#048 - Justin Blackman - Brand Voice Is Not a Feeling: Brand Ventriloquism & Why "Friendly" Means Nothing

Speaker A: When people say we want to sound friendly, what does that mean? Think about how many friends you have. Do they all sound the same? Do they all act the same? Would you actually want your brand to sound like your best friend? Like your actual best friend? Mine curses a ton. Uh, it says some pretty outrageous stuff. And if I put that on paper, I'd get fired. So, um, I don't want to sound like my best friend. I want to sound like me, and I want to understand what that means. I think that's what AI is like. It's going to the gym, but it's not really lifting weights. I like to think with AI. I don't like to write with AI. But if you want to get good at something, then do the work. If it's worth doing the work, then do the work. Don't look for shortcuts. If you look for hacks, it makes you a hack. I want to get good at something. For me, mastery matters.

Speaker B: Hey, welcome to the Message Market Fit podcast. I'm your host, Chris Silvestri. This is the show where we chat with B2B SaaS, folks, marketers, product leads, growth owners and founders about how they join the conversation already happening in their customers mind. We unpack how they think, how they research, and how they shape messages that actually move the needle. No fluff, just systems, insight and strategy you can actually use. Quick note before we dive in, this podcast isn't sponsored. It's supported by Conversion Alchemy, my own consulting business. So if you're listening and thinking, I wonder how Aligner Messaging actually is, Check out the Message Market Fit scorecard. It's a free diagnostic tool I built to help B2B SaaS teams pinpoint exactly where their messaging might be breaking down. You'll find the link in the show notes. I've been looking to chat with today's guest for a while and I'm super excited about this. Today we have Justin Blackman on the pod. He's a brand voice strategist and the founder of, uh, BrandVoice Academy, where he helps personal and corporate brands define how they truly sound and turn that into clear, usable voice guidelines. In this episode, we chat about what brand voice actually is, why most brands confuse voice with personality, how to scale voice across teams, where voice fits into messaging strategy, and most importantly, how, why all this work still matters in the age of AI. Let's dive right in. Hey, Justin, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker A: Yeah, this is going to be fun. I'm looking forward to this.

Speaker B: So I Have loads of questions around brand voice personality. I think when it comes to brand voice and personality, you are the guy that comes to mind. When I think about that. Lots of things to get into, but first I want to touch on this particular experience that you've gone through. So back in 2017, you wrote a hundred headlines a day for a hundred days, right? And I wanted to ask, what did that teach you about brand voice?

Speaker A: So at the time, I didn't realize it was actually about brand voice. At the time, it was one, a bit of a social experiment to, one, see if I could do it, and two, get my name out there, uh, on the map. As was a copywriter, really. I just wanted to get a little bit of notoriety. And when I, when I did it, I really was looking for messaging. I wanted to, you know, if you go back, the site's still up@the headlineproject.com. it's. There was a line on there, it says, I want to be the message master. There was another line that it says, copywriters aren't born, they practice. I don't remember where that line was from, but I loved it. And it was really just me practicing and learning in public. So what it did was it taught me to look at, uh, really anything that I was working on 100 different ways. And there are definitely some repeats, and there are a lot of bad repeats, bad, awful headlines on there. I say on, uh, the best day I had, I probably had six or seven good headlines out of the 100. Most of them were junk. But what they did was really just teach me different ways to approach any type of topic, whether it's B2B, SaaS, e. Com. I wrote about the fart candle. It was a lot of things. It was a lot of things that I found off the, like, Kickstarter.

Speaker B: So you actually went through real websites and crafted headlines for those specific businesses.

Speaker A: Most of them were for real headlines, uh, for real products. There were a couple that I made up just for fun, but they were based on something real. And if I went to something real, I was giving it, like, additional parameters. So I tried to stay on brand. Those are a little bit harder because I didn't want to invest a ton of time researching everything. This was project for speed. So if I spent, like, I spent at least an hour, I spent at least three hours a day on this. Uh, if I had to research everything, that would have been in three hours. So a lot of it was just like, quick review and then go as far as what it taught me about voice. Was there were definitely some headlines that I wrote that I loved but could never be used either. Too funny. Just the wrong. The wrong audience. I used the wrong language. At this point, I didn't know what brand voice was. This was early in my career before I really invested in understanding brand voice. So the things that it taught me weren't clear yet. They didn't become clear until probably three years later. So I'm glad I did it. But I can't say that there was a direct lesson what brand voice was other than knowing instinctively some of these things were not going to be a good fit. It's a right. I would never see the light of day.

Speaker B: Yeah. But. Well, I guess they also like. They, they like the exercise helped you absorb what sounds good and what doesn't sound good. And also what different brands sound like when compared to each other. Especially every single day. Back to back writing for each different business.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. There were sometimes like I would write a funny headline and I would be like, okay, this is ridiculous. There's no way that can work. But what if I change this? What if I use that word instead of this? So it was really just an, uh, exercise in creativity. But once you find a hook, there are ways to adapt that to apply to really any brand. That's where brand voice comes and until years later. But yeah, it really gave me a way to. To loosen up the reins a little bit and find the hook and then be able to figure out the way to make it work afterward.

