Developing a unique brand voice is less about creative invention and more about disciplined empathy. The most powerful and resonant brands don’t invent a personality from thin air; they discover one by deeply understanding their target audience and mirroring the language, motivations, and worldview of that customer back to them. The goal is not to create a “brand voice” at all, but to speak in your customer’s voice. As Will Leach explained on the Up Arrow Podcast, the most successful marketing feels like hearing your own thoughts. When a brand uses the emotions and specific phrasing that a customer already has in their head, the messaging feels natural and bypasses their daily filter of 35,000 other decisions.
The underlying problem most founders face isn’t a lack of clever copy ideas. It’s a lack of genuine customer intimacy. They create a product, then try to bolt on a “voice” that sounds witty or aspirational, leading to generic messaging that blends into the noise. This is backward. The voice isn’t the final layer of paint; it’s a reflection of the brand’s core reason for being, which should be inseparable from the customer’s core need. Today, this is more critical than ever. The explosion of AI-generated content has flooded every channel with competent, but soulless, copy. This makes a truly human, specific, and opinionated voice a massive competitive advantage. It’s a shortcut to trust in a landscape of sameness.
Moving Beyond the Style Guide
The conventional wisdom says you need to define your brand archetypes, pick a few adjectives (e.g., “playful but authoritative”), and write a style guide. This advice isn’t wrong, it’s just insufficient. It treats voice as a purely stylistic exercise. A true voice goes deeper. It’s a direct output of your brand’s entire identity, as Ben Jenkins detailed on The eCommerceFuel Podcast. You must first define your essence—your values, your mission—and then identify your audience. Only then can you craft a narrative that connects the two.
This is where most brands stop, but where the real work begins. The consensus is wrong to treat voice as a static document. It’s a living element that must be found in the wild. As Kevin Pasco put it on the Serious Sellers Podcast, the brands that win have spot-on language because they know exactly who they’re going after and why. The secret isn’t in a branding workshop, but in the Reddit threads, product reviews, and social media comments where your customers are already talking. Their exact phrasing, their jokes, their complaints—that is your voice.
Benjamin Gottlieb, speaking from his experience as a journalist on Limited Supply, made the brilliant point that the goal should be absolute clarity, as if explaining it to a non-expert. Your voice shouldn’t be a performance of cleverness. It should be a masterclass in being understood. This requires stripping away industry jargon and using the simple, direct language your customers use.
The Real Work: Story and System
Authentic brand storytelling is the engine of a great brand voice. It’s not just about a compelling founder narrative, although that’s a powerful tool, as Vanessa Pham demonstrated when building Omsom. It’s about finding the human problem at the core of your product. Michael Jamin’s entire focus on The eCommerceFuel Podcast episode “Storytelling That Sells” is that stories create the emotional connection that builds long-term loyalty. The story provides the substance, and the voice provides the style in which that substance is delivered.
One of the most overlooked, second-order effects of a strong voice is that it acts as a powerful filter. It will actively repel people who aren’t your ideal customer, which is a feature, not a bug. This focuses your marketing efforts and builds a fiercely loyal community of people who feel truly seen by your brand. Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games found this to be true, using his brand’s narrative to build a multimillion-dollar business with a dedicated following. A strong voice also simplifies internal decision-making. From product development to hiring, a clear point of view makes it easier for everyone on the team to stay aligned. Consistency, as social media star Brandon Armstrong noted on the Serious Sellers Podcast, is crucial for building trust across all platforms.
Your 30-60-90 Day Plan for Finding Your Voice
If I were starting from scratch, here’s what I would do.
First 30 Days: Pure Listening. Do not write a single line of marketing copy. Your only job is to become an anthropologist of your customer. Spend 2-3 hours every day reading. Go through your competitors’ product reviews (1-star and 5-star). Live in the subreddits where your audience hangs out. Read their blogs. See who they follow on TikTok. Create a "swipe file" not of competitor ads, but of customer language. Document the exact phrases, slang, pain points, and desires they express in their own words. This raw material is gold.
Next 30 Days: Translation & Experimentation. Take your customer language swipe file and start translating it into small, testable assets. Write five different versions of a meta ad headline. Write ten different email subject lines. Post on social media using their language. The goal here is not to be perfect, but to experiment. Test your hypotheses about what resonates. Is their humor sarcastic? Is their tone urgent? Let the engagement data be your guide. You are A/B testing your way into a voice.
Next 60 Days: Codification & Scaling. After 30 days of testing, you will have clear winners. You will see which phrases and tones generate clicks, comments, and sales. Now, you can finally write your brand voice guide. But it won’t be based on abstract adjectives; it will be built on real-world examples. Use a “Speak like this, not like that” format with actual sentences from your successful tests. Once codified, begin systematically rolling this voice out across your entire customer experience, from your website’s hero banner to your Amazon A+ Content and your automated email flows. This is how you build a brand that doesn’t just sound authentic, but is authentic because its voice is a true reflection of the customers it serves.