Why Brands Are Losing Control of Their Voice
Every organisation believes it has a voice. Some have tone guides, others have messaging frameworks, many have extensive brand books. Teams understand the intention, people care about consistency, and leaders talk about “sounding like ourselves”.
And yet, in almost every organisation – from global brands to high-growth companies – the same pattern emerges:
The brand’s voice begins to drift.
It starts subtly, then accelerates through the system.
No one decision causes it, but every decision contributes.
Teams improvise tone to hit deadlines.
AI tools generate copy that’s close — but never quite right.
Channels diverge.
Regions adapt.
Review cycles compress.
Writers change.
Contexts shift.
The result is a voice that fragments over time — a brand that slowly stops sounding like itself.
This isn’t a failure of craft.
It’s the predictable outcome of a system that was never designed for the way modern communication works.
The Drift Effect
Most organisations underestimate how easily – and how quickly – drift happens.
It’s not the big moments that cause inconsistency. It’s the accumulated effect of small, sensible, everyday decisions:
A UX writer fixes a sentence to fit a tight UI constraint.
A product manager tweaks messaging to get a feature page out.
A social team simplifies language for speed.
A support agent softens tone for clarity.
AI writes a paragraph that’s “good enough”, so it slips through.
A regional hub adapts wording for local nuance.
A new joiner mimics what they think the brand sounds like.
Individually, every action is rational. Collectively, they erode coherence.
And in a world of intelligent communication, the volume of these micro-decisions has increased exponentially.
When language is produced faster than it can be governed, drift is inevitable.
The Guideline Trap
Most organisations try to solve inconsistency with more guidance:
Fuller tone frameworks
Expanded messaging maps
Detailed do/don’t lists
Writing principles
Brand books
Voice charts
But these tools have a fundamental flaw:
Guidelines describe behaviour. They don't govern it.
They rely on:
Memory
Interpretation
Time
Good faith
Manual alignment
Individual craft skill
This worked when a few specialised teams produced content. It does not work when content is created:
By dozens of teams
Across multiple channels
At high velocity
In multiple regions
With AI generating first drafts or full pieces
Guidelines sit outside the workflow. Modern communication needs something that sits inside it.
The Organisational Reality
Most organisations don’t have one voice – they have many:
Marketing uses expressive language to differentiate.
UX prioritises clarity and flow.
Product communicates with precision and constraints.
Comms focuses on narrative and leadership.
Support values empathy and speed.
AI-assisted tools introduce a synthetic “fourth voice” that sounds close — but never truly on-brand.
Each is valid. Each has a job.
But without a structure that governs how meaning works across the system, these voices diverge – and the brand loses coherence.
This is why even the strongest tone guidelines collapse under real-world complexity.
They weren’t built for scale.
They weren’t built for distributed teams.
And they certainly weren’t built for intelligent creation.
Why Brands Are Losing Control
The uncomfortable truth is this:
Brands aren’t losing control because they lack guidance.
They’re losing control because they lack architecture.
Voice is not a style. Voice is a system.
And systems need:
Clear definitions
Structural logic
Governed behaviours
Tool-level integration
Shared patterns
Feedback loops
Adaptive refinement
Human–AI alignment
Without this, even the most beautifully written guidelines remain theoretical – disconnected from the daily reality of creation.
The Way Forward: From Guidelines to Systems
The solution isn’t a better tone guide. It’s a different model altogether.
Brands need environments where:
Meaning is defined at the system level
Workflows channel alignment
Tools embed tone and structure
Governance happens automatically
AI writes within boundaries, not beyond them
Teams express the brand consistently without slowing down
A communication system doesn’t tell people what the voice is. It makes the voice unavoidable.
In this model:
Creators move with clarity
AI becomes a reliable support
Leadership gains coherence
The brand sounds like itself — everywhere, all the time
Where This Work Leads
Reclaiming control of brand voice isn’t about rewriting rules. It’s about redesigning the environment the voice lives in.
Because in the age of intelligent communication:
Clarity is not the output.
It’s the infrastructure.
And the brands that build that infrastructure will be the ones that communicate with consistency, confidence and unmistakable identity – no matter how fast they scale.
This is the work we’ve been designing for — systems that give organisations the structure to communicate with clarity in the age of intelligent communication.
Interested in exploring these ideas further?
