Brand Voice Quiz

What is brand voice?

Brand voice is the consistent personality a brand expresses through every word it writes — emails, social posts, support replies, product copy, ad headlines. It is the difference between "we apologize for the inconvenience" and "we screwed up, here is what we are doing about it." Same situation, completely different brand. Voice shapes more than 80% of customer touchpoints across the typical brand's surface area, which makes it one of the highest-leverage decisions in a brand kit.

The four voice archetypes — The Expert, The Friend, The Guide, and The Entertainer — are useful because each maps to a clear set of decisions: vocabulary, sentence length, level of formality, use of humor, and the relationship the brand offers to its customer. The Expert offers authority. The Friend offers warmth. The Guide offers clarity. The Entertainer offers attention. None is objectively better — the right archetype depends on your category, audience, and competitive positioning.

A useful brand voice document does three things: names the archetype, provides do/don't examples covering common contexts (support reply, social post, product copy), and bans specific words that conflict with the voice. "Banned words" is the single most underrated voice tool — a list of 10-20 forbidden phrases does more for consistency than any amount of abstract "tone" description.

How to use your results

Take your archetype result and write three sample pieces of copy in that voice: a 50-word product description, a 20-word social post about a feature, and a 100-word support reply for a frustrated customer. Read each out loud. Does the voice come through clearly? Would a customer recognize this as your brand if the logo were stripped off? The exercise reveals what the archetype actually sounds like in practice, which is more useful than the theory.

Voice is one piece of a complete brand kit. To build the rest — strategy, color, typography, logo system, guidelines — Markuva generates everything from a short business description and your chosen voice archetype.