Speaker B: Did you find yourself going back to headline formulas? Were you even aware of headline formulas or did you just brainstorm freely?

Speaker A: Yeah, the first, I had a list of probably 300 headline formulas that I

Speaker B: was working off of.

Speaker A: And the first few days were absolutely. I was going back and forth to templates and trying things. After about day 30 to 40, the headline formulas were ingrained in my head. By day 70, I didn't even look at them. And it was just like I still. I found I knew my favorite ones, but they were ingrained.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And every now and again I might get stuck or go back to something. The headline formulas were great, but I. The first few days I definitely stuck too close to the template and I wasn't as creative as I wanted to be.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Toward the end I trusted myself. I knew I can come up with 100 easily. Yeah.

Speaker B: It went from mechanical to intuitive.

Speaker A: Yeah. It was just, uh, the conscious competence.

Speaker B: Yeah. Is that something that you would recommend people do now? Because I like one thing that I'm thinking about is especially now with AI, where you basically can ask hundreds of different variants to ChatGPT and uh, comes up with like average stuff, I think building that muscle is super important. One thing that I'm doing now, which kind of I find that it keeps me fresh, is I'm doing the old. I don't know if you're familiar with James Altucher. He recommended doing like the 10 ideas a day thing. So I've been doing that for two weeks now and I find that it's super invigorating, energizing even just for thinking about in general work or lifestyle stuff. And I think it's probably gonna. It was the same for you with this kind of exercise, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, it was. And to make it more broader, uh, because I. Look, AI is here. I'm not gonna say don't use AI.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What. My, uh, my thoughts on AI are whatever. But so I'll use this analogy. For the last year, for actually for the last two years, I'm going to the gym. Last year, about last year was like rough. Just family stuff, just life stuff was a lot. So I still went to the gym, but I didn't train hard, about three days a week. But I wasn't lifting heavy weights. I wasn't, uh, I was just through with emotions. I wasn't really there. I cut my workouts shorter, about a half hour and they weren't high intensity. They were just, hey, this is better than doing nothing. At the end of the year, I took a body fitness test. I had gained like 3 pounds of fat and I was actually weaker than I was the year before. So I still went, but I didn't do the work and I didn't get any stronger. I m think that's what AI is like. It's going to the gym, but it's not really lifting weights. Oh yeah, it's not going to make you better. It might make you better at using AI, but it's not going to make you a better writer. It's up to you whether or not that matters. And as a writer, I want to be a writer. It's part of my identity. If I don't write, I don't feel complete. Uh, writing with AI doesn't scratch the itch for me. Uh, I like to think with AI. I don't like to write with AI. But if you want to get good at something, then do the work. If it's worth doing the work, then do the work. Don't look for shortcuts. If you look for hacks, it makes you a hack. I Want to get good at something. For me, mastery matters. My courses, the lessons that I teach. When I teach copywriters, I go deep in this stuff because the surface level isn't enough to really make a difference with you. And I want to make a difference with you. When I work with brands, I don't just focus on three adjectives and an avatar. I don't say that you're friendly, casual and human. That's the trifecta of nothingness. It doesn't mean anything. Yeah, show me another brand. Show me a brand that's not human, friendly and casual. And now you probably can name a couple. And that's the important thing. Look at the ones that aren't. They're doing something unique. When I work with brands, I want to go deeper than just the surface level. Brown nosing that AI is going to do. I don't. I like doing the work. For me, it's worth it.

Speaker B: Nice. Yeah. Let's go deeper into the whole writing and messaging aspect of your experience. I wanted to. So when you started out, you work with like different fields with brands like Puma, Ferrero, Energy, Red Bull, I think how did that work influenced your understanding of messaging in general and writing?

Speaker A: So let's go to Red Bull. I worked for them for six years and the first three years I was out in the field where I managed the sampling teams, the like the Mini Cooper with the big can on the back. I managed a lot of those teams. And like through college and up until that point I was doing that type of work. I was running consumer sampling, I was involved in consumer sampling and I have spoken to hundreds of thousands of people in real life face to face in countless situations. And with Red Bull in particular, we'd be going out and giving cans to people who were, who needed to be energized, people who were doing the work. And this could involve like in a four hour shift, I could be on a college campus, I could be on a military base, I could be in a white collar office and I can be on a construction site. I had to change my message every single time and if I stuck to a canned speech, that wasn't going to apply. So what I learned was to read situations and adapt to real time feedback and consumer responses. Sometimes something didn't go, like an introduction, didn't go the way that I wanted it to. So we had to adjust. Sometimes it failed miserably. But over hundreds of thousands of times you begin to understand what worked. And I actually went on to create a training program for there were Other people involved in this, it wasn't just me, but I did create a training program for a lot of the Red Bull samplers. And same thing when I was with 5 Hour Energy. Being Face to face and getting real time response and real time reactions allowed me to understand how changing my language and, uh, even my posture would affect the situation. And those are things that I bring forward into writing. I have a casual style, I have a casual nature. But I know when I'm writing for a more corporate brand, that has to change. I have to stand up straighter, I have to use different language. I have match the audience.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah.

Speaker A: And having spoken to hundreds of thousands of people, I've gotten really dang good at matching the audience. When I learn brand voice and I can match the brand as well. I think that was the deadly combo that really kicked off my.

