Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

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Right, quick bit of maths. The average person gets advertised at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 times a day: every screen, billboard, radio slot, and sponsored whatever in the feed. Call it 8,000 pitches before bed. So here's the question actually worth asking. In all that racket, how does anyone remember you? Not with a bigger logo or a shinier font. What sticks is the way you sound. That's your brand voice.

It's the thing sitting underneath the colours and the typefaces: how you talk to the world, and how you want the world to see you. Get it consistent, and a brand starts to feel relatable, distinctive, and the one that quietly moves money—trustworthy.

Quick hello while we're here: I'm Bill, Doc to most. I run a startup called Athyna and write a newsletter called Open Source CEO, where I've sunk an unreasonable chunk of my life into this exact thing. So today we're pulling the whole lot apart: where brand voice came from, who's nailing it, who's face-planted, and how to build one so good your customers end up quoting it back to you. Let's get into it.

For roughly the first 150 years of advertising, the whole job was blunt: say what the thing does, say it louder than the next bloke, collect the money. Take John Smedley of Matlock, Derbyshire, and his gloriously named Chillie Paste. Billed as "The King of Cures," it promised to see off your rheumatism, your lumbago, your gouty pains, your bronchitis, and presumably your in-laws. The ad even walked you through exactly what the outer package and the inner package looked like. Everything was painfully literal. No wit, no personality, no soul.

The company that changed everything, though, was Volkswagen. Around 1959, the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach kicked off a run of Beetle ads so good that Ad Age would later crown the whole campaign the single finest of the entire twentieth century. Not bad for a small, odd-looking, cheap little car.

You'll know the flagship, the famous Think Small ad. But the whole campaign ran on one trick: a flat refusal to oversell. My favorite might be this one. The headline? "And if you run out of gas, it's easy to push."

Read that again. A car ad, cheerfully owning up that the thing might leave you on the hard shoulder, then shrugging that at least it's light enough to shove to the kerb. It's playful. It's self-deprecating. It rips into its own product before you get the chance to, and quietly knifes the thirstier competition on the way past. Every Mad Men-era copywriter alive spent the next decade trying to bottle that, and in all the flailing about, they dragged the whole idea of brand voice into existence.

My favorite framing of all this landed in my inbox over a decade ago, forwarded on from someone's pitch deck. It laid out ten personas a brand can step into (some people stretch the list to twelve archetypes).

One glance and you just get it, right? Selling life insurance? Lean on The Sage. Selling energy drinks? The Rebel's your man.

Here's the bit most people miss, though. You don't have to wear one mask from dawn till dusk. Same as actual humans with actual personalities, you flex. You pick a primary, then a couple of secondaries to round yourself out. For example, my startup, Athyna, used The Joker as our primary persona, and The Rebel and The Dreamer as our secondaries.

Picture a design studio juggling wildly different clients. With an indie game startup you might crank the dial to playful, fast, and a bit feral, pure Jester or Rebel. Then a law firm walks in, and suddenly you're all steady hands and careful words, more Sage or Caregiver. Same studio, different mask.

We put real hours into Athyna's voice. It's been tweaked plenty since, but the first crack at it went roughly like this. First, my co-founder and I (yes, there was a co-founder, for a few glorious months) mapped the business itself on a quick Lean Canvas. Then we knocked out our mission, vision and values across a handful of short, sharp exercises.

Enough about the greatest company on the planet (ahem). Let's watch a few of the other lot, Nike, Google, Rolex, and M&Ms, wear their masks.

Google is The Wise, top to bottom. "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is basically the job description of a wizard, or at least a very patient librarian. They're not really selling you a product. They're offering to point you in the right direction, every single time you ask.

The voice lives in the restraint just as much. One clean box on a blank white page. No shouting, no clutter, just the unbothered calm of something that assumes you'll trust it, mostly because you already do. And as it keeps innovating, from search to maps to AI that answers before you've finished typing the question, the character never wavers. The wise guide who's read the whole library and is happy to save you the walk.

Rolex wears The King like it was tailored for them. The entire pitch is success, status, and a velvet rope. In the late sixties they ran a whole series of these, each one built on the same swaggering little formula: if you were somebody who genuinely mattered, you'd already have one on your wrist.

And then, the undisputed champion of the gag, M&Ms. If those decades-long M&Ms spots don't drag at least a twitch of a smile out of you, I've got some worrying news about your heart. We probably shouldn't be friends. But joking aside, the sheer brand equity two anthropomorphic chocolates have quietly banked over the years is genuinely staggering.

Because people get so attached to the brands they love, hauling that voice in the wrong direction can go very badly, very fast. GAP, the popular clothing brand, has pulled it off more than once. In 2012, while Hurricane Sandy was tearing up the US East Coast, GAP fired out what might just be the most tone-deaf tweet in the history of the platform.

Read the room? They read a different room, in a different country. That's not a voice; that's The Idiot archetype, live and unscripted.

And that one landed only a couple of years after they'd already binned their beloved logo for a slicker redesign, post-2008, in a bid to look a bit fancier. It went down like a lead balloon: seventy-two hours of backlash, a rumored $100M of design work straight in the skip, and a 3% dip in the share price.

The point of all this isn't to kick GAP and Nivea while they're down. Nor is it that you should never take a swing or step outside your usual register. It's simpler than that: your audience is paying attention. They're attached to your colors, your fonts, the jingle that used to play between their Saturday cartoons, and above all to your voice, the thing most likely to make them actually feel something. David Ogilvy said it best.

Right, enough theory. Here's how you actually go and build one.

The way I grade brand is basically an NPS scale. Sitting at a one-to-six? It's actively working against you. A seven or eight and you're firmly in "fine, I suppose" country. But get it to a nine, or heaven forbid a perfect ten, and the whole world cracks open.

So build it with care, friends. Lay the foundations properly, because in business, same as in culture, a great brand is the gift that just keeps on giving.

And that's it! You can join Open Source CEO here, follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

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