it to produce anything. A brand voice guide is that context. You write it once as a single file, and everyone drafts from the same page.
A brand voice guide has three parts
Think of the guide as three parts your team can hold in their head.
The first part is what you sound like. Voice traits in plain words, not adjectives you would put on a careers page. The tone you take by audience, because the way you write to a fund manager is not the way you write to a founder. To the fund manager you lead with the number and cut the warmth. To the founder you carry more context and more patience, because they are learning the market as they go. Name both settings in the file, so the drafter picks the right one instead of writing every piece in the same register. Then the words you own, the specific terms your firm uses that a competitor would not reach for.
The second part is the sentence rules, each one carried by a before and after example. "We write short sentences" is a wish. Showing a bloated sentence next to its tightened version is a rule, because your team can see the move and repeat it. The examples do the teaching. The instruction on its own rarely sticks.
Make the pairs real. Take a line like "We are committed to delivering best-in-class strategic communications solutions that drive measurable value for our clients." Put the fixed version right beside it: "We win our clients coverage that moves the share price, and we can show you the numbers." A drafter reads those two lines once and understands the house style better than a page of rules would teach them. Ten pairs like that, pulled from drafts you have already fixed, and the guide starts writing in your voice for you.
The third part is the order you run things in, and that is where most files fall apart. A brand voice guide that only describes the sound is half a tool. It needs to tell the drafter what to do after the first draft exists.
Run it in two passes, brand voice first
Here is the sequence I use. First pass, the brand voice guide. Second pass, an anti-AI filter that catches the machine tells: the puffed-up significance, the three-item lists on every line, the words no human reaches for.
Brand voice sets the sound. The anti-AI pass strips out what gives the draft away as machine-made. Two passes, in that order, every time. Reverse them and the anti-AI pass scrubs the draft clean, then the voice guide paints the tells back on.
There is one carve-out worth building in. Every field owns a few words that sit on the generic banned lists but carry real meaning in your trade. An investor relations firm cannot drop "institutional investor" to satisfy a style rule. So name your owned terms inside the guide and let them through. The genuine tells with no meaning in your work still get cut. Write the exception down so the drafter does not have to hold it in their head at midnight.
To be honest, the guide is worth building for that reason alone. It moves the rules out of your memory and into a document your team can run without you in the room. That is the difference between a firm that scales its voice and one where every draft still routes through the founder.
What to do this week
You can build a first version of your brand voice guide in an afternoon.
Point AI at your own website. Feed it your positioning page, your methodology, your services, your testimonials, and ask it to describe how the firm sounds and which words it repeats. Thirty minutes, one sitting.
Pull that into a file under four headings: voice traits, tone by audience, words we own, sentence rules. Paste in three real before-and-after pairs from drafts you have already fixed. Fifteen minutes. This is your brand voice template, and it gets sharper every time you use it.
Write the two-pass rule at the top of the file, in one line, so nobody has to guess the order. Then add your owned-terms exception underneath it.
Test it on one live draft this week. Take a piece a junior wrote, run it through the guide, and compare it to what you would have sent. Where it still misses, the miss tells you what the guide is not yet saying. Fix that line. Fifteen minutes.
Share it with the team and fold it into your agency workflow. If someone disagrees with how you have pitched the firm's voice, that is the conversation you want, because now you are arguing about a document you can both edit, not about taste.
Back to that 9pm draft. Next week the same account executive writes the same newsletter, and this time she runs it through the guide before it reaches you. The draft that lands in your inbox sounds like the firm, because the firm's voice no longer lives only in your head. You read it once, and it goes out.
Gabriel Tan is the founder of Mekong Bridge Advisory. He builds structured execution systems for PR and communications firms.
