My brand sounds different on every platform

Your website sounds corporate. Your Instagram sounds casual. Your emails sound like a different company wrote them. And your LinkedIn posts sound like everyone else's LinkedIn posts.

This is normal — and fixable

Most brands don't have a voice problem. They have a consistency problem. Different people write for different channels, or you adjust your tone by "feel" each time. Without a shared reference, each platform drifts.

Why brand guidelines don't fix this

Traditional brand voice guidelines say things like "We are: approachable, innovative, trustworthy." Great. So is every other brand. These adjectives are too vague to actually constrain writing. They describe a zone, not a voice.

What works instead

A voice recipe. One sentence that captures your exact tonal fingerprint with concrete references:

"Brené Brown's vulnerability meets Liquid Death's irreverence, but for financial planning — and always slightly self-deprecating."

Now every writer, every channel, every AI tool has the same north star. The website, the Instagram caption, and the cold email all sound like they came from the same person. Not identical — adapted to the platform. But recognizably the same voice.

The test

Read your latest social post out loud. Then read your homepage. Then read your last email. If someone wouldn't know it's the same brand, you need a voice recipe.