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, why AI-written content doesn't sound like you, 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.
More in Brand & Voice
Part of the Brand & Voice hub - see all 9 resources on this topic.
- Playbook: Brand Foundations Playbook
- AI agent skill: Brand Voice Definition
- Playbook: Brand Voice Playbook
- Article: Founder Story and Company Narrative: How to Tell Yours Without Overpromising
Also useful in Marketing Ops, AI & Team, Content, Copy & SEO.