--- title: Define your brand voice description: Build a brand voice guide from the copy that already works and the words your happiest customers use, with clear rules for how your tone shifts between audiences and channels. slug: /use-cases/brand-voice page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I define my brand voice with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent define my brand voice? - How do I write a brand voice guide? - How do I find my brand's tone of voice from customer reviews? - How do I adjust our tone for different channels and audiences? - What are good examples of brand voice guidelines? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-10-30' date_modified: '2026-10-30' --- # Define your brand voice ## Key Takeaways - The fastest way to define your brand voice with AI is to have it study what already works: your best-performing copy, any brand guide you have, and the words your happiest customers use in reviews. A voice built from that evidence sounds like you, while a voice built from adjectives sounds like everyone. - A useful brand voice guide holds a short description of how you sound, a few traits with real examples of each, the themes you keep returning to, the words you use and the ones you never use, and rules for how the tone shifts by audience, channel, and moment. - Kite reads your website and records your brand voice during onboarding. From there, it can mine your customer reviews for the phrases buyers use, look at which of your ads you've kept running longest, and turn all of it into a voice guide with a quoted example behind every rule. - Kite keeps the voice in your team's knowledge base, which it reads before it writes anything. Your blog posts, ads, emails, and social posts all start from the same rules, and posts under a founder's name can follow that person's own voice. - The guide stays current. When you say a draft is exactly your voice, Kite can keep it as a sample. When you correct one, Kite records the correction as a proposed rule, and its nightly review decides whether that rule should guide later work. ## Why your brand voice should come from what already works Your brand voice is how your company sounds when it writes and speaks. It matters most when several people write for you. If the founder writes the homepage, a freelancer writes the blog, and a salesperson writes the outbound emails, a reader can tell. The copy sounds like three different companies, and none of it may sound like the customers who love the product. The usual fix is a workshop where the team picks three adjectives, such as "friendly, confident, and clear." Those words are true of almost every brand, so they don't tell a writer what to do differently on Monday morning. A voice guide only works when it's specific enough that two writers would make the same choice: whether you say "we" or "the team," whether you use jokes, how long your sentences run, and which words you never use. The good news is that most companies already have the raw material. Somewhere in your website, your ads, and your emails are lines that worked. Somewhere in your reviews are customers describing the product in words better than your own. Defining your voice is mostly a job of reading all of that, finding the patterns, and writing them down with examples. That reading is slow for a person and a natural fit for an AI agent. Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it turns your existing material into a brand voice that every later piece of writing follows. ## How Kite defines your brand voice Kite works like an experienced brand writer who has just joined your company. It collects the copy you've already published and anything you hand over, reads what customers say about you, and studies the lines that worked. Then it describes your voice with traits and quoted examples, sets rules for how the tone changes from one audience or channel to the next, and saves the result where all of its writing starts. Kite doesn't start from nothing. During onboarding, it reads your website and records a first version of your brand voice in your team's knowledge base. That first version covers how your copy sounds, the themes you return to, and any limits your own materials state. The steps below are how Kite deepens that first read into a guide your whole team can use. ### Gather the copy that already works A brand voice guide is only as good as the evidence behind it, so Kite starts by collecting the material that shows how you sound at your best. It reads your live website, blog, and social posts on its own. You can add anything else by sharing files in the Kite web app or in Slack. The most useful material falls into four groups: - **A brand guide you already have.** If you hand Kite a brand guide or a style document, it treats your guide as the authority. When your guide and your website disagree, the guide wins, and Kite tells you where the two differ instead of quietly picking one. - **Your published brand material.** A press page or media kit often holds the company's own description of itself, so Kite looks for one before it reads the rest of your site. - **Your best-performing copy.** These are the ad lines, email subject lines, and headlines that got results. Kite can look up the ads your company runs from your website address alone and see how long each one has been running. An ad library doesn't show clicks or sales, so Kite reads an ad you've kept running for months as one you keep paying for, and it says so plainly. If you share your ad or email results, Kite can rank your lines by the results themselves. - **Work you've praised or rejected.** A post you called exactly right is a sample of the voice. A draft you threw out shows Kite what to steer away from. If you're just starting out and have little written down, Kite can still create a first voice. It works from your website and whatever you share, and it marks each choice it made on its own with a note explaining its reasoning, so you can see which parts came from evidence and which parts you should check. ### Find your voice in your customers' words Your happiest customers often describe your product better than your marketing does. They use plain words, they name the specific problem you solved, and they sound like the people you want to reach. That makes customer reviews one of the best sources for finding your brand's tone of voice. Kite collects what your customers say in public reviews and community threads, plus any review exports, support logs, or sales-call notes you share. It then builds a customer voice page in your knowledge base, organized around the parts of a buyer's story that writers need most: - what happened right before they went looking for a product like yours - what the problem was costing them - what they tried first and why it failed - the objection that almost stopped them - the result, in their own words - the exact phrases that sound like a headline, grouped by the feeling behind them, such as relief or frustration Every quote stays exactly as the customer wrote it, with its source and date. Kite never smooths a review into marketing language, because the point is to keep the customer's words intact. When Kite draws a conclusion from several reviews, it labels that conclusion as its own reading rather than presenting it as a quote. The page ends with a list of gaps, such as "we have no reviews from customers who switched from a competitor," along with the easiest next source to fill each one. Customer language and brand voice work together. Your brand voice decides how you sound, and your customers' words decide which words you use within it. If your voice is calm and precise and a reviewer wrote "this saved my sanity," Kite might keep the idea of relief and phrase it in your calmer register. ### Describe the voice with rules a writer can follow Kite turns the evidence into a description of your voice that a new freelancer could follow on their first day. It looks at the real copy, not at what anyone hopes the brand sounds like. It measures things like how long your sentences run, whether you write as "we" and address the reader as "you," how formal you are, whether you use humor, and which phrases keep coming back. Each trait comes with a line quoted from your own copy or your customers. The voice page in your knowledge base then records: - a short summary of your tone of voice - a brand personality, with a sentence on why it fits - the traits that describe your voice, each with real examples - the two to four themes your company keeps returning to - the words and phrases you use - what your brand never says or does in copy, such as banned words, pressure tactics, fake urgency, or comparisons with competitors Here's a short example of what part of a finished guide might look like for a bookkeeping service that works with restaurants: > **How we sound.** We sound like the calm person in the back office who has seen every kind of messy month. We're direct, practical, and never preachy about money. > > **Plain over polished.** We write the way an owner talks after close. "Your food costs jumped in March" beats "We identified a variance in cost of goods sold." From a customer review: "They told me what was wrong in one sentence." > > **Words we use.** Owner, not client. Books, not financial records. Close the month, not reconcile your accounts. > > **Never.** No guilt about the owner's past bookkeeping. No exclamation marks in anything about money. No "simply" or "just," because nothing about payroll feels simple to someone doing it at midnight. Kite's positioning and personality conclusions are labeled as its own reading of the evidence, and you review the whole guide before it becomes the standard. Change a trait, delete a rule, or tell Kite which of two conflicting examples is right. ### How do I adjust our tone for different channels and audiences? You adjust your tone by keeping one voice and changing how strongly each trait shows up for each audience, channel, and moment. The voice is who you are. The tone is how you speak in a particular room. A company can sound warm on social and still sound measured in a proposal to an enterprise buyer, as long as both clearly come from the same personality. Kite writes these shifts down as rules, so writers don't have to guess. Your voice page holds the tone for specific moments, such as a product launch, an outage notice, or a reply to a support question. Rules for one kind of content get their own page, such as "LinkedIn posts carry no emojis" or "ad headlines lead with the result, never the feature." You can also set different voice rules for different audiences, such as a more formal voice for enterprise buyers and a casual one on social. Here's how one voice might stretch across channels for that same bookkeeping service: - **Website.** Calm and confident, with short sentences and one clear promise per section. - **Social posts.** Looser and a little funnier, with the occasional inside joke about restaurant life. - **Emails to a large restaurant group's finance team.** More formal, with more numbers and less personality, but still plain words and no jargon. - **An outage or billing error.** No humor at all. It states what happened, what you're doing about it, and when the reader will hear next. When a moment comes up that the guide doesn't cover, Kite works from the traits you've already recorded instead of inventing a new voice. A recorded calm, direct voice already tells it a lot about how to write an apology. If a founder or executive publishes under their own name, Kite can also build a voice profile for that person. It reads their recent posts or the writing samples you share and records how they write, with a quoted line behind each trait and a note on what their posts never do. Posts under their name then sound like them, while company content follows the brand voice. ### Put the voice where every draft starts A brand voice only keeps writers consistent if it's read before the writing starts. Kite saves your voice, your customer voice page, and your rules in your team's knowledge base, and every part of Kite reads them before it writes. When Kite drafts a landing page, an ad, an outbound email, or a social post, it works from your recorded voice rather than from a summary someone typed into the request. Each draft is also checked against your "never says" list before you see it. The knowledge base is yours to read and edit. You can open the voice page in the Kite web app and change it directly, or tell Kite what to change. When your team edits a page, Kite treats your wording as the final word and doesn't overwrite it with