These words should be banned from your brand guide.

I’ve been on a tear lately to strip the fluff from the brand strategy process. If you missed my article on brand promise, you might enjoy this twitter thread to summarize.

Today I take on brand tone.

Finding the right words to shape your brand’s voice is a worthwhile exercise. It helps you be thoughtful and consistent with your experience and messaging. Typically you drop these words in your brand guide and refer back to them often as a litmus test for whether your creative is hitting its target.

However, I often see attributes that are so vague as to become virtually meaningless. Like what? Glad you asked.

Here’s 5 words I suggest you avoid:

1. Authentic. Authenticity isn’t really something that can be prescribed, it’s something that just is or isn’t. Consider instead what you actually mean: do you want the brand to have a conversational or human quality? Do you want it to be a little rough around the edges? To be vinyl in a digital world? Say that.
2. Accessible. This one is just too broad and open to interpretation. Does it mean simplistic? Does it mean conservative? Does it mean empathetic? Dig a little deeper.
3. Distinct. Well yeah, that’s the goal of this exercise. You should be defining how to be distinct. Again, it’s not something that can be prescribed, it just is.
4. Confident. You are selling stuff, of course you’re going to be confident. Now if you wanted to be insecure that would be noteworthy: “maybe buy our products…or no, you probably wouldn’t want to…did I do something to upset you?” In this post-post-irony world, who knows?
5. Helpful. All brands engage in some sort of value-exchange with their audience. You wouldn’t have a customer if you weren’t helpful. One person’s idea of helpful could mean simple, succinct and factual while another might like a friendly and conversational tone. The word helpful doesn’t adequately define its intentions.

To create even more useful rules around brand tone, I suggest employing with / without statements. Such as:

Be witty without being snarky.

Be smart without being pretentious.

Be conversational but not long-winded.

Be fearless but never mean-spirited.

Just remember the goal of defining these types of things is to empower your organization to find a unique voice that sticks with people. The more specific you are the better.