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How to Find Your Brand Voice — And Why Most Brands Never Do
By Jayshri Tiwari, Co-Founder and Editor of Brand Untold•August 4, 2026
Most brands don't have a voice problem.
They have a clarity problem.
If you've spent any time trying to figure out how to find your brand voice, you already know the frustrating part isn't the theory — it's that every guide gives you adjectives instead of a process. They know what they sell. They know who they're selling to. But when it comes to how they speak — the actual words, the rhythm, the personality that shows up in every caption, every email, every Instagram bio — they default to something generic. Something that sounds like everyone else in their category.
And then they wonder why nothing sticks.
This is a working brand voice guide — not a mood board, not a list of adjectives. It's the same process Brand Untold uses when we help Indian founders and brands find the language that actually sounds like them.
Before anything else, this distinction needs to be clear — because most people get it wrong.
Brand voice is who you are when you speak. It's your personality, your values, your worldview expressed in language, and it doesn't change based on context. Brand tone is how you adjust that personality depending on the situation — more formal in a media pitch, more playful in a caption — while the underlying personality stays exactly the same.
Think of it this way: your voice is your character. Your tone is your expression. A person who is fundamentally warm and direct will still adjust how they communicate in a board meeting versus with their best friend — but they don't become a different person.
Most brands confuse these two things. They write a "brand tone of voice" document that lists adjectives — professional, friendly, innovative, trustworthy — and call it done. Those adjectives describe every brand ever created. They tell you nothing about who you actually are.
Real brand voice is specific. It's recognisable without a logo. It's the reason you can read a Zomato notification, a Fevicol ad, or a CRED email and know exactly who it is — even if the brand name is covered.
That's what we're building toward. If you want more on how identity and voice work together, we've written about it in our Writing & Branding archive.
Brand Voice | Brand Tone | |
What it is | Your brand's fixed personality | How that personality adapts |
Does it change? | No — stays constant everywhere | Yes — shifts with context |
Example | Analytical, opinionated, warm | Sharper in a crisis, lighter in a caption |
Set once, or ongoing? | Defined once, deepened over time | Adjusted content by content |
Failure mode | Sounding like your category | Sounding tone-deaf for the moment |
Alt text: Brand Untold editorial illustration featuring a cinematic black-and-gold writer's workspace with a vintage typewriter, handwritten drafts, a modern laptop, and flowing golden lines symbolizing the journey to finding an authentic brand voice.
There are three reasons Indian brands in particular struggle with this — and understanding them is the first step to avoiding them.
The translation trap. Many brands start by thinking in Hindi or their regional language and then translate their communication into English. The result is language that is technically correct but emotionally flat. The warmth, the rhythm, the specific cultural references that make communication resonate — all of it gets lost in the translation. A brand voice built from translation is almost never one built from truth.
The aspiration gap. Most Indian founders write the way they think a "professional brand" should sound — formal, distant, corporate. This is a performance of credibility rather than an expression of identity. The problem is that audiences are increasingly sophisticated. They can feel when a brand is performing versus when it's actually speaking. The aspiration gap — between who you are and who you're pretending to be in your communication — is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
The category copy problem. Brands look at what competitors are doing and approximate it. In the D2C beauty space, everyone sounds like they're "empowering women through clean beauty." In the edtech space, everyone is "making learning accessible." These aren't brand voices — they're category descriptions. When you sound like your category, you disappear into it.
There is no shortcut to how to find your brand voice. But there is a process. These five questions, answered honestly, will give you more useful material than any workshop or template.
This is the most important question. Brand voice isn't just about how you speak — it's about what you stand for. The brands with the clearest voices almost always have a clear point of view that challenges something in their category.
Zomato doesn't just deliver food. They've built a voice around the belief that food is emotional, and that delivery is a deeply human experience — not a logistics problem. That belief shows up in every piece of communication they write.
What do you believe? Not what your category believes. What you believe — even if it's slightly uncomfortable to say out loud.
Not your "target audience" in the marketing sense. One specific person. Someone you can picture clearly. What do they already know? What do they care about? What would make them roll their eyes? What would make them feel genuinely seen?
The most resonant brand voices are written for one person — even when millions end up reading them.
Negative definition is often more useful than positive definition. Make a list of words your brand will never use — words that feel inauthentic, hollow, or simply wrong. This "banned words" exercise tells you more about who you are than a list of aspirational adjectives ever will.
At Brand Untold, our banned words include: authentic (ironic, we know), hustle, grind, masterclass, game-changer, journey, inspiring, passionate. Every time we're tempted to use one of these, we ask ourselves what we actually mean — and the specific answer is always better than the generic word.
This sounds like a creative exercise, but it's actually a diagnostic. The most memorable brands have a personality that would be interesting in a social setting — they have opinions, they notice things others miss, they tell stories in a specific way. The brands that disappear are the ones whose personality would make them forgettable at that dinner table.
