---
name: brand-voice
description: Define a brand voice and tone system — personality attributes, tone dimensions, do/don't lists, vocabulary rules, and crisis voice guidance — and produce a one-page voice charter anyone can write from. Triggers when the user asks to create, define, refine, audit, or apply a brand voice / tone of voice.
---

# Brand Voice

## Purpose
Turn a fuzzy idea ("we want to sound friendly") into a usable verbal identity: fixed voice attributes with definitions, tone dimensions with positions, a banned-words list, and paired on-brand/off-brand examples. Output is a one-page voice charter in plain Markdown that a freelancer with zero context can write from.

## Workflow
1. **Collect the inputs.** Brand name, audience (who reads it, how they prefer to be spoken to), 3 competitors whose voices to differ from, and 3–5 existing content samples if they exist. If no samples, say so — the charter becomes aspirational, and mark it that way.
2. **Set the attributes.** Choose exactly 3–4 voice attributes, each written as **"X but not Y"** (e.g. "confident but not arrogant", "playful but not childish"). The "not Y" half is the part that actually constrains writers. For each attribute write: one-line definition, one DO and one DON'T sentence pair.
3. **Plot the tone dimensions.** Position the brand 1–5 on each of the five spectrums (see references/tone-spectrums.md), then map tone shifts by context (homepage, error messages, support, legal, social). Voice stays fixed; tone flexes.
4. **Write the vocabulary rules.** Words we love (5–10), words we never use (3–5 corporate offenders like *elevate*, *premium*, *unleash*, *transform*, *discover* — adapt to the brand), and style defaults (sentence case, exclamation budget, Oxford comma choice).
5. **Add crisis voice.** Every charter gets the crisis section: acknowledgement language, apology anatomy, active-voice rule, and the voice floor — how the brand sounds when something has gone wrong (see references/crisis-voice-playbook.md).
6. **Stress-test.** Take one real sentence from the client's current copy and rewrite it three ways: neutral, on-brand, and (honestly) off-brand. If the three are indistinguishable, the attributes are too generic — sharpen them.

## Output Contract
The deliverable is a one-page voice charter (Markdown). Required sections, in order:
1. **Voice in one line** — "Imagine the brand were a person — who are they to the customer?" (e.g. "the friend at the gym who's three years deeper than you — cuts the BS, hypes you up without preaching, never the loudest in the room")
2. **Attributes** — the 3–4 "X but not Y" pairs with definitions
3. **Tone map** — five spectrum positions + context-shift table
4. **Say this, not that** — at least 6 paired examples drawn from the client's real surfaces (button copy, emails, error states)
5. **Vocabulary** — love list, never-use list, style defaults
6. **Crisis voice** — apology anatomy, half-apology traps to avoid, messenger guidance
7. **Voice check** — three questions a writer asks before shipping ("does this sound [attribute]?", "would any other brand say this unchanged?", "could a real person say this aloud?")

Keep it to one page (~600 words). A charter nobody can hold in their head is a charter nobody uses.

## Operating Rules
1. **Voice is fixed, tone is situational.** Never confuse them. An apologetic tone is not a different voice — it is the same attributes under pressure.
2. **No generic adjectives.** "Friendly, professional, trustworthy" without a definition and a paired example is decoration, not guidance. The off-brand example is the most valuable line on the page.
3. **The "any brand" test.** If a sentence could appear on any competitor's site unchanged, rewrite it. Specificity is the voice.
4. **Concrete over clever.** Plain language, short sentences, specific nouns and verbs. Ban vague claims ("best-in-class", "innovative", "transformative") unless immediately followed by proof — a number, a quote, a fact.
5. **In crisis, the voice compresses to three moves:** acknowledge fast, own it in active voice ("We failed", never "A failure occurred"), and pair every apology with concrete corrective actions and a timeline. Never apologize with "if", "any", or "feel" ("sorry if you were offended" is a trap, not an apology).
6. **Match the messenger to the severity.** Social teams handle bumps; leadership speaks for real harm. Silence is itself a statement — acknowledge before the narrative sets.
7. **Revisit yearly** or after any major brand shift. A charter that predates the company's current reality is worse than none, because writers trust it.