I spent last Tuesday reviewing a brand voice guidelines document that was 47 pages long. Forty-seven pages describing how a snack brand should talk on Instagram. There were approved adjectives. There were banned phrases. There was a "voice spectrum" with one end labeled "too formal" and the other end labeled "too casual" and the approved zone was approximately two millimeters wide.
Then I went on TikTok and watched a 19-year-old with a ring light make a video about the same snack brand that got 2 million views. She did not consult the voice guidelines. She did not know the voice guidelines existed. She was funny and weird and specific in a way that no 47-page document could ever produce.
When Glossier built a $1.2 billion valuation primarily through Instagram, they proved that a feed could be a storefront, a community, and a brand manifesto simultaneously. Their comments section did more brand-building than most companies' entire marketing budgets.
And her video sold more product than the brand's last three months of owned content combined.
This is the tension at the center of the creator economy, and I think it is going to break how we think about brand voice entirely.
For decades, brand voice was about control. Consistency. Every touchpoint should sound like the same entity. The idea was that repetition builds recognition and trust. And that was true in a broadcast era where brands were the primary speakers and consumers were the audience.
Every touchpoint should sound like the same entity.
But in 2021, brands are not the primary speakers about brands anymore. Creators are. Consumers are. The majority of content about your brand is not made by you. And the content that performs best is the content that sounds least like a brand.
Look at what Dunkin' did with Charli D'Amelio. They did not hand her a script. They did not ask her to conform to Dunkin's brand voice. They let Charli be Charli who happens to drink Dunkin'. The result was a drink named after her that sold hundreds of thousands of units on day one.
Or look at how Chipotle uses TikTok. Their most successful content is not polished brand content. It is employees filming behind the scenes, creators doing challenges, users making jokes. The "voice" is chaotic, unpolished, and human. And it works precisely because it does not sound like a brand.
I think brand voice guidelines are going to evolve from prescriptive documents into permissive frameworks. Instead of "here is exactly how to sound," they will become "here are the boundaries; everything inside them is fine." Less script, more improv rules. Less approved copy, more guardrails.
For strategists who spent their careers crafting meticulous brand voice, this feels like a loss of control. And it is. But the control was always partially an illusion. You never controlled what consumers said about you at dinner parties. You just controlled the official channels. Now the official channels matter less, and the dinner party conversation happens publicly at scale.
The brands that will thrive in the creator economy are the ones comfortable with being spoken about in voices that are not their own. That requires confidence in what you stand for. If you know your brand deeply enough, you can let other people express it in their own words without losing your identity.
Forty-seven pages of voice guidelines is not confidence. It is anxiety.