What does your brand notice? What does it care about enough to argue for? What kind of stories does it tell?
Most brands can answer the first part easily. The second part is harder. Not "what do we want people to know" — that's messaging, not voice. "How do we want people to feel?"
The feeling is where voice lives. Curiosity. Warmth. Sharpness. Surprise. Trust. The feeling your communication creates is the most direct measure of whether your brand voice is working.
Theory is only useful once you can hear it. Here's what a genuinely distinct voice looks like across a few Indian brands — not the tagline, but the underlying personality driving it.
Zomato — irreverent but emotionally sincere. Their notifications treat food ordering as a small, funny, human drama rather than a transaction, and that same warmth carries into their crisis communication and founder posts.
CRED — exclusive but self-aware. The brand leans into premium positioning while constantly winking at its own absurdity, which is what keeps it from feeling arrogant.
Mamaearth — personal and trust-led. Much of its early voice was built on founder-led, motherhood-rooted storytelling rather than clinical product claims, which is part of why it resonated where "clean beauty" category-speak didn't.
boAt — youthful and unapologetically loud, matching the energy of the customer base it built around music and self-expression rather than pure spec sheets.
Fevicol — patient, witty, culturally fluent. Decades of advertising built around a single consistent idea — unbreakable bonds, told through very Indian humour — rather than chasing trend-driven messaging.
Notice what none of these have in common: none of them describe themselves as "authentic," "innovative," or "customer-first." Their voice shows up in the choices, not in the adjectives.
If you'd like this kind of thinking applied to your own brand, that's exactly the work we do — you can work with us directly.
Alt text: Brand Untold editorial illustration featuring a luxury black-and-gold workspace with a brand voice notebook, handwritten prompts, and creative notes, symbolizing the process of defining and documenting an authentic brand voice.
Most brand voice documents are useless because they describe rather than demonstrate.
A document that says "we are warm, witty, and human" tells a writer nothing. A document that shows what warm looks like in a headline, what witty looks like in a caption, and what human looks like in an error message — that is actually useful.
Here is the structure of a brand voice document that works:
Section 1: The one-line identity. Not a tagline. Not a mission statement. A sentence that captures the essence of who you are when you speak. Brand Untold's internal one-liner is: "We're the editor who tells you what nobody else will — because the real story is always more interesting than the version they published."
Section 2: Three voice pillars. Not adjectives. Tensions. The most interesting brand voices hold two things in tension simultaneously. Zomato is "irreverent but warm." CRED is "exclusive but self-aware." Brand Untold is "analytical but emotionally honest." Name three tensions that define your voice. Each one should feel slightly contradictory — because the best brand voices are never one-dimensional.
Section 3: The banned words list. As described above. Minimum ten words. Be ruthless.
Section 4: Side-by-side examples. For every channel you communicate on — captions, emails, headlines, bios, error messages — show a "this, not that" example. The contrast does the teaching that description never can.
Section 5: The litmus test question. One question that any piece of communication can be tested against. Brand Untold's litmus test is: "Would someone recognise this as Brand Untold if the logo was removed?" Your litmus test should be equally specific and equally honest.
This is the part most brand voice guides skip — the actual psychological mechanism behind why some voices resonate and others don't.
Specificity signals honesty. When a brand is specific — using particular details, unusual observations, concrete examples — the human brain reads it as evidence of genuine knowledge and experience. Vague communication, by contrast, triggers a low-level skepticism response. The brain registers it as the kind of thing anyone could say, which means it probably isn't worth remembering.
Consistency creates familiarity. Psychologists have long studied what's known as the mere-exposure effect — the tendency for people to develop a preference for things simply because they've encountered them repeatedly, often without consciously noticing the exposure at all. A consistent brand voice that shows up the same way across every touchpoint builds a kind of familiarity that eventually becomes trust. Inconsistency, even subtle inconsistency, erodes that familiarity.
Distinctive voices trigger pattern recognition. Human beings are pattern-recognition machines. When a brand voice has a genuinely distinctive quality — a particular rhythm, an unusual perspective, a specific way of framing things — people begin to recognise it without being told whose it is. This recognition creates the feeling of a relationship, which is the foundation of brand loyalty.
Vulnerability increases relatability. This is counterintuitive for many Indian brands, which have been trained to communicate only strength, expertise, and success. But behavioural research on trust and self-disclosure is fairly consistent on this point: controlled vulnerability — admitting a belief you're not sure everyone shares, saying something that not everyone will agree with, acknowledging the complexity of something rather than pretending it's simple — increases trust, not decreases it.
Alt text: Brand Untold editorial illustration contrasting generic messaging with an authentic brand voice, featuring a cinematic black-and-gold design that symbolizes the psychology of trust, emotion, and meaningful brand connection
If you're building a brand voice for startups in India, these are the four traps that show up most often — and quietly undo otherwise good work.
Switching voice by platform. Many brands write formally on LinkedIn, casually on Instagram, and somewhere in between on their website. The result is that no platform develops a recognisable personality. Your tone should adapt across platforms — but the underlying voice must be the same everywhere.
