Brand voice examples: 12 you can copy without sounding like Nike

Search for brand voice examples and you get the same six brands every time: Nike, Apple, Wendy's, Mailchimp, Glossier, Innocent. The lists are accurate. They are also useless, because what gets quoted is the tagline, and your business does not have a tagline problem. It has a few hundred small pieces of copy nobody has decided anything about.

Your voice is not "Just Do It". Your voice is what your out-of-stock message sounds like. Your shipping banner. Your newsletter signup. The line under the button. Those are the places a reader actually meets you, and they are almost always written by whoever had the tab open.

So this piece does it the other way round. Every example below is quoted from a page that was live on 3 September 2026, three of them from voice guidelines the brand publishes itself, and the section that matters most compares four 404 pages, because a 404 is where a brand voice either exists or turns out to have been a slide in a deck.

Why most brand voice examples cannot be copied

The famous examples are famous because one line got decades of money behind it. "Just Do It" does not work because of the words. It works because of everything Nike spent making those three words mean something. Copy the words and you get none of that.

The examples that transfer are the boring ones. A brand with a real voice has decided things like:

1. Do we use exclamation marks, and where.
2. Do we say "you" or "customers".
3. What do we call the thing we sell, every single time.
4. What happens to the voice when we have to apologise.
5. Which twenty words are we never allowed to use.

None of that is glamorous and all of it is copyable this afternoon. The rest of this post is those decisions, made visible in other people's live copy.

What is a brand voice, exactly?

Brand voice is the set of decisions that stay the same in every piece of copy you publish. Tone is what changes inside those decisions depending on the situation: the same voice sounds different in a welcome email and in a service outage notice.

The most useful way to make that concrete comes from Nielsen Norman Group. In Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice, Kate Moran put tone on four sliders rather than treating it as a vibe:

The paper was published in July 2016 and last reviewed in August 2023. Worth being straight about its size: the quantitative half was a survey of 50 American respondents, and the rating differences between tone variants came out at roughly 0.5 to 1 point on a 5-point scale. That is a small study, not a law of nature. What it gives you is not proof, it is vocabulary. Four sliders you can set deliberately beat an adjective like "friendly", which every brand claims and no writer can act on.

Set the four sliders and you have a voice. Refuse to set them and every writer sets them differently, which is what a brand with no voice actually sounds like: fine in isolation, incoherent in aggregate.

Brand voice examples: 12 brands and the register each one runs

Mailchimp: plainspoken, and it says so out loud

Mailchimp's voice and tone guide is the most copied document in this category for a reason. It states four traits, in the first person, as commitments:

"We are plainspoken." "We are genuine." "We are translators." "Our humor is dry."

"We are translators" is the one worth stealing. It says the job is to demystify, not to sound clever, which resolves a hundred sentence-level arguments before they start. And "our humor is dry" is a real constraint, because it rules out the jokes most brands reach for.

GOV.UK: plain English as an actual rule

The GOV.UK style guide is not trying to have a personality, and it is still the single most useful voice document on the internet, because it bans words and explains why:

"Plain English is mandatory for all of GOV.UK so avoid using these words: agenda, advance, collaborate, combat, commit/pledge, counter, deliver, deploy, dialogue, disincentivise, empower, facilitate, focus, foster, impact, incentivise, initiate, key, land, leverage, liaise, overarching, progress, promote, robust, slim down, streamline, strengthening, tackle, transform, utilise."

The reasons are better than the list. On "deliver": "pizzas, post and services are delivered, not abstract concepts." On "drive": "you can only drive vehicles, not schemes or people." On "tackle": use it "unless talking about fishing tackle or rugby". On "robust": fine for a sturdy object, otherwise say "well thought out".

Read your own last landing page against that list. Most marketing copy loses four or five words per paragraph, and every replacement is more specific than what it replaced.

Monzo: kindness with a hard edge on humour

Monzo publishes its tone of voice as three principles: "Straightforward kindness", "Everyday magic", "Warm wit". The rule under the third is the one most brands need:

"Humour is a delicate seasoning in our writing. We want people to feel part of the joke, not the target of it."

They also name what they avoid: Latin-rooted business words like "require" and "provide", passive voice where active is clearer, and "punching down". Then the live site keeps the promise. The homepage reads "Get clear on your spending. Unlock smarter ways to save. Invest with confidence." Three verbs, no hedging, no bank language.

That match between the document and the page is the test. Plenty of brands publish a voice guide the site itself does not obey.

Basecamp: talks to exactly one person

Basecamp's homepage opens with a section headed "Tell me if this sounds about right." Then: "There's a good chance we know why you're here." Then a paragraph listing the reader's actual Monday, ending "software that's hard to use doesn't get used."

Second person, contractions, short declaratives, no adjectives doing the persuading. The register is: a competent person explaining something across a table. It is the easiest of these twelve to copy and the one most B2B sites should copy.

