20 August 2025
Tone of voice: How to handle your brand globally
No matter what your business or industry sector, no matter whether you sell products or provide services, creating a strong brand tone of voice is essential for building recognition and emotional connection with your customers. It’s becoming even more important in the age of AI content production. Beginning this journey can be daunting, so we’ve put together some tips and ideas to help you on your way.
Your brand personality forms the foundation of how customers perceive and connect with your business. Begin by examining your company’s core values and determining whether your brand should communicate with authority and professionalism or embrace a more relaxed, friendly tone. Consider your industry context, target audience expectations, and the emotional response you want to evoke. A law firm might prioritize trustworthiness and expertise, while a lifestyle brand might emphasize creativity and authenticity. This decision shapes every interaction your customers have with your brand.
Make a list of 3-5 specific personality traits (for example: confident, humorous, or thoughtful) that you think align with your values and speak directly to your audience’s needs and preferences. These traits will serve as your communication compass, ensuring consistency across all channels and touchpoints. When your team writes social media posts, develops marketing campaigns, or responds to customer inquiries, they can reference these traits to maintain a cohesive voice.
Next, draw up a table and compile some concrete examples of how each of the characteristics you’ve listed translates into language choices, tone, and messaging style. This table will provide a useful starting point for creating your brand TOV ‘bible’.
Effective communication requires deep knowledge of how your audience speaks and what resonates with them. You must research their vocabulary, preferred tone, and communication patterns to match their expectations. A brand that targets Gen Z will adopt casual language, internet slang, and conversational messaging, while a company serving enterprise executives should use formal language, industry terminology, and authoritative statements. This difference stems from each group’s communication culture and professional context.
Building comprehensive audience personas helps you capture these communication preferences alongside traditional demographic data. These personas should document specific language patterns, preferred communication channels, response times, and engagement styles. When you know that your audience prefers direct, no-nonsense communication over flowery language, or that they respond better to questions than statements, you can tailor your messaging accordingly. You can also find out more about your specific customers by looking at which content performs well according to your marketing metrics, which can also help to define your localization strategy. This detailed understanding transforms generic content into targeted communication that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and preferences.
A comprehensive tone of voice style guide serves as the foundation for consistent brand communication across all channels and contexts. Teams use this document to ensure every customer interaction, marketing message, and internal communication reflects the same authentic voice and values. The guide should include specific language preferences, contextual applications, and practical examples that team members can reference when crafting communications. This systematic approach prevents the confusion and mixed messaging that occurs when different team members interpret brand voice differently.
Create a list of preferred words and phrases versus a list of words and phrases to avoid. This will serve as a quick, no-nonsense guide for any team member who needs to create a piece of public- or customer-facing content.
This is a great start, but there’s more to do. Your teams need to understand how to adapt the brand’s core voice across different scenarios while maintaining consistency. A customer service representative addressing a billing complaint needs different language than a social media manager sharing industry insights, yet both communications should feel authentically connected to the same brand. The guide should provide concrete examples for each communication context, demonstrate how to adjust formality levels appropriately, and include quality checklists that help team members evaluate their own communications before sending them to audiences.
Authenticity forms the foundation of trust between brands and customers. Your tone must reflect your organization’s genuine values and culture rather than adopting a manufactured persona that sounds appealing but lacks substance. Customers possess an intuitive ability to recognize when communication feels forced or disconnected from a company’s true identity. They engage more readily with brands that communicate honestly about who they are, what they stand for, and how they operate. This authenticity emerges through consistent language choices, messaging priorities, and the underlying attitude that permeates all communications.
Consistency transforms authentic communication into a recognizable brand voice that customers learn to trust and expect. Once you establish your voice, you must maintain its core characteristics across every customer touchpoint, from website copy and product descriptions to customer support interactions and social media engagement. However, consistency does not mean rigidity. Your brand voice requires thoughtful adaptation to different platforms and contexts while preserving its fundamental personality. A LinkedIn post demands more professional language than an Instagram story, yet both should unmistakably represent the same brand identity. The key lies in adjusting your expression to suit the medium and audience while keeping your core values, personality traits, and communication style recognizable and constant.