Speaker B: So, yeah, you're basically mimicking, like, the physicality aspect and bringing that into how you write for people as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, there. When I write for certain people, someone pointed it out to me that my posture changes depending on who I am. So I really do go back to that and I embody it. Like I physically embody.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: There's a lot more to it, but it's just something that still happens. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's interesting because my next question, I don't know if it has anything to do with this, but you coined the term brand ventriloquism. Can you explain what that means for our audience?

Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. So I got really good at throwing my voice and sounding exactly like other people. And it's like a ventriloquist. They've got their dummy and they're talking with it, but you don't see their lips move. You see somebody else's move, and it sounds different. I got very good at hiding myself to sound exactly like the brand. And I get my voice to match other people. It was just something that was fun. If you're watching the video of this super Grover behind me, Muppets and puppetry and silly things are part of my brands. And I just. It was something that just fell out of my mouth when I was talking to someone. They're like. I was like, uh, I can write in any style. You don't even see me. It's basically like. Like a brand ventriloquist that I can, like, write through somebody else and someone's. Wait, what? And I was like, okay, there's a hook. So I just started using a little bit more. I actually own the trademark for it. And I got back in the copywriting days, I was really good at throwing my voice to sound like someone else.

Speaker B: Yeah. Which is also, if you think about it, the essence of good copy is that it doesn't sound like sales copy. Right. It sounds like having a conversation with someone who is basically telling you about the product in a persuasive way. Right. So you do that, but you also do it in the voice of the brand for your clients.

Speaker A: Yep. Yep. And there's. With sales copy, there's two schools of thought. There's one that the writer should be invisible, and you shouldn't identify or even know that the writer's there. You're just so entranced by the words that you just keep on going. And then there's the other school of thought, which is we want this to sound like us. It's less like direct response copy, although it still is. But we want some identifiable marker on there. We want our fingerprints on the copy. So even if our name is covered, they'll still know. It's usually two different schools of thought. And I played in both camps, and I'm, um, totally mixing metaphors here. I do that.

Speaker B: It's perfect.

Speaker A: But, yeah, I play in both. I enjoy the personality writing a little bit more. Uh, it's just. It's more my style. But I also know when it's not appropriate, and I'm able to adjust, to hide myself and become invisible.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. All right, so how do you define brand voice?

Speaker A: So there are a lot of fluffy definitions about brand voice, and most of them seem to be based off of, uh, fiction writing. Like, voice is your soul on the page. It's your. It's the heartbeat of your brand. Well, true. That doesn't help writers at all. It does. It's like, one of the things that I like those type of definitions. It's like saying that we want our brand to sound blue. Cool. What does that mean? There are about 360 shades of blue. Like, sky blue, baby blue. Uh, dark blue, light blue, dark. There's so many different shades. And the chances of me thinking the same shade as you, not the same.

Speaker B: You cannot use the hex code to describe the color.

Speaker A: Right. The heck of voice. But there actually is, like, hex code is mathematical. You can find the exact pixel on a color chart to get it and to match it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I approach voice that way mathematically. And for me, brand voice is three things. It's your vocabulary, it's your tone, and it's your cadence. So the vocabulary is literally the reading level that you write at. Are, uh, you using Smaller words or big words? Are you saying shoes and sneakers? Are you saying Nikes? Are you saying the cross? Uh, trainer XJ30? It's like, how specific are we getting? Are we using a longer language or are. Are we using just short basic words that are accessible to everybody? The tone is the emotion of your writing. And I'm not just talking about happy or friendly. That doesn't really mean anything. Like the color blue. There are so many levels of happy and friendly. Happy can mean anything from calm and serene all the way to giddy and boisterous and like sounding like an over caffeinated toddler. We need to know the exact level of the tones and it's a little trickier to define that specifically. And they do change depending on your medium and your audience and your topic. But we can define them on a pretty granular level if we look deeper. And then the cadence is the rhythm of your writing. You write short like I write short. I write choppy. I write staccato. Other people write long, wordy bird sentences that go on and on forever and hardly have a comma. And they just seem to run like a Gen Z er wrote it without any punctuation or style and you run out of breath before you hit the final sentence or you write somewhere in between. Yeah. Like we can literally define all these things and put mathematical numbers on it to define your style. So like a graphic designer has the hex codes to know what color you're writing in and know if they get it right. By defining voice as vocabulary, tone and cadence, we can identify if the writer got it right.

Speaker B: Cool. Yeah. I love the specificity and also the fact that you can actually basically measure it. Right. In a way, yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. There are literally tools. I built a tool to help measure it. I'm not saying that you need to hit the exact same color every single time. We know what range we want to play in.

Speaker B: Yeah. And for people who are listening, the tool is called Verbatim. Right. And it's. It's like uh, a. It gives you two kind of a Hemingway app side by side and it gives you the scores, all the cadence, the vocabulary and tone. Right?

Speaker A: Yep. It's called the verbatim. It's verbatimtool.com. we'll get you right there. And yeah, you can put two pieces of copy side by side and see how they match up.

Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah, I love it.

Speaker A: Again, we're not match everything's decimal point, but it can.