Everlane: declarative, no jokes at all

Everlane's about copy opens "EVERLANE STARTED WITH ONE T-SHIRT." and lands on "better materials, better factories, better style."

Fragment, repetition, full stop. No humour slider engaged at all. Worth including precisely because it proves a voice does not need jokes. Restraint reads as confidence when it is consistent, and as blandness when it is accidental. The difference is whether you chose it.

Huel: clinical on purpose

Huel leads with "Fast, nutritious, complete food." Then: "Designed by expert nutritionists as a convenient way to get all the daily nutrients you need."

Huel sells a product people are suspicious of, so the voice is set to matter-of-fact and stays there. Nutrient counts, macro ratios, no delight. When your category has a credibility problem, the enthusiasm slider is the one to turn down, not up.

Liquid Death: irreverent all the way into the legal copy

Everyone quotes Liquid Death's tagline, "MURDER YOUR THIRST". The tagline is the least impressive part. Look where the voice goes instead.

The flavour names: "REST IN PEACH", "CHERRY OBITUARY", "MANGO CHAINSAW", "GREEN GUILLOTINE", "SQUEEZED TO DEATH". The 404 page: "If you were looking for a page with nothing on it, you totally nailed it. Welcome. You did it." And the newsletter consent line, which is the one that should make you sit up:

"You agree to be brainwashed by Liquid Death marketing through rare (but hilarious) emails."

That is a consent checkbox. It is the most skippable string on any website. Somebody wrote it in voice anyway. That is what having a brand voice actually means, and it costs nothing.

Innocent: lowercase mischief, and it never breaks

Innocent runs everything in lowercase, which is a voice decision made at the typography level so no writer has to remember it. Ask for a page that does not exist and the 404 reads "CONGRATULATIONS / you've just found our error 404 page / whose fault was this?" Scroll to the very bottom of any page and the last thing in the footer says:

"stop looking at my bottom."

That is the least-read pixel on the entire site. Both of those are places a voice normally gives up, and the decision to write them at all is the whole example.

Who Gives A Crap: cheerful cause, and fart jokes

Who Gives A Crap heads its homepage "Good for the planet" and the line under it is "Who knew changing the world could be as easy as changing your toilet paper?" A product page reads "Coffee? Gone. Pesto? No problem-o!" The newsletter box is headed "Stay up to date on the latest news, promos and fart jokes."

Selling something worthy without becoming sanctimonious is genuinely hard, and the fix here is structural: every serious sentence about donated profits is followed by a stupid one. That rhythm is copyable even if the jokes are not.

Oatly: deadpan, including on the error page

Oatly's 404: "There's nothing to see here." Then "There must be a glitch in the matrix. Perhaps you will have more luck here."

Two sentences on a page nobody plans, in a voice that is recognisably theirs. Note how little effort it took. Nobody needed a workshop.

Cards Against Humanity: insults the reader, affectionately

The Cards Against Humanity product description reads: "Cards Against Humanity is a fill-in-the-blank party game that turns your awkward personality and lackluster social skills into hours of fun! Wow." Elsewhere on the same page a product is described as "America's #1 gerbil coffin", and the section offering the free download is headed "Steal the game."

"Wow." doing the work of a whole sentence is the tell. And the voice extends into a business decision: giving the game away free and calling it stealing. When the voice reaches the pricing page, it is not a copywriting layer any more.

Tony's Chocolonely: warmth with a punctuation tic

Lowercase headings again on Tony's Chocolonely, plus a house habit: the double dot. "customize our chocolate..", "..aka your 1-stop shop for irresistibly tasty chocolate gifts", "Get creative in 3.. 2.. 1.."

It looks like a typo until you notice it appears everywhere, at which point it reads as a signature. Two brands can use identical words and sound different purely on punctuation, which is why "friendly" is not a brand voice and a punctuation rule is.

Where does brand voice actually get decided?

On the pages nobody assigns. Here are four 404 pages, quoted as they read on 3 September 2026:

Basecamp's is the interesting one. It is not a failure to have a voice, it is the same voice as the homepage: a competent person telling you a fact without wasting your time. A joke there would have been off-brand.

Then there is the failure mode, which is more common than any of the above. Who Gives A Crap's 404 headline is "Zoinks, Scoob!" and the sentence directly underneath it is "We're sorry, but the page you're looking for could not be found."

That second sentence is platform default text. The voice reached the headline and stopped. It is the single most widespread brand voice problem: the parts a marketer looks at are in voice, and everything else is whatever the theme shipped with. Your own site almost certainly does this. Check your 404, your empty cart, your form validation errors and your unsubscribe confirmation, in that order.

How do I find my own brand voice?

