About half a dozen years ago, doing a brand voice meant a two-day workshop at a Lake Garda resort. Three facilitators. Eight managers around a table with paper placemats. Sticky notes everywhere. At the end, a 60-page manual with four "brand values" — usually authentic, innovative, people-close, and a fourth of choice — and twenty pages of examples.
Almost no one opened the manual after delivery.
Over the years we understood that, especially for Italian SMEs, the problem is not the lack of a manual. It's the lack of a one-page document that anyone, in the company, can read in three minutes and use the next day. So we dismantled the process. The template we share here is the one we actually use today with clients.
It's done in half a day. Costs half. Works almost always better.
Premise: what brand voice is, and what it's NOT for
Brand voice is the writing style of your brand. Full stop.
It's not the mission. It's not the values. It's not the positioning. Those are other exercises (useful, important, and in most cases already done — perhaps in an old but still valid version).
Brand voice is for one thing only: answering the question "how do we write this email / post / page so it looks like us?". If your brand voice template doesn't answer this question operationally, it's useless.
The six questions, one by one
Take an hour. Gather two or three people (founder, marketing head, possibly the main copywriter). Open a Google Doc. Answer these six questions with short sentences. No bullet points, no "values", no abstract concepts.
1. If our brand were a person, what profession would they work in?
We're not asking the spirit animal. We ask the profession because it evokes a way of speaking. An accountant speaks differently from a sommelier. A yoga teacher speaks differently from a mechanic. A journalist speaks differently from a psychotherapist.
Real example (a client of ours in the artisan food sector): "It would be an aunt who's a seamstress. She knows everything about her craft, does it with rigor, but when she welcomes you home she first asks how you are."
From this answer, many practical things flow: the tone is warm but competent, sentences are direct but not brusque, vocabulary is specialized but explained.
2. What three things do we NEVER say?
Not which values we have. Which words, expressions, attitudes are outside our grammar.
Examples we often see: "we never use 'innovative solutions'", "we never use 'we are proud to…'", "we never speak about competitors by name", "we don't use exclamation marks", "we don't write in caps for emphasis".
"Don'ts" are more precise than "do's". Tend to be brutal here. Three bans are better than thirty.
3. What's our default mode when we have to be brief?
When you have to write an email subject, a push notification, a blog title, a claim under the logo — which register do you choose?
Three basic options: informative ("Your analyses are ready"), complicit ("We found something for you"), authoritative ("Results available"). There's no right or wrong. There's the choice of register your brand makes by default — and when you go against that default, there must be a reason.
4. What's the thing that would come naturally to us to say — but everyone has already said it?
The cliché exercise. Every sector has its verbal traps. "We put the customer at the center", "we are partners, not suppliers", "we do things with heart", "Italian excellence". They're true phrases, but they've become noise. Identify the three that tempt you most. And forbid them.
It works like a diet: what you remove creates space for what you put in instead.
5. If we had to write a single sentence explaining what we do to a fourteen-year-old, how would we write it?
The nephew exercise. Not a customer. Not an investor. A curious fourteen-year-old. A single sentence.
This is the toughest test. If you can't explain what you do to a fourteen-year-old in one sentence, you don't have a brand voice problem. You have a positioning problem, and it's another problem (worse). Go back to that, fix it, then come back here.
6. What's our typical mistake when we write badly?
Every brand has its specific way of writing badly. Some fall into formal-bloated ("We seize the occasion to…"). Others into too-friendly ("Hey there! So, we…"). Others into aspiring-technical ("We implement solutions…"). Others into clever-ironic ("Another day in paradise…").
Identify yours. When it appears, you know you're slipping.
The three exercises, in half an hour
Once you've answered the six questions, do these three practical exercises. They serve to test the answers against operational reality.
Exercise A — Rewrite three existing texts
Take three real texts of your brand — a page of the site, an automatic email, a social post. Rewrite them applying the answers to the six questions.
If the rewritten text sounds better (more recognizable, clearer, more "yours"), the template works. If it sounds the same, the six questions are too abstract: go back and be more specific.
Exercise B — Write an "uncomfortable" email
A customer writes you angry because of a snag. Write the reply — applying the template.
Brand voices from paper-placemat workshops always fall here. The replies come out evasive, bloated, full of "we're so sorry" that doesn't mean anything. A strong brand voice makes you write difficult replies in a real way — without lying, without self-castrating, without being hostile.
If you can't write an uncomfortable email with your template, your template is ornamental.
Exercise C — Give the template to a new collaborator
Literally. Take the document, send it to someone who recently joined the company (or to an external collaborator who just met you), and ask: "could you write a client email in our tone reading only this?"
If the answer is yes — the template is ready. If the answer is "I need to see some examples", add a section of three examples (one short, one medium, one long) and finish there. If the answer is "I don't understand", you've gone back to the 60-page manual. Dismantle and restart.
What comes out of the half day
A one-page document (single). Structure like:
- Who we are, in one sentence for a fourteen-year-old: (the sentence from exercise 5)
- The person we are: (synthesis of answer 1, two or three lines)
- Our default register: (informative / complicit / authoritative — plus a line of reason)
- Our three strong rules (the bans from exercise 2)
- Clichés we don't use (from exercise 4)
- Our typical mistake (from exercise 6) — and what to do when we notice
- Three examples: (one short, one medium, one long — result of exercise A)
One page. Anyone reads it in three minutes. It prints out, hangs up, gets sent to the new freelance copywriter, gets linked at the bottom of a new employee's onboarding email.
The final provocation
There's a good reason two-day brand voice workshops still exist: they're rituals. They serve to make participants feel that the decision is serious, shared, important. They have a social and emotional function, beyond the operational one.
The template we gave you doesn't replace that ritual. It concentrates it. Half a day instead of two days. One page instead of sixty. Six questions instead of a workflow you forget after a week.
For most Italian SMEs it's exactly what's needed. For big, complex brands (more than 100 employees, multiple markets, multiple sub-brands), the template is a starting point: it forces you to understand who you are before spending sixty thousand euros on the complete manual. It's the document that precedes serious investment, not the one that replaces it.
In both cases, it's worth half a day. And zero euros of facilitators.
Monday, June 22, we return to the startup pillar with a piece we'd been keeping in the drawer: Fundraising in Italy in 2026: between flight and return. The real numbers of the first semester, where the money went, and why founders staying here are changing strategy.
Feel like spending that half day together? We do it for tailored branding clients as part of every new project. Write to us.