Brand Tone of Voice Examples: Six Brands and the Habits Behind Them

By Jack Stovell X · Instagram · LinkedIn · 2026-10-14 · Guides

Short answer: break each brand down into things a colleague could check in a draft, then note where your evidence comes from. Below, each brand's habits come from its own web copy or its published style guide. The figures come from ScriptGrain's measurements of UK brand writing.

Brand tone of voice examples at a glance

Most lists give you one word per brand: friendly, playful, bold. You can't check "playful" against a draft. You can check whether a page says "you" or "customers", whether it writes "we're" or "we are", and whether its sentences run to eight words or twenty-five.

None of this is a measurement. A style guide tells you what a brand intends, and a few pages of copy are only a sample. How a brand writes across thousands of pages is a separate question, and the section on what the examples have in common shows what the numbers say.

Innocent: chatty, small, and consistent

Innocent's "a bit about us" page reads like a colleague showing you round. It offers "a whistle stop tour of our best (and worst) achievements", mentions a customer called Barry who "decided to tattoo our logo on his arm", then follows up with a three-word sentence: "Nice one Barry."

Habits you can see:

• Person: "we" for the company, "you" for the reader, so the company sounds like a small team.
• Contractions: constant ("we're", "it's", "isn't", "we've").
• Case: menu items and headings in lowercase ("a bit about us", "things we make").
• Rhythm: very short lines next to long, rambling ones.
• Humour: self-deprecating and domestic, such as being "weirdly obsessed with fruit and veg".

The same habits run through the menu and the page copy, which is why it feels like one voice. That impression comes from a handful of pages. ScriptGrain's study of whether a brand keeps one voice tested it on 14 UK brands. Two pages from the same brand and channel scored a median 81 out of 100 for voice agreement. The same brand's blog scored only 68 against its own press releases. Being consistent on the website doesn't mean the press office writes the same way.

Monzo: plain and direct about money

Monzo publishes its writing principles, and several are concrete enough to check:

• "Swap formal words for normal ones."
• "Avoid ambiguity: write in the active voice." The guide's reason is that passive phrasing hides who is responsible.
• "There's no room at all for unexplained financial jargon." Technical terms are rare, and they are defined when they appear.
• "Humour is a delicate seasoning in our writing", kept mostly for brand and marketing copy.

The result is clear first and friendly second. That suits a sector where a badly placed joke costs trust. To try it on your own copy, find the passive verbs and formal words in one paragraph and swap them out. While you're there, count the "may", "might" and "could" in sentences about things you're sure of.

Evidence: a published guide. It shows what Monzo intends, but it can't tell you how every Monzo page reads.

Oatly: deadpan and self-aware

Oatly's product pages write ordinary information as jokes. Its No Sugars oat drink was made "for the 12 humans who asked for one". The serving suggestion reads: "If your plan is to just drink it, pour the Oat Drink No Sugars in a glass, a cup, or a mug and drink."

Habits you can see:

• Person: "we" made it, and "you" might be into it.
• Humour: deadpan. The joke comes from spelling out the obvious, or from a number that is a little too precise.
• Rhythm: plain, mid-length sentences. The humour is in what the copy says, and the punctuation stays ordinary.

Evidence: the brand's own product copy, read on a few pages. A deadpan voice is hard to keep up. It only works when every writer knows where the line is, and copied without that discipline it reads as smug.

Slack: conversational and clear

Frontify's guide to brand voice examples quotes two lines from Slack's brand guidelines: "The key to sounding like Slack is speaking directly to the user, in a voice that they can hear and recognize," and "We are humans, speaking to humans." Frontify also reports that Slack ran voice training sessions for all 650 people in its marketing department.

On the page, the homepage line Frontify quotes is "Give yourself the flexibility to work when, where and how you work best." That line uses the second person and everyday words, says one thing, and makes no joke.

So a human voice doesn't have to be funny. It can simply be easy to read. Note that this evidence is a guideline quoted second hand, so it shows what Slack intends.

Mailchimp: a published example of voice versus tone

Mailchimp's public style guide puts the distinction in one line: "You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes." Voice is the fixed set of habits. Tone shifts with the reader's situation, so an error message and a launch email sound different but still sound like Mailchimp. The brand voice glossary entry draws the same line.

The guide also names habits you can test. It says "Write in plain English", avoid slang and jargon, and "Our humor is dry", and it warns that "forced humor can be worse than none at all." Frontify quotes Mailchimp's aim to "speak like the experienced and compassionate business partner we wish we'd had".