One of the most important practices involved in setting up your brand’s TOV is being proactive. The work is never finished. Here are some suggestions for maintaining, honing and generally improving your brand TOV as time goes on:
Implementing an ongoing refinement process will ensure your voice remains relevant and effective without losing its authentic core, while creating a systematic approach will help to maintain your brand’s voice, making sure it remains cohesive regardless of who in your team delivers your message, and in what capacity.
You may have your brand TOV perfected with regards to your domestic market, but what about further afield? If your brand has a global presence or is trying to extend its global reach, you need to think about how your brand is received in different territories, especially when localizing your website, which is often a consumer’s first port of call. This means not only thinking about translation of your messages, but also localization, so you can be sure that your brand’s voice hits the right note culturally and socially, no matter where the market is situated.
To achieve this, it’s important to work with trained linguists or, better still, an LSP (language service provider) that has experience of working with brands across all industry sectors. We talked with some of our own experts to get their insights on working with clients to create and maintain a strong tone of voice.
Alpha CRC’s Founder and Director of Languages, Isabelle Weiss, talks about implementing strong tone of voice from a German-language point of view: “If you want your company to come across well in Germany, the first rule is simple: cut. Cut the superlatives. Cut the profusion of adjectives (if your US copy has three adjectives, think carefully which – if any – you want to preserve). Cut the long sentences that are so packed as to be unreadable. Remember: In der Kürze liegt die Würze (Keep it short and sweet).
Second, be factual and precise. Germans expect you to get to the point. Give them benefits and figures, not exaggerations and sugar-coating. Avoid the ever-present “best-in-class”, “next generation”, “life-enhancing”, “revolutionary” attributes, as they will only lose you credibility. 10 years ago, slogans like “anywhere, anytime, anyhow” might have sounded fresh and original. These days they sound tired and empty, predictable. You want to be authentic and impactful.
Third, do not talk down to your readers. Careful with imperatives (“Empower your finance team”, “Accelerate your reporting”) and with using “smart” and “intelligent“ – particularly in their comparative forms (“Work smarter”, “Make more intelligent decisions”). These might be perceived as offensive (are you suggesting they are not smart or intelligent unless they use your AI-assisted product?). In short, write for the readers, inform them, don’t belittle them, don’t order them around. Keep your message neat and crisp (“Fortschritt durch Technik”), be concrete, give examples, and measurable figures.
Avoid nominalizations, and in line with all good brand style guides, favour the active voice over the passive. You don’t want your content to be bureaucratic and impersonal. Instead use strong and interesting verbs. Don’t just copy the ones you see everywhere else (“empower”, “enhance” or “elevate” … apart from anything, these are practically impossible to translate to German). Let’s face it: this is the hardest bit.
Finally, consider carefully how you want to handle gender. Systematically using both female and male forms might become tiresome for the reader (“Anwenderinnen und Anwender”, “Programmiererinnen und Programmierer” …) and spoil the visual impact. A compromise might be your best solution.”
Language Production Manager, Melina Vischi, describes how Spanish linguists look at brand tone of voice: “When advising clients on Spanish style guides, it is important to bear in mind that effective brand communication requires tonal adaptation, not just linguistic translation. The biggest challenge is that direct transference sometimes fails to maintain the intended brand voice.
Spanish audiences typically expect slightly higher formality levels than English speakers. While Spanish communication is becoming more informal – particularly with younger audiences and digital platforms – brands must avoid overcorrecting toward language that is too casual. The challenge is striking the right balance: accessible without sacrificing authority, warm without appearing unprofessional. A financial services brand, for example, might use “tú” with younger clients but still maintain formal register and avoid colloquialisms that could undermine trust.
Wordplay presents another significant challenge. English marketing frequently relies on puns for memorability and cleverness, but these could sound forced or juvenile in Spanish, particularly in professional sectors like finance or healthcare. The linguist must capture the brand’s intent – being memorable, approachable, or clever – through culturally appropriate means rather than literal adaptation.
