What My Grandmother's Recipes Taught Me About Brand Voice
My grandmother never measured anything. I mean never. She cooked for sixty years, fed an entire extended family through weddings, funerals, festivals, and random Tuesdays, and not once did she pick up a measuring cup. "You'll know when it's right," she'd say, tossing spices into a pot with the casual confidence of someone who has never experienced self-doubt.
I once spent three weeks trying to document her recipes. I followed her around the kitchen with a notebook, a measuring spoon, and the desperate energy of an anthropologist who knows her subject won't be around forever. She found the whole thing hilarious.
"A pinch of this," she'd say. "How much is a pinch?" I'd ask. She'd hold up her fingers, pinching air. "This much." Reader, it was a different amount every time.
I thought about this recently while working on a brand voice guide for a client. I'd spent weeks on it. Tone attributes, writing principles, do's and don'ts, example sentences, the whole thing. Forty-seven pages. It was comprehensive. It was thorough. It was, I realized with a sinking feeling, completely useless.
The problem with brand voice guides
I once spent three weeks on a brand voice guide nobody read. Including me. I went back to reference it six months later and couldn't find it. It was in a shared drive, inside a folder called "Brand Assets," inside a subfolder called "Voice & Tone," inside a sub-subfolder called "Final_v3_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE."
And that's the problem. Brand voice guides are like gym memberships: everyone feels good about having one, almost nobody uses it, and the people who need it most are the least likely to read it.
The guides that do work, and I've seen a few, share something in common with my grandmother's cooking. They don't try to measure everything. They capture a feeling.
Brand voice isn't a set of rules. It's a feeling that people recognize. Like a grandmother's cooking, it's less about the measurements and more about the instinct behind them.
What my grandmother knew
Here's what Nani understood about cooking that applies directly to brand voice: consistency doesn't come from precision. It comes from identity.
She didn't need to measure because she knew who she was as a cook. She knew that her dal was always going to be a little sour, a little smoky, a little more cumin than the recipe in the book called for. That wasn't a recipe. That was her.
Mailchimp doesn't need a hundred-page voice guide to sound like Mailchimp. They sound like Mailchimp because they know who they are: friendly, a little quirky, never condescending, surprisingly helpful. When a Mailchimp writer sits down to write error copy, they don't check the brand guide. They just write like Mailchimp, because the identity is clear enough that the voice follows naturally.
Compare that with the brands that have voice guides thicker than a phone book and still sound like they were written by a committee. Which they were. Because the guide tried to legislate voice through rules instead of cultivating it through identity.
How to find your brand's "pinch"
If I'm being honest (and I try to be, at least in essays, if not always in meetings), the best brand voice work I've ever done took about two hours. Not two weeks. Two hours.
Here's what I did. I sat in a room with five people from the company. People from different departments, different levels, different amounts of time at the company. And I asked them one question: "If this brand were a person at a dinner party, what would they be like?"
The answers were messy and contradictory and perfect. "They'd be the person who explains something complicated without making you feel dumb." "They'd make a joke but it would never be at your expense." "They'd be genuinely curious about what you do." "They'd have strong opinions but they wouldn't be a jerk about it."
That's your brand voice. Right there. Not in a forty-seven-page document. In the gut feeling of the people who live inside the brand every day.
Three things, not thirty
If you absolutely need to write something down (and sometimes you do, especially when you're onboarding new writers), here's my advice: three things. Not thirty. Three.
What are the three words that describe how this brand talks? Not what it says. How it says it.
For my grandmother's cooking: generous, unpretentious, bold.
For Patagonia's content: direct, passionate, honest.
For Basecamp: opinionated, clear, human.
Three words. You can memorize three words. You can hold three words in your head while you're writing at 4 PM on a Thursday with a deadline breathing down your neck. You cannot hold forty-seven pages in your head. Nobody can. I wrote forty-seven pages and I couldn't hold them in my head.
A brand voice guide should fit on an index card. If it doesn't, you don't understand your voice well enough to explain it.
The recipe is not the food
My grandmother passed away four years ago. I never did manage to write down her recipes in a way that actually works. I've come close with a few dishes. The dal is about eighty percent there. The aloo gobi is maybe seventy. The biryani is a lost cause.
But here's the thing: when my daughter helps me cook and she tastes the dal and says "it tastes like Nani's," she's not saying I followed the recipe correctly. She's saying the feeling is right. The warmth is there. The identity came through.
That's what you're going for with brand voice. Not a perfect reproduction of rules. A feeling that comes through so clearly that people recognize it without being able to explain exactly why.
You'll know when it's right. Trust the pinch.