Evidence: a published guide. It shows how Mailchimp describes its approach, but it can't show how far its real copy varies.

BrewDog: loud and clipped

BrewDog's shop packs its voice into very little space. Each beer gets three words in capitals, each followed by a full stop: "SMOOTH. FRUITY. JUICY." for Hazy Jane, "CRISP. BRIGHT. BOLD." for Punk IPA, and "KEEP. IT. CLASSIC." for the mixed pack.

Habits you can see:

• Case: capitals for emphasis.
• Punctuation: full stops used as beats, even inside a three-word phrase.
• Rhythm: fragments with no verbs and no hedging.
• Person: no pronouns at all in the product lines.

Compare this with Monzo. Both are direct, but Monzo explains while BrewDog declares. They share a trait and use it in different settings, which is why the word "direct" on its own describes neither. Evidence: one shop page of short product lines. Longer BrewDog writing may read differently, since the study below found that a brand's channels differ measurably.

What these examples have in common

Each brand makes three visible choices, and an adjective alone captures none of them.

Person. Innocent, Oatly and Slack talk to "you". ScriptGrain measured 16,392 pages from 117 UK brands. On brand blogs, "you" made up 61% of the words I, we and you. In the same brands' press releases it was 29%. Insurance brands wrote to "you" the most (66%) and supermarkets the least (20%).

Rhythm. Innocent and BrewDog use very short lines, while Monzo and Oatly write plain, medium sentences. In the same study, UK brand blogs averaged 12.3 words per sentence and press releases 14.6. Of ten sectors, fashion wrote the shortest sentences (10.0 words) and supermarkets the longest (14.7).

Contractions and humour. Contractions make writing less formal, and contraction rate measures how much. Food and drink brands, the sector Innocent and Oatly sell in, used the most contractions of the ten sectors: 22.2 per 1,000 words. The humour in these examples is dry (Mailchimp), domestic (Innocent), deadpan (Oatly) or sparing (Monzo), and Slack's homepage line has none. Each one is a choice.

What ties them together is that someone decided, and you can see those decisions in the copy.

How to describe your own brand tone in one paragraph

You can do this by hand.

1. Pick three pieces of copy you're happy with, ideally from different channels: a blog post, an email, a product page.
2. Check the person. Count "we", "you" and the company name in each.
3. Check the rhythm. Count the words in ten sentences and take the average. Note whether you mix short and long.
4. Check contractions and hedging. Do you write "don't" or "do not"? How often do "may", "might" or "perhaps" soften something you're sure of?
5. Check the humour. Is there any? Is it dry, warm, deadpan or loud?
6. Write one paragraph using only habits a colleague could check.

A weak version: "We're friendly and professional." A stronger one: "We write to 'you' and call ourselves 'we'. We use contractions freely, keep most sentences under 15 words, state claims without hedging, and allow one dry joke per page at most." A colleague can check the second version against a draft. The brand voice guidelines template gives you somewhere to keep it.

If you'd rather measure than count by hand, the free brand voice analyser compares a page with a reference piece and needs no account. ScriptGrain profiles a voice as 45 attributes in 8 layers. These include average sentence length, contraction rate, formality on a 0 to 10 scale, and confidence versus hedging. The free plan covers one profile and one full analysis, and you don't need a card.

Questions

How do you describe a brand tone?

Describe habits a writer can copy: who the brand addresses, how long its sentences run, whether it uses contractions and what kind of humour it allows. "Dry, direct, contractions, short sentences" tells a writer what to do; "friendly" leaves them guessing.

What is a good tone of voice?

One that is chosen, consistent and checkable. It suits the reader, it is specific enough that two writers would produce similar copy, and you can point to the features that make it up. Whether it is chatty or formal matters less than whether someone decided it.

What is the difference between brand voice and tone?

Voice is the set of habits that stays the same everywhere. Tone is the adjustment for context: softer for bad news, livelier for a launch. Mailchimp's style guide puts it as "You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes."

How many types of tone of voice are there?

There is no fixed number. Tone sits on several dials at once: formal to casual, serious to playful, reserved to confident. Lists of "types" are a convenience, and it is the combination of settings that makes a voice distinctive.

How do you check that your writing matches your tone of voice?

Check each feature against your one-paragraph description: person, sentence length, contractions, hedging and humour. Doing it by hand works for a short piece. In ScriptGrain, each draft is scored from 0 to 1 against a voice profile, with a difference shown for each feature, and on-voice drafts typically land between 0.85 and 0.95.