Speaker B: Yeah. Would you use it in what instances? Like, I don't know, uh, you have, I don't know, two value propositions for a page and you would use that to see if the voice is consistent or between which types of assets would you use it?

Speaker A: It can really be used for any type of asset. It's just, it gives you an apples to apples comparison. If you, if you have something that you like and then you work with another writer and you just say, this sounds off, I'm, um, defining what's off so you know what to fix.

Speaker B: Got it.

Speaker A: That's really the biggest thing. It's like when people with those fluffy, airy definitions of this is our lifeblood on the page, this is our soul on the page. We don't know. We know when people get it wrong, but we don't know how to make it right. Yeah, with the math, we know how to make it right. We can identify the pieces that are wrong without accidentally changing the things that

Speaker B: we love about, uh, it. So when a client says, oh, it doesn't sound like us, then you can show them. You can put it into custody and show them. Look at it.

Speaker A: Yeah, sometimes. Typically when someone says, it doesn't sound like us, or they say something's off, but I don't know what, that's usually the cadence. Writers are prone to writing very short. Uh, we average with about 8 to 11 words per sentence, where the average sentence in English is about 15 words. So very often, if you see that staccato copywriter style that's really popular in a lot of like, emails, uh, or on LinkedIn, if you write in that style for a brand that doesn't traditionally use that style, they're going to look at it and be like, this isn't right. The words might be right, but they'll just look at it. And I'll be like, nope, don't like it.

Speaker B: Yeah, that actually recently happened to me and a client. I was writing, yeah, like shorter sentences, trying to vary the cadence as well. But they were like, uh, can we have it a bit more? They said it like natural or smooth. But how do you actually find out what's their favorite way to find out? Like, for example, from a client. Do you ask them for an example of a website or copy that they like or how do you go about it?

Speaker A: I do, yeah. There's a pretty specific content list that I request coming in. Uh, it's a combination of what works, what they like. There's any brands that they like that, that they don't sound like. It really depends on where the brand is in their development. If they're an established. Like, I work with a lot of personal brands, and if you have an established personality or a, uh, face of the brand, our goal is to match that person's style all the time. When I'm developing a new brand from scratch, we don't necessarily want to have the exact bullseye of how something will sound. We want to give it some room to grow and to find itself. So we want to put parameters so the writer knows what lanes to play in, but they don't have to hit a bullseye every time. I find that, like, going a little bit longer actually works better for this brand. So maybe we adjust and move on. It just really depends specifically on. On where the brand is and what they're trying to achieve and really why they bring me in.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. What do you think are the biggest myths around brand voice that you hear?

Speaker A: So there's, uh. I'll tell you the. The biggest one, and it's not so much a myth, but it's a battle that I have to fight. There's a difference between brand voice and brand personality. Lot of the ways that people define voice really apply more to personality. When people say, we want to sound friendly.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What does that mean? Think about how many friends you have. Do they all sound the same? Do they all the same? Would you actually want your brand to sound like your best friend? Like your actual best friend? Mine curses a ton. Um, it says some pretty outrageous stuff. And if I put that on paper, I'd get fired. I don't want to sound like my best friend. I, uh, want to sound like me, and I want to understand what that means. Maybe when. When I talk about friendly, is that empathy? Is that sympathy? Is that compassion? Do I have an, uh, optimistic viewpoint or a hopeful viewpoint? Because those aren't the same thing. Stick is, yes, this will work out for us. Or hopeful is. Even if this doesn't work out, I still believe that we're like, there's a difference there. And when we figure out what that is, everyone becomes aligned and the writing becomes much more consistent. And so the nuance of, um, understanding personality, sure, it might. Friendly might be a personality, but it's not actually a voice. And then even understanding what. How the voice fits into the whole personality. Sometimes when people say they want a vibrant brand, maybe that has nothing to do with the writing. And that's more the imagery. A lot of colors, a lot of bright yellows and pictures of people smiling. Maybe that's the personality, that's the vibrancy that people are looking for. But the words might actually be more traditional. Getting the names of your offers, the names of your services, the company culture, that's a brand personality. Voice is just one element of it. M. It's one thing that a writer can control. And when we give them the proper instruction, they can work magic with it. But it can't fix everything. Sometimes writers get the blame when it's really not the writer's fault.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually I had a chat with. It was a potential client, so not even my actual client. They. It was clear that they had problems with positioning and messaging strategy before even writing any of the copy. But, uh, the red flag to me was when they said something like, yeah, we would like with your copy for our brand to appear trustworthy. And I don't. Yeah, legit and trustworthy. And, and. Which is a lot of what you do with actual good design as well with the copy. So it's not only the copy or your voice. Right. So that to me was a clear red flag there. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it's a bit early.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's like we want to appear trustworthy. Well, how about you be trustworthy? Yeah, maybe that's like, that's. That's more than the writing can do. Yeah, it's like the writing can support it if you are. We can bring that stuff to light, but otherwise it's. That's a way too heavy of an ass for the copy to do.

Speaker B: Yeah. When you work. Yeah, exactly. When you work with a brand that still hasn't found their voice, what do you see the signs of it being so?