My approach focuses on understanding what the brand wants to sound like, then mapping that essence onto Spanish communication norms. This means creating guidelines that preserve brand personality while respecting cultural expectations. The style guide should include specific examples of tone adaptation, regional considerations, and clear advice for maintaining brand consistency.”
Pauline Della Malva, one of Alpha CRC’s French Linguists, advises that French requires more cultural finesse than English in its professional dimension, insisting that there are several points that should be defined with the client at the outset.
“The universal English “You” becomes a strategic choice in French. Choosing the wrong register can mean missing your target or appearing disrespectful.
For example, the phrase “Can you help us?” works everywhere in English. But in French, “Pourriez-vous nous aider ?” is deemed very polite, while “Pouvez-vous nous aider ?” appears more neutral, and “Vous pouvez nous aider ?” is more direct. The point here is three distinct hierarchical levels are implied; it’s the linguist’s job to assess the context and choose the right phrase.
Elsewhere, English generally offers more lexical plasticity than French for creating neologisms or adapting terms (consider instant verb creations such as “You can google it”, “To friend/unfriend someone”, as well as freely creating word-composites, such as “game-changer”, “life-hack”, “crowd-sourcing”). French linguists frequently need to resort to periphrases and longer messages in French in order to get the correct brand message across.
Marketing translation can be an emotional minefield in French. Marketing English is often more concise and spontaneously enthusiastic than French. Consider “Amazing deal!” In French, you could opt for “Offre exceptionnelle” or “Offre incroyable”. The first is a bit of a mouthful and the second risks being too familiar. Ideally, the linguist needs to establish with the client some examples of desired emotional intensity and acceptable stylistic boundaries to ensure consistent brand voice across all French marketing materials.”
Based in Alpha CRC’s Tokyo office, Project Manager Keisuke Tonegawa talks from the perspective of a native Japanese speaker. “When creating a style guide for Japanese, it’s essential to recognize that tone of voice in customer-facing communications is largely conveyed through subtle shifts in formality, sentence endings, and honorific expressions. Unlike English, where tone can be expressed through word choice and punctuation, Japanese relies heavily on levels of politeness and the presence (or absence) of personal pronouns and modifiers.
One notable feature of Japanese is the rare use of direct second-person pronouns such as “anata” (“you”) in formal or semi-formal writing. While English brands might commonly use “you” to create a sense of closeness or direct engagement, in Japanese, such usage often sounds too casual or even confrontational. Instead, companies usually refer to the customer indirectly, or use respectful titles and expressions, which is important to define in the tone-of-voice guide.
My first recommendation would be to define the brand’s desired level of formality – ranging from formal (desu/masu style) to neutral or even friendly informal tones, depending on the target audience. For example, a luxury cosmetics brand would benefit from polished and elegant keigo (honorific language), while a casual fashion brand targeting younger audiences may adopt a more conversational tone.
The next priority is consistency. A clear, detailed tone-of-voice section in a style guide should include example phrases, preferred sentence structures, and guidance on how to handle idiomatic expressions, metaphors, or humour that may not translate well culturally.
Finally, tone in Japanese is closely tied to trust. A brand voice that is too casual can feel unprofessional, while one that is too stiff may seem cold. The ideal style guide should balance clarity, cultural expectations, and brand personality to ensure natural, engaging communication with Japanese customers.
Building a strong brand tone of voice takes time, and requires commitment and some strategic implementation practices. But it’s a worthwhile endeavour; companies that invest time in defining their personality, understanding their audience, and creating comprehensive guidelines will find themselves better equipped to maintain consistent communication.
Additionally, localization ensures a brand’s tone of voice resonates authentically with local cultural norms, values, and communication styles, preventing misunderstandings and building genuine connections that drive customer engagement and trust in each market.
Ultimately, a continual, carefully monitored effort in creating a localized and well-developed TOV for your brand will lead to a sustainable foundation for meaningful customer relationships which, in turn, will drive long-term business success.
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