its own research. Your human writers can use the same guide. Ask Kite for a copy as a file or a report page with a shareable link, and send it to freelancers, an agency, or a new hire. ### Keep the voice current as you work A brand voice guide should change as your company learns what works, and Kite updates it from the feedback you're already giving. When you tell Kite a draft is exactly your voice, it can keep that draft as an approved sample on your voice page. Samples like that teach later drafts more than any adjective can. Corrections work the same way. Say Kite drafts a launch post that opens with "We're thrilled to announce," and you reply that you never open with how excited you are. Kite records that as a proposed rule. Every night, Kite reviews the day's conversations, and a rule it confirms guides later work for your whole team, for one client, or for one kind of content. A standing instruction, such as "never use exclamation marks in emails," is recorded as your preference the first time you say it. For a deeper look at turning your past edits into rules about grammar, word choice, and mechanics, see [Write an editorial style guide](/use-cases/editorial-style-guide.md). ## What you get - **A brand voice guide.** It includes a short description of how you sound, a brand personality, traits with real examples, your recurring themes, the words you use, and the things your brand never says. - **A customer voice page.** It holds verbatim quotes from reviews and conversations, organized by trigger, problem, failed alternatives, objections, and results, plus a phrase bank your writers can borrow from and a list of gaps to fill. - **Rules for audiences, channels, and moments.** These show how your tone shifts on social, in sales emails, for enterprise buyers, in a launch, or in an outage notice. - **Voice profiles for named people.** Founders and executives who publish under their own name get a profile of how they write. - **On-brand drafts from Kite.** Every piece of writing Kite produces starts from your recorded voice and is checked against your limits. - **A shareable copy for human writers.** You get the guide as a file or a report page with a link, ready to send to freelancers, agencies, and new hires. ## How to get started Start by telling Kite what you want in plain language. You might say, "Write our brand voice guide from our best reviews and the ads we've kept running," or "Our blog and our sales emails sound like two different companies. Help us settle on one voice." Kite already has a first read of your voice from onboarding, so it begins by showing you what it recorded and where it thinks the evidence is thin. Share anything that would help: an existing brand guide, a review export, ad or email results, or a few pieces you consider exactly right. Kite then gathers your public reviews and ads on its own. Kite comes back with a draft voice guide, a customer voice page, and any conflicts it found, such as a brand guide that says "playful" next to a website that never jokes. Review it, change what you disagree with, and approve it. From then on, Kite writes in that voice and gives you a copy to share with anyone else who writes for you. ## Integrations used to define your brand voice Kite defines your brand voice mostly with its built-in research, so you don't need to connect anything to get started. It reads your website, finds public reviews and community discussions, and looks up the ads your company runs without a separate account. You can give Kite more to work with by sharing files directly in the Kite web app or in Slack, such as a brand guide, a review export, or your ad and email results. If you add Kite to Slack, it can also search the public channels it has joined for earlier feedback on your copy, which is often where the best examples of "yes, exactly this" are hiding. ## Common questions ### What's the difference between brand voice and tone? Your brand voice is your company's consistent personality in writing, and it stays the same everywhere. Your tone is how that voice adjusts to a particular audience, channel, or moment. A playful brand still uses a serious tone when it announces a data breach. Writing down both keeps writers consistent without making every message sound the same. ### What are the five main brand personalities? The most widely used framework, from the marketing researcher Jennifer Aaker, groups brand personalities into five types: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. These types are a useful starting point, but most brands blend two of them, and a label alone doesn't tell a writer what to do. Kite records a brand personality with a sentence explaining why it fits, then backs it up with traits and examples taken from your own copy. ### Can I just ask a chatbot to define my brand voice? You can, and you'll get a reasonable set of adjectives and sample sentences. A general chatbot writes from what brand voices usually look like, so the result tends to describe a typical brand rather than yours. The details that make a voice guide useful come from your own evidence: the reviews, the long-running ads, and the drafts you praised or rejected. Kite reads that evidence, keeps a source for each rule, and then writes in that voice in the work it does for you. ### How many customer reviews does Kite need? Enough to show patterns. A few dozen reviews that describe real experiences usually reveal the phrases and problems that come up again and again. Kite marks each theme as recurring or seen once, so you can tell a pattern from a single strong opinion. If you have very few reviews, Kite says so on the customer voice page and suggests the easiest next source, such as notes from three recent sales calls. ### Can an agency keep a separate brand voice for each client? Yes. Each Kite team has its own knowledge base, so an agency can run a separate team for each client, each with its own voice guide, customer voice page, and rules. One person can belong to several teams and switch between them. For more examples of how companies describe their voice, see our guide to brand voice examples and how to keep every writer on-brand (coming soon). To learn how Kite picks up your company's context more broadly, see [Teach an AI agent about your company](/use-cases/teach-an-ai-agent-about-your-company.md).