Author: Melissa Rosenthal Executive Top Voice
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissarosenthal5/
Every AI marketing platform now sells a brand voice feature. And honestly? They're all selling the same voice.
The pitch sounds reasonable when you hear it. The software crawls your site, learns how you sound, and applies that voice to everything you generate. Set it once, enforce it everywhere.
But think about what it's actually enforcing.
Go pull up your brand voice guide. I'd bet money it's built on the same four adjectives as everyone else's. Professional. Trustworthy. Innovative. Customer-focused. Now put your biggest competitor's name at the top and read it again. Did a single word need to change?
Probably not...and that's the tell.
Adjectives describe how you want to be perceived. They say nothing about what you believe. And the voices we actually recognize, the ones you'd know with the logo stripped off, come from beliefs. Positions. Decisions a rival wouldn't have made.
This flaw was survivable for a long time because a human writer handed a vague guide would quietly fill in the gaps with judgment and taste. AI doesn't do that. Feed a model "confident and approachable" and you get the average of every company that ever wanted to sound confident and approachable. Which is, well, all of them.
The software isn't broken. It's following the adjective list perfectly, for the first time ever. The guide always said generic. Humans just never complied this well.
AI can't flatten something that already has shape. So write down what you actually believe first. The software will scale whatever you hand it.
Read the full piece on State of Brand here: https://lnkd.in/gbxii-xm
The pitch sounds reasonable when you hear it. The software crawls your site, learns how you sound, and applies that voice to everything you generate. Set it once, enforce it everywhere.
But think about what it's actually enforcing.
Go pull up your brand voice guide. I'd bet money it's built on the same four adjectives as everyone else's. Professional. Trustworthy. Innovative. Customer-focused. Now put your biggest competitor's name at the top and read it again. Did a single word need to change?
Probably not...and that's the tell.
Adjectives describe how you want to be perceived. They say nothing about what you believe. And the voices we actually recognize, the ones you'd know with the logo stripped off, come from beliefs. Positions. Decisions a rival wouldn't have made.
This flaw was survivable for a long time because a human writer handed a vague guide would quietly fill in the gaps with judgment and taste. AI doesn't do that. Feed a model "confident and approachable" and you get the average of every company that ever wanted to sound confident and approachable. Which is, well, all of them.
The software isn't broken. It's following the adjective list perfectly, for the first time ever. The guide always said generic. Humans just never complied this well.
AI can't flatten something that already has shape. So write down what you actually believe first. The software will scale whatever you hand it.
Read the full piece on State of Brand here: https://lnkd.in/gbxii-xm
Images:
