AI Prompt for Brand Voice Guides & Tone of Voice Guidelines
Generate comprehensive brand voice guides with actionable tone descriptors, preferred vocabulary, banned phrases, and before-and-after rewrite examples.
Objective: Create a reusable AI prompt that codifies brand personality and audience nuances into a clear, operational brand voice guide that copywriters, marketers, and AI workflows can follow for consistent messaging.
How the Base Prompt Was Formed
The base prompt was formed through these deliberate steps:
- Grounded the tone in three specific, non-contradictory adjectives (
{{adjective_1}},{{adjective_2}},{{adjective_3}}) to create a distinct persona rather than generic marketing jargon. - Defined the explicit audience relationship via
{{target_audience}}so sentence complexity, vocabulary, and empathy levels match customer expectations. - Structured actionable rules: mandated three core tone pillars with practical explanations to remove ambiguity.
- Included positive and negative vocabulary lists (words to embrace vs. words to avoid) to prevent corporate buzzwords and AI clichés from creeping into copy.
- Enforced concrete before-and-after rewrite examples, allowing writers to quickly see how generic statements transform into on-brand copy.
Save the resulting brand voice guide as a system prompt or pinned project instruction. Reusing it across daily drafting tasks ensures tonal consistency across different team members and AI tools.
Base Prompt Template
Write a brand voice guide for {{brand_name}}. The brand feels {{adjective_1}}, {{adjective_2}}, and {{adjective_3}}, and speaks to {{target_audience}}. Include: (1) three tone descriptors with a one-line explanation each, (2) five words or phrases the brand should use often, (3) five words or phrases the brand should avoid, (4) two example sentences rewritten from a generic version into the brand voice.
Snippets and Variables
| Element | Type | Example Value | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| {{brand_name}} | variable | Bock Coffee | The name of the brand or company |
| {{adjective_1}} | variable | warm | Primary tonal characteristic |
| {{adjective_2}} | variable | direct | Secondary tonal characteristic |
| {{adjective_3}} | variable | grounded | Tertiary tonal characteristic |
| {{target_audience}} | variable | home baristas who care about sourcing | The primary customer persona and their core motivations |
Pin the "words to avoid" list in your team's editing checklist or LLM system prompts—banning tired buzzwords does more to create a distinctive voice than adding new adjectives.
Filled Base Prompt
Write a brand voice guide for Bock Coffee. The brand feels warm, direct, and grounded, and speaks to home baristas who care about sourcing. Include: (1) three tone descriptors with a one-line explanation each, (2) five words or phrases the brand should use often, (3) five words or phrases the brand should avoid, (4) two example sentences rewritten from a generic version into the brand voice.
Extended Example Values
-
{{brand_name}}
- Bock Coffee
- Kinetic Security
- Bloom Nutrition
- Basecamp Workspace
-
{{adjective_1}}
- warm
- authoritative
- vibrant
- calm
-
{{adjective_2}}
- direct
- vigilant
- encouraging
- thoughtful
-
{{adjective_3}}
- grounded
- transparent
- playful
- pragmatic
-
{{target_audience}}
- home baristas who care about sourcing
- enterprise CISOs and SecOps leads managing multi-cloud compliance
- busy working parents looking for clean, whole-food dietary supplements
- remote team leads seeking quiet, asynchronous productivity tools
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