Not in a workshop. You already have a voice; it is distributed across everything you have published and nobody has written it down. Four steps, in order:

1. Pull your last 30 captions, emails and product pages into one document. Include the ones that performed badly. You are looking for habits, not hits.
2. Count things instead of describing them. Average sentence length. Exclamation marks per hundred words. How often you open with a question. Whether you use "we" or the brand name. Emoji rate. These numbers are your voice, and they are the part a new writer can actually follow. If you would rather not count by hand, the brand kit generator reads the colours, fonts and tone words off your own site and quotes the sentence behind each one.
3. Set the four sliders deliberately. Formal or casual, serious or funny, respectful or irreverent, matter-of-fact or enthusiastic. Write the position down and one example sentence per slider.
4. Write your own banned list. Twenty words, with the replacement next to each. Steal from the GOV.UK list, then add the five your category overuses. This does more for consistency than any adjective.

Then apply it where it counts. Your voice on the homepage is table stakes. Your voice on a shipping delay email is the differentiator, because that is when the reader is paying full attention.

One thing to hold separate: voice is not the same decision as message. Which claim you lead with depends on how much the reader already knows about your category, which is the five levels of awareness problem, and pinning the claim itself down is what a messaging framework is for. Voice is how the claim sounds once you have chosen it. Brands that confuse the two end up rewriting their tone when the actual problem was that they were arguing the wrong point.

How Selzee builds your brand voice from your own captions

Most tools that offer to write in your brand voice ask you to pick adjectives from a dropdown, then generate the statistical middle of the internet with your adjective sprinkled on top.

Selzee reads what you have already published instead. It pulls your own captions and measures them: sentence-length bands, emoji and hashtag rates, the openers you use, the openers absent from every post, the lines you repeat, and the generic marketing phrases you never touch. That half is arithmetic, so it cannot invent anything.

Three things cannot be counted: a positioning line, your tone words, and which of your own words are worth reusing. Those come from one model call, and every item it returns is checked back against your real captions before it is allowed to become a brand fact. A tone word whose supporting quote is not in your corpus gets dropped. A vocabulary word appearing in fewer than two captions gets dropped. A positioning line whose evidence is not verbatim gets dropped whole, and the field stays blank rather than filled with a guess.

Blank beats invented. That posture exists because of a specific incident: an empty field once led a model to put "Visit our website for more info" on an ad handed to a brand as its own words.

From there the voice is a fact your briefs and concepts are written against, not a prompt you retype. If you want to work on the sentence level first, the hook generator builds hooks out of your real customer reviews, and the product description generator lets you hear the same product in several registers before you commit to one.

Brand voice examples: FAQ

What is the difference between brand voice and tone of voice?

Voice is constant, tone moves. Voice is the set of decisions that hold everywhere: your vocabulary, your sentence rhythm, your punctuation habits, your banned words. Tone is where you sit inside those decisions for a given situation, so the same voice is lighter in a welcome email and flatter in an outage notice. If your tone changes so much that a reader would not recognise the same writer, that is a voice problem, not a tone one.

How do I write a brand voice guide that people actually use?

Make it rules, not adjectives. A guide that says "friendly, bold and human" cannot be followed or broken. A guide that says "no exclamation marks outside celebrations, never say 'solutions', always 'you' and never 'customers', sentences under 20 words" can be checked line by line. Mailchimp and GOV.UK are both worth copying structurally: traits stated as commitments, then a list of specific words with the replacement next to each.

Can a small business have a brand voice?

A small business has the advantage, because the voice is usually one person's and already consistent. The work is writing down what you do naturally so it survives a second writer, a freelancer or a tool. Start with the count in step 2 above on thirty pieces you have already published.

Should our brand voice be funny?

Only if it is funny across every surface, including the apology. Humour is the dimension that fails worst when it is inconsistent, because a joke in the wrong place reads as not caring. Monzo's own rule is the safest version: people should feel part of the joke, not the target of it. Everlane and Huel are in this list to show that zero humour is a complete, working voice.

How often should a brand voice change?

The voice rarely, the tone constantly. A voice that changes every quarter is a positioning problem wearing a copywriting costume. What should get revised regularly is the banned-word list, because the phrases your category overuses drift, and the specific line that sounded fresh last year is now in every competitor's hero section.

Where should I apply a new voice first?

The utility copy, not the homepage. Your 404, empty states, form errors, shipping and out-of-stock messages, and the unsubscribe page. Those are cheap to change, nobody is arguing about them, and they are where readers meet you when they are paying the most attention.

The short version

Brand voice examples are worth reading, and the useful part is never the tagline. It is the consent checkbox, the 404, the line under the button. Twelve brands above, and the ones with real voices are the ones whose voice survived into copy nobody was watching.

The post layouts above come from the creative ad design dataset by Contralabs, used under CC BY 4.0. Photographs by chris robert, Suzi Kim and Lee Milo on Unsplash.

Pick your own four sliders, write the twenty banned words, and fix your 404 this week. If you would rather have your voice read out of what you have already published than picked from a dropdown, see Selzee run on your own brand.