Writing for approval rather than recognition. There's a specific anxiety in Indian startup communication — the fear of sounding too casual, too opinionated, too different. The result is communication that is technically correct but emotionally flat. No one will remember a brand that is trying to be approved of by everyone.
Overexplaining the product instead of embodying the brand. Product communication and brand communication are different things. Product communication tells people what you do. Brand communication shows people who you are. Many Indian brands — particularly early-stage D2C and SaaS companies — default entirely to product communication, which means they never build a voice at all.
Copying the brand voice of international companies. There's a particular category of Indian startups that sound exactly like Y Combinator companies — short, punchy, slightly aggressive, heavily data-driven. Sometimes this is appropriate. Often it is a performance of a culture that isn't the brand's actual culture, and audiences — especially Indian audiences — can feel it.
There are three tests worth running regularly:
The recognition test. Take three recent pieces of your communication — a caption, an email subject line, a LinkedIn post. Remove the brand name and logo. Ask someone unfamiliar with your brand to read them. Can they describe the personality? Would they recognise the next piece as coming from the same brand? If not, the voice isn't consistent enough yet.
The imitation test. Ask a team member or writer who knows your brand well to write a new piece of content in your brand voice — without you briefing them. If their version sounds substantially different from what you would have written, the voice isn't documented clearly enough.
The feeling test. Ask ten people who have encountered your brand communication recently — not what they understood, but how they felt after reading. The feelings that come back should match the feelings you intended to create. If they don't, the gap is worth examining.
Brand voices aren't permanent. They evolve as the brand evolves, as the audience evolves, as the cultural context evolves. But there's a difference between evolution and abandonment.
Evolution is a gradual deepening — the voice becomes more specific, more confident, more distinctively itself over time. This is healthy and normal.
Abandonment is what happens when a brand, usually after a rebranding exercise or a new marketing hire, decides to start from scratch. The result is a voice that doesn't connect with existing audiences and hasn't yet connected with new ones. This is expensive and usually unnecessary.
The signal for evolution is: the voice still feels true, but it could go further. The signal that something is wrong — but probably isn't solved by changing the voice — is: the voice feels fine but the content isn't working.
A voice that feels true but content that isn't working usually means a distribution problem, not a voice problem. A voice that doesn't feel true is almost always a clarity problem — you haven't answered the five questions honestly enough yet.
Alt text: Brand Untold editorial illustration featuring a cinematic black-and-gold workspace with a mirror, notebook, handwritten reflections, and symbolic objects representing self-discovery, authentic brand voice, and listening to your own perspective.
This is the thing most brand voice guides don't say because it's harder to sell a template if you say it:
Your brand voice is not something to be invented. It's something to be uncovered.
It lives in the way your founder talks about the problem they're solving when they're not thinking about messaging. It lives in the specific complaint a loyal customer makes when a competitor gets something wrong. It lives in the emails your team writes to each other when they're excited about something.
The job of brand voice work isn't creation. It's listening — carefully, specifically, and with enough honesty to write down what you actually hear rather than what you think you should be saying.
That's where the voice is. It's been there all along.
What is brand voice in marketing? Brand voice is the consistent personality a brand expresses through language — the values, worldview, and character that stay the same across every piece of communication, regardless of channel or context.
What is the difference between brand voice and brand tone? Brand voice is fixed — it's who a brand is when it speaks, and it doesn't change. Brand tone is flexible — it's how that same personality is adjusted for a specific situation, like being more formal in a press release and more playful in a social caption.
How do I find my brand voice in practical steps? Start by answering five questions honestly: what you believe that your category doesn't, who you're really writing for, which words you'll never use, what would make your brand interesting at a dinner party, and how you want people to feel after reading your content. The answers, not a mood board, are your voice.
What are examples of a strong, distinct brand voice? Zomato (irreverent but warm), CRED (exclusive but self-aware), Fevicol (witty and culturally rooted), and Mamaearth (personal, founder-led storytelling) are all examples of Indian brands with a voice specific enough to recognise without seeing the logo.
Why do Indian startups struggle to define a brand voice? Three recurring reasons: translating communication from a regional language into English (which flattens tone), performing a "professional" corporate voice instead of an authentic one, and copying category-standard language instead of developing a distinct point of view.
How often should a brand voice change? Rarely, and gradually. Brand voice should deepen and become more specific over time rather than being reinvented. A full reset is usually only warranted after a major brand repositioning — frequent tone adjustments across channels are normal and expected.
Brand Untold tells the real stories behind Indian brands and founders — the thinking, the decisions, and the human moments that shaped everything.
If you're looking to find and articulate your brand voice — or tell the story behind your brand — we'd love to hear from you.
→ Work With Us: branduntold.in/work-with-me
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Storyteller, writer, and brand strategist helping founders craft compelling narratives that connect with audiences.
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