Speaker A: There are a lot of brands who, uh. So this is where I'm going to go against the grain with a lot of copywriters. Copywriting uses a lot of voice of customer, which is great. If you're writing for conversion, you want voice of customer. It should absolutely be in your pages. That's not the thing that I have them with. The problem that I have is when you rely so much on external language that you'd never define your internal language. And some brands have trouble because they're told to base everything off what the consumer wants, but they never define who they are. So it becomes really hard to sustain something that you're not, something that you're told you should be. I have an inside out approach. I don't work from the outside when I'm just focusing on brand voice. I'm not making up who you are, I'm defining who you are. It's not, oh, we want to be fun. Uh, but Are you fun? Let's figure out what you actually are and build the brand voice around that. Then it becomes sustainable. Everyone can understand what it is, we can adjust it and evolve it as things go. But when you create a brand voice out of something that you're not actually embodying, it doesn't work. It fails. And no one quite knows what to do. Everyone has an opinion on what to do and everyone is right because it's never been defined. That's a problem. We need to have a true north star of what the brand actually is. So to me, the problem is when we've defined the brand voice on, um, the 5,000 foot level, but not the boots on the ground level. 5000 foot level is that friendly, casual, professional, human. There are 8.5 billion humans on earth. Choose one. Let's sound like that. Yeah, that's usually the problem.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. When my. It was basically my next question about voice of customer, you basically addressed it. But when I use voice of customer, to me, it's not really use it to actually write the full copy or maybe taking an entire sentence and use it in my copy. What I do mostly with voice of customer is, for example, I have a headline where maybe I have to pick between two words or to like very small sections of that sentence. Then I might refer to voice of customer to see can I use something more vivid, more descriptive, or that actually speaks how the audience would speak just because I'm speaking to them. Right. And so it's more of the editing stage for me.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.

Speaker B: Which I think is closer to what you were saying.

Speaker A: Right, yeah, I'm totally on board with that. When you're choosing between two words, let's go with the one that the voice of customer. Yeah, yeah. Uh, uses. That's why I mentioned before the example of vocabulary. We're saying running shoes or the, the Nike Swift. Like a specific model. If, if you're talking to sneaker heads, use this specific model. If you say a pair of Nikes, they're going, what pair of Nikes? That's a good way to, to identify that. All right. You're not serious about it. When you say something ultra specific, that's when you're like, okay, you're my people. So the right voice of customer can make a difference in those points. But by defining the level of vocabulary that we're going to use, that's a way to make it more consistent.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm thinking specifically about B2B companies and I'm like, I'm thinking in their heads. They might think when they think about voice, personality. How do I balance a strong personality for my brand with being just clear about what I do? Because I think a lot of companies are afraid of being too bold and being, and using much more personality and not being clear enough on what they actually do. They, when in reality they think, uh, oh, we should just tell them what we do, what this is for. These are the features, blah, blah, blah. So how do you think about that?

Speaker A: Yeah, it depends on the user and the brand entirely. But, uh, clear is always going to be clever. But that doesn't mean you can't do both. Chris, you've taken my the master of brand voice course. No, you know my answer to this. There's clear and clever. But what I usually, what I try to strive for is to be cleaver. Cleaver with a little bit of cleverness in it. The word cleaver right there. You get it. Like when you can add in a little pop like that and become cleaver, you don't sacrifice either one and you stand out in a really interesting way that makes you more memorable.

Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I want to talk about scaling your voice just because a lot of brands, when they grow, and especially B2B SaaS, you might have different teams, everyone starts speaking different languages. And from my perspective, like the messaging framework, messaging work that I do helps a lot, keeping everyone consistent on the same page, but maybe not at this level of detail. And so I wanted to ask, how do you make sure that everyone's aligned on voice? And actually you wrote something interesting that is on LinkedIn that might be related to this or might not. But, uh, you said give your voice room to grow and your audience will grow with it. So what do you mean by that?

Speaker A: Yeah, once you've found your lane once, like your North Star, you'll go that way. But we're in a position right now where things are changing across the world. And like, even me, I'm shutting down some of my older programs. I'm. I'm ready to do some new things and I'm ready to evolve and I have to let my voice differ a little bit because I'm like growing into a different audience and changing around a few things, trying to help different people. So I have to tinker and I have to let go of certain things and I have to trust that I will get it right. And yes, I'm going to lose certain people, but I'm also going to reach a different audience, a bigger audience that I want to and voices, uh, evolve a Lot of times brands will take on the personality and the voice of its founder, but as the company grows, or if the founder becomes too busy to write the content, or even if the founder, if the CEO changes, yeah, we, you're screwed. So you have to give a brand room to find its own identity and become who it's meant to be. And sometimes that's a snake shedding its skin. You outgrow something, grow. Not everyone's going to come along, but new people will go with you. So as much as I believe in having a well defined voice, there are times when you need to review your voice guide and say, you know what, this is who we were. This got us here. But it's time to evolve it a little bit and scale into something new. And maybe that means dropping some of the core elements and not worrying so much about the vocabulary, tone and cadence for a couple of weeks and just testing stuff out, finding a new message and be like, ah, uh, okay, I got it. Now we understand what this new audience wants and who we are and now we can define the match. Yeah. Every now and again you just have to forget the rules a little bit.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's good to have a, uh, well defined voice, but each stage has a different well defined voice. And sometimes you might just want to take time to explore what that voice is. But that also implies that you still intentionally need to constantly think about what is that voice. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah. You're graduating to a new voice. Yeah, it's a different level. You've outgrown something and ah, so understanding how it's going to change, you can make a couple of predictions, but you also have to, you have to mess around and find out.

Speaker B: Exactly. Without spilling all the beans, what do you think are the core components of voice guidelines? Voice, brand voice and style guidelines?

Speaker A: So I will say that my voice guides are way more robust and complete than most would ever imagine. When I'm writing for, uh, defined personal brands like I've written for Amy Porterfield, to Herman, Stu McLaren, Ali Abdaal, those voice guides can be over a hundred pages on the voice. And now granted, that includes a lot of samples, it includes a lot of templates. I'm not saying every brand should have that, but I once worked for a corporate brand and they had a 60, I think it was about 65 page brand guide. And there was one and a half pages on voice, there was about 40 on like with the pantone colors and how many pixels away from the corner the logo should be and uh, the angles. There's about 45 pages on design and about one and a half on voice. And that was the like the friendly, human, casual type of thing. Okay, so my guides, now I know that everyone's going to read a hundred pages on voice, but so typically, like my corporate guides are more about 35 to 50 pages. They're not for everyone to read all uh, at once. But it's like having a dictionary on your desk. It's a reference and you need it. The more define the voice, the more you can know when it's right, the more the stakeholders can understand when. If something is off, here's what to adjust. And more importantly, the writers will know when it's right before they submit it, or if they're making a conscious change to break one of the rules because of a specific reason. They can stand by it, they can identify it, and then the stakeholder can either say yes or no. But it makes approval so much easier, it makes things quicker and it gives a clear black and white answer for what's right and what's wrong. You can't do that by saying it doesn't sound human enough. Again, what? Human? Because the writer had one in mind and you've got someone else in mind. If you're not thinking of the same person, you're not going to get it right. And it's going to be an extremely frustrating process for everybody.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Detail, More detail than you could ever imagine. That's essentially what should be in a voice.

Speaker B: Yeah. How do you make those hundred page documents easy to skim or like scan when you need to actually ask people, like to refer to something.

Speaker A: There's a table of contents, everything's broken out with chapter heads. And again, some of it, like there could be seven or eight pages on punctuation, like.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, so you can actually extract those as like mini handbooks. Yeah.

Speaker A: And sometimes there's an appendix or glossary. So like the common terms that we use, brand biographies. So it's not voice, it's just everything that a writer would need to know. The voice, the vocabulary, tone and cadence. That's probably 15 to 20 pages where we get super nuanced on the different tones. Uh, when we want to, we address negative situations, how we talk about products, how we talk about our people. There's different rules for all of these things. It's not one tone for everything. That's going to sound really robotic and be a pain in the butt for anyone to both read and write. So knowing the different, the changes in tone, per channel, things like that.

Speaker B: Yeah. I wanted to Ask for my clients. So a lot of the work that I do is typically diagnosing when I jump in whether or not they have problems at ah, the positioning stage, messaging stage or copy stage. Right. Where do you think voice, understanding, voice fits into that? Is it more at the discovery stage before everything or should it be between positioning, messaging? Where do you see it?

Speaker A: Well you have to know who you are in order to know how you want to sound. So once we've got the sort of the brand identity done and you've got the messaging like uh, ah, okay, this is what we want to say. The voice is there to back that up and it's to make it sound consistent. I don't think it goes last but I would say let's get down the messaging. The voice can tell us what specific words to use in the messaging and what to carry on.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. What I do is basically have a uh, section, not 100 pages, a section in my messaging frameworks. But it's basically okay, let's define the messaging and then apply the voice. Yeah.

Speaker A: And again for most brands it's not going to be a hundred pages. For B2B, consumer brand, corporate brand, the voice guide is not going to be 100 pages. I know that no one would read that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But I do and it's not made for everyone to read, it's made for the writer to have.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So it's a resource. Um, it's not the like people like tend to have it open in ah, a browser tab for weeks at a time writing but they're not reading through it every single day.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: That's a nightmare. I don't want anyone to do that. I just want you to have the information available for when you need it.

Speaker B: Have uh, you, I'm curious, have you tried feeding that one of those guides to AI and see what it does? Even though I would say 100 pages, I'm not sure how much the context would be able to handle it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I wouldn't put a hundred page Voice guide into AI, but I have put 15 to 30 pages in where actually when I have a 30 page guide I break it up into chunks and here's our, our vocabulary. Uh, sorry, not here's our vocabulary, here's our grammar usage like commas, dashes, all that stuff. Put that in one section so it understands how you use if you use the oxford comma or not if you put spaces around the em M dash, Chicago style for say P style, small things like that. Literally just a formatting tool. And then for brand voice. And I've had to figure out how to make this work with AI because AI can apply one theme across everything. What it does is when I work with, with voice guides for AI, I focus more on the brand perspective. It's not, I don't create. It's not the Persona. It's not the. Is it the Jungian, the young Persona?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The avatar or whatever.

Speaker A: Yeah. The archetype. It's not an archetype. Me, that's not a voice, that's a personality like the sage. Like that's Gandalf or Yoda. They speak very, very different piece backward. Gandalf doesn't. That's not. That's voice. The backward speak of Yoda. Compared to Gandalf, that's voice. The archetype is still sage. So what I do is I create more of a Persona and I define it very well so the brand understands who we are. From there the speech falls into place.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: I'm never trying to get AI to write 100% right. I don't think it can. I don't think it should. At least not right now. I don't want to eliminate writers because we have different. We do things very well. There's a reason why we exist.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: I'm not anti writer. I'm um, not ne. Even necessarily anti AI but I think the way that I've gotten the night and day difference and this is client's words of AI is by defining the brand's perspective and putting that into. Into whatever bot you're using. And that will make things sound much more aligned.

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess it's basically uh. Yeah. You're basically restricting the field of information that AI has access to and you basically give it like a direction like guide.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So I've gotten some pretty dang good stuff from M AI once I. Once I gave it my. My more. My identity information.

Speaker B: Yeah. Even I find even if you can get like a good 80% there, then the editing, it's what. Where the magic happens. Which is what you would need to eventually do anyway. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah. How do you convince like a skeptical stakeholder that investing in brand voice development is important?

Speaker A: So brand voice is not a CEO level problem. You're dealing with a corporation. It's just not.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But it does pay for itself because the amount of time it takes to train a writer, the approval process, the amount of times it can save, paid for itself again and again. And it's not a static document. That's just used once or something that sits on the shelf. It's literally there every day. I've known voice guides like I've created voice guides that are an onboarding process and create like a 90 day program for a new writer to get onboarded that's completely hands off as a, as an owner or a uh, brand manager. You don't have to say the same thing. Every time you hire a new writer, you give them the guide and then the work is done. They're onboarded quicker, they're onboarded better. And most of my voice guides are Google Doc so they're easily updated. So there's a reason for that. But it also acts as a sales tool. I've created voice guides where people have polled lines that I've written and put them on their website, have been like, created like brand manifestos, become tagline through slogans, giving them content ideas and basically wrote one voice guide that acted like a content calendar for the next year for one brand. That wasn't my plan. Like there's so much gold in here and uh, we're going to use. So it's not so much that it's a C suite problem, but for the boots on the ground folks and even the 5,000 foot, the middle managers comes the true North Star. So everyone can approve things consistently.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Even through different channels or mediums. Yeah. All right. You have an interesting term you talk about when you I think, become like this, differentiating brands which is becoming unmistakably, um, themselves. What are the characteristics you think of a brand that's unmistakably itself.

Speaker A: So when you have I so tough to describe, I don't have a set answer for this but when you're unmistakably yourself, you're not afraid to speak bolder. You might be the guy that's for me. When I'm unmistakably myself, I'm not jumping into every conversation. I'm going to wait and I'm going to listen to all the opinions and then I'm going to come in at the end and I'll probably just say one thing that kind of ties everything together. That's me. I know that's my role. I know that's what I do. The brands that are unmistakably themselves, whether we're not funny because we lead with this value, because we, we all die on this hill. Because when you understand your core identity, everything else just falls into place. The voice is part of that. It's what brings it to life. It's how you Communicate, you know, immediately whether it's right or wrong, because you know who you are. And it's not friendly, it's not human, it's not casual, it's not, uh, not professional. It's some very specific word or combination of word or some avatar that we're going to create that just when you see it, you get it and you're just relaxed and be like, yeah, that's it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you think that has to do with, with a company's point of view? For example, one question that I like to ask clients when I try to dig into their voice is what drives you crazy about your industry? And I find that they give a lot of signs and telltale, like, signals about what their voice and personality is.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Finding the common enemy and, uh, understanding what you don't want is usually a great starting place. People are very adamant on what they don't like. And then what do you like? Well, I don't know. So sometimes that's what we do. It's Michelangelo, uh, creating David. Well, I just removed all the more. Yeah, that's not excellent. And sometimes that's what. That's actually one of my brand voice finding processes is going through, uh, an ungodly amount of words in about two hours to figure out what we're not and then get crystal clear on who we are. And this goes deeper than what you think.

Speaker B: And.

Speaker A: And it's never friendly. It's never one of the words.

Speaker B: Well, uh, and I think it's that kind of hard work that makes brain sweat. That actually makes you come up with a goal stuff. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's it.

Speaker B: Which a lot of all the companies avoid, typically.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The voice is in the details. You gotta.

Speaker B: What's one piece of writing advice that you typically give but you wish more people actually followed?

Speaker A: It's funny. This is something that, as I'm working with some different people right now, I'm getting more people saying, I want to write like I talk. If you listen to. If you're reading this transcript, I don't write like this.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: There are definitely some lines and there are some pieces of my cadence that work its way through, but I speak much more rambly when I speak. You're getting my first draft and, uh, I write. You're getting my third, my fourth, my 89th draft. It's way more polished.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: When you're listening to scripts on television that's written by writers, there are no flubs, there are no false starts. We don't all write like we Talk. And you, uh, can write on a more conversational level. I can do that for you. And. But writing like you talk is not always a great thing.

