The Brand Voice Guide
A free brand voice guide template: voice attributes, do and don't rules, words to avoid, and a block your AI tools can check content against.
Word + Google Docs · Free
What this resource helps you do
Voice rules specific enough to check against - plus the block your AI tools read, so the rules can actually be enforced.
Get the guide from AAJ's free marketing templates library.
What is a brand voice guide?
A brand voice guide is a short document that records how a company writes: the adjectives that define its tone, the rules its writers follow, the words it never uses, and worked examples showing a weak sentence rewritten. Its purpose is to make voice checkable rather than a matter of opinion.
Use the AI Tool Policy for Marketing to set the operating rules around the tools, then read how to use AI without losing your voice and why core marketing principles still govern AI-written content.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a brand voice guide include?
Three or four voice attributes with what each one is not, do-and-don't rules specific enough to check a sentence against, a list of words to avoid, the phrases you do use, a reading-level ceiling, before-and-after rewrites, and decisions for the situations voice usually breaks on - apologies, pricing, and bad news.
How is a brand voice guide different from a style guide?
A style guide settles mechanics: serial commas, capitalisation, date formats. A brand voice guide settles character - what the company sounds like and what it refuses to sound like. Most teams need both, and confusing them produces a document full of comma rules that nobody can use to judge a headline.
Can AI writing tools follow a brand voice guide?
Only if the rules are written in a form a tool can read. A model given no explicit rules writes toward the average of its training data, which is where category jargon lives. This template ends in a block you paste into an agent context file, so a conformance check can quote back every violation rather than a human catching them by eye.
Is the template free, and what format is it?
Free, in exchange for an email address. It is a Word .docx so you can type directly into the tables and ruled lines, and it opens editable in Word, Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice.