You can solve your brand voice problem in 60–90 minutes. Not with a 40-page brand deck your team ignores. With a workshop that forces decisions, creates artifacts, and gives everyone the same answer when they ask: "Does this sound like us?"
Here's the problem it solves: Your startup doesn't have a brand voice. You have five different voices competing for attention, and AI just added a sixth one that sounds like every other piece of slop from ChatGPT.
The pitch deck is aspirational. The landing page is SEO-optimized gibberish. The founder's LinkedIn reads like unfiltered therapy. Support emails apologize too much. Product copy tries to sound "professional." And now your AI-generated content has layered algorithmic sameness on top of human inconsistency.
This isn't a marketing problem. It's an infrastructure failure. Your team burns hours rewriting each other because nobody defined what "sounds like us" actually means. Customers can't figure out who you are because you sound like a different company every time they interact with you.
The 60–90 Minute Workshop Agenda
If you've got 60 minutes, you can solve your voice problem. Ten minutes to set context, thirty minutes for exercises, fifteen to converge on decisions, and five to define next steps. If you have 90 minutes, give each phase more breathing room, not more complexity.
Set context (10 min): Remind everyone why you're here. "We're not wordsmithing. We're deciding how we sound so we stop rewriting everything later." Clarify the outputs: personality traits, a tone map, and DO/DON'T examples in real sentences. Show a before-and-after example from your own marketing. Ask: "Which one sounds like us?" Most teams can't answer. That's the point.
Run exercises (30 min): This is where the work happens. Start with the adjective card sort. Give everyone 7 minutes to sort individually before comparing. Then run the "brand as a person" sketch to unlock tone. Finally, translate that into example lines using real copy from your site. When someone suggests a generic trait like "innovative" or "customer-centric," push for receipts. "What does that look like in a sentence?" If they can't give a concrete example, park the word.
Converge (15 min): Force-rank traits using dot voting. Give everyone 3 votes, they can stack them or spread them. Pick the top 3–5 traits with the most votes. Then identify one or two non-negotiables: traits you'll defend even when it's inconvenient. Write one short paragraph describing the voice in human language. That's the seed of your voice charter.
Define next steps (5 min): Assign an owner to turn notes into a draft doc within 48 hours while the energy is still there. Don't end without naming an owner and a deadline. "Someone should write this up" means no one will.
You walk out with three things: personality traits with agreed definitions, a tone map showing how personality flexes across channels, and DO/DON'T example lines that feel undeniably like you. That's enough to guide real work and train both your team and your AI systems. (Later, you can turn this into machine-readable format for AI voice consistency.)
Need more detail? Read the full Brand Voice Workshop Facilitator's Guide (PDF) for step-by-step scripts, facilitation tactics, and troubleshooting moves.
Brand Voice Workshop Exercises That Work for Small Teams
Start with an adjective card sort. Print out a free set of brand personality cards or grab Brand Deck, a set of cards with trait words like "bold," "playful," "sophisticated," or "irreverent." Have everyone sort the cards into three piles: "You Are" (traits that describe your brand), "You Are Torn" (traits you're debating), and "You Are Not" (traits you actively reject).
The "You Are Not" pile matters just as much as the "You Are" pile. Take Liquid Death. They're not "refreshing" or "pure" or "artisanal." They're ruthless, self-aware, and absurdly metal. The "You Are Not" pile keeps them from sounding polite, corporate, or subtle. Once everyone's sorted individually, compare results and narrow the "You Are" pile down to 3–5 core traits.
Once you've got traits, run a "brand as a person" sketch. Ask: "If our brand walked into a room, how would they introduce themselves? What would they never say?" This unlocks tone. People stop thinking in adjectives and start hearing a voice.
💳 Stripe walks in: "We're Stripe. We build payment infrastructure so you don't have to. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet. Our API documentation is better than most companies' actual products. We'd never say 'innovative payment solutions' or 'seamless fintech experience.' We'd say: it works, it scales, and you can integrate it in an afternoon."
Then translate that into example lines. Take a real sentence from your homepage or a sales email and rewrite it in the new voice. Write a DO version and a DON'T version. These pairs become reference points your team can paste into docs, Slack threads, or content reviews.
❌ DON'T (Liquid Death): "Our premium mountain spring water is sustainably sourced and packaged in eco-friendly aluminum to help you stay hydrated throughout your day."
✅ DO (Liquid Death): "Death to plastic. Our infinitely recyclable cans will absolutely murder your thirst, then twerk on your thirst's grave. Ruthless hydration that donates to kill plastic pollution."
❌ DON'T (Stripe): "Our innovative payment platform leverages cutting-edge technology to deliver seamless, secure transactions that empower businesses to scale globally."
✅ DO (Stripe): "Accept payments online. Our APIs are designed for developers who want full control. Integrate in minutes, scale to millions of customers. Documentation you'll actually want to read."
When disagreement shows up, time-box it. "We have five minutes to hear the strongest arguments, then we pick a direction for now." Progress beats perfection. For strong personalities, use silent voting. Everyone writes down their top three traits, then you compare.
Making It Stick and Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Turn workshop notes into three blocks: personality (3–5 traits with definitions), principles (3–5 voice rules in plain language), and examples (DO/DON'T pairs straight from the session). Keep it to one page in Notion or Google Docs. Something you can screenshot into a Slack thread when someone asks, "Does this sound like us?"
Liquid Death Voice Charter
Personality
- Ruthless: We murder your thirst, not coddle it
- Self-aware: We know we're selling water in a can and we own the absurdity
- Metal: Loud, edgy, and way more fun than we need to be
Principles
- Use health and humor, never wellness language
- Own the violence metaphor completely (murder, death, destruction)
- Cut boring explanations. "But enough about us and our boring story."
Examples
- ✅ DO: "Our ruthless cans will murder your thirst, then twerk on your thirst's grave."
- ❌ DON'T: "Stay refreshed throughout your day with premium hydration."
The first failure mode is trying to do too much. Founders try to solve positioning, naming, visual identity, and voice in one sitting. Scope is your friend. One workshop, one outcome: brand voice. The second is treating it like a lecture. If the founder talks for 45 minutes and everyone nods, you ran a TED talk, not a workshop.
Introduce the charter with a live walkthrough, not a link drop. Walk through it in a team meeting, show before-and-after examples, and bake it into existing rituals.
One founder I worked with made the voice charter the first thing in their content Notion workspace. Every new doc template starts with a link to it. Adoption went from 20% to 80% in two weeks. Another embeds it in their Google Docs meeting agenda template. Every weekly standup starts with the charter at the top. When someone uses the voice well, they open the meeting with public praise and read the example out loud. The team hears what "good" sounds like and who's doing it right.
Use it as a checklist in content reviews. Add it to onboarding. Reference it when rewriting.
Revisit it at major inflection points: new product lines, new markets, big shifts in who you serve. If your team starts ignoring the charter or constantly bending it, that's a signal. Either the voice is wrong, or your behavior is.
Want to go deeper? Download the complete Brand Voice Workshop Facilitator's Guide (PDF) with step-by-step scripts, timing breakdowns, and troubleshooting tactics for every exercise.
I'm also building a tool that helps you run this adjective sorting session digitally for remote and in-person sessions. If you run this workshop and want to systematize your voice without hiring an agency, let's talk. I'm looking for early-stage founders to test it and shape what gets built.