Speaker B: Yeah. There's uh, a it m makes me think about because now I typically try to use those dictation tools. Right. With AI that you basically hold a, uh, button, speak. And I use it mostly for prompting, typically just because it's faster.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I would never use that message to, to write something to someone on LinkedIn or on email. Right. So that, that's pretty clear when you try and do it. This is like 10 paragraphs to say one thing that I could say in half the length.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes when we. This is a line one of my editor co instructor friends, Jill Hill told me. I don't remember where she got it, but she said sometimes we write things because we have to write them, not because the audience has to read them. And in the editing you're like, you know what that part was for me? Let's delete that. Here's the part for you.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's the thinking process behind the writing that then sometimes you have to remove.

Speaker A: It's important to write versus what's important to read.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Where do you go to learn? I'm curious.

Speaker A: Where do I go to learn?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I've stopped spending time in marketing and

Speaker B: copywriting groups and I'm in AI slot.

Speaker A: I don't enjoy my time there. I don't like social media. Yeah. Uh, honestly, right now I'm reading things by completely outside sources. I'm reading a lot of biographies. Whether it's from an entrepreneur or a comedian or just someone in history, I go there. I love watching comedians and analyzing their styles. Uh, I just try to find actions from the totally outside world. I'm done with the echo chamber that I've been in for the last decade. Yeah, I'm just burnt out on that. And I'm just more interested in. I had a really strong pursuit of mastery in writing and brand voice. And I'm so glad that I did it. And I went deep, but like I went rabbit hole after rabbit hole. But eventually you have to come back up for air. And when you don't come back the same way you came down and you come out differently than when you went in and you need a break. Okay. I've done everything there. I've explored every nook and cranny there. Um, I'm ready to find something new. I'm taking all that information with me, but I don't need to learn that Anymore. Yeah, so I'm just, I'm not going to. I don't have a set place. I don't know the answer to that. I just know where I'm not going these days.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Which is, it's interesting because now especially with AI, there's a lot of people talking about, oh, uh, you have to be a uh, generalist, know a little bit of a lot of things because then like AI can do all the execution now. So your advice is more of finding your, the stage you are in and if you know what, where you don't want to go, then focus on the other aspects.

Speaker A: I guess my, my tip. Not that you asked for a tip, but just get obsessed with something and then figure out all you can and then whatever you learn is gonna carry over and it'll be. You take it with you. But at a certain point you need to be done learning a topic. That's my thought.

Speaker B: Do you have a, like a writing practice that you do like daily?

Speaker A: I don't anymore. I, I still, I really enjoy writing. I actually when I write sales pages I write on my hand. I've been doing a lot more writing by hand for really anything important. Emails. I still do like my emails to my list, which is a great list and you should get on it just but the little plug there. But I really found that anything of importance, I've gone back to writing by hand.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I found the same. Those 10 ideas of data I'm writing down like in journal by hand. It's just more like an immersive experience.

Speaker A: It's more connected.

Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I know that you meditate or at least you used to do you still do it and what type of meditation?

Speaker A: So I did it for a long time. But like anything that works, you stop doing it because it worked. Yeah, that's great. And then it's. And then you slip out of it. Like why aren't I calm and so non reactive anymore? Oh, cause I stopped doing the thing. I don't do it on a uh, on a regular basis anymore. But I'm a big believer in it. I'm a big proponent of it. I tell everyone who needs it. And if you can't meditate for, for even three minutes, that means you need to meditate for at least 10. Those are the people who need it. Um, for me I actually prefer guided meditations. Uh, it feels like you're listening to a story and wherever it takes you, that's where you need to go. I can sit still with nothing but the sound of Winds and wind chimes for a while. I can do that for about five minutes. Um, a guided meditation I can listen to for as long as it goes.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because what I do is the pass on a meditation, which is basically. I did like the ten day silent retreat and it's basically like nothing. You sit down and there's like a, like a body scan kind of technique that you go through, but it's basically the opposite. And I was actually supposed to go to my second retreat tomorrow, but I had to cancel because I work to do. But do you think meditation helps with writing and thinking better right now?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely it does. Just trusting the process, the calmness, the not worrying, letting, just letting ideas come to you. Uh, yeah, big believer in that. Uh, I don't want to get too woo or spiritual on that because it's going to be different for everyone. Being able to silence your mind and let one idea come up and knowing that's the right idea and just trusting it. Yeah, absolutely. I believe it helps.

Speaker B: Awesome. All right. It's been super, super insightful, Justin. Thank you so much. So people, as you said, they can find you justinblackbun.com emails for your newsletter, right?

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah.

Speaker B: And you're not on LinkedIn, so people don't go

Speaker A: being on there. But if you do want to connect with me, please send a note. I get a ton of connection requests that I don't really have any interest in, but if you send me a

Speaker B: note, if people come from this podcast, you know that there's good people that know all their stuff and they want robot messaging and copy.

Speaker A: Perfect.

Speaker B: All right. All right, Justin, thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening. If the episode sparked some ideas or made you rethink how you're doing messaging, check out the Message Market Fit scorecard. It's free, quick to complete, and it'll show you exactly where your copy or strategy might be misaligned. You'll find the link in the show notes. And if you want to go deeper or just bounce ideas around, I'm always up for a chat. Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter ilvesterChris. And of course, if you enjoyed the episode, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify really helps more people discover it. That's it for this one. See you next time.