Tone of voice examples from four brands, plus a guidelines template you can copy

TL;DR

• Voice is who you are and stays the same everywhere. Tone is how that voice adjusts to the reader's mood and the situation.
• Nielsen Norman Group's four dimensions give you a simple way to describe any tone: formal or casual, serious or funny, respectful or irreverent, matter-of-fact or enthusiastic.
• The best public examples, Mailchimp, Monzo, and GOV.UK, all describe their voice with a few traits and then show those traits in real sentences.
• A usable brand voice guide fits on two pages: three or four traits, a tone-by-situation table, words you use and avoid, and before-and-after rewrites.
• If AI writes for you, the rewrites are the most valuable part. Examples steer a model's tone far better than a list of adjectives.

Ask a founder to describe their brand voice and you'll hear "friendly, professional, and approachable". Ask a second founder in a completely different market and you'll hear the same three words. Adjectives like these describe nearly every company, which is why they help nobody write anything.

The fix is to look at how brands with a distinct voice wrote theirs down, then copy the structure. Below are tone of voice examples from four brands, a template for your own guidelines, and how to get an AI writer to stick to them.

What is the difference between voice and tone?

Your voice is your personality on the page. It doesn't change between a blog post, a support email, and a pricing page. Tone is the way that personality adjusts to the moment, the same way you speak differently to a friend at dinner and to your bank manager.

Mailchimp's content style guide explains it with exactly that dinner-and-meeting comparison, and adds a point worth stealing: your tone should also shift with the emotional state of the reader. Someone celebrating a launch and someone who's just been double-charged need different tones from the same brand.

Keeping the two apart saves a lot of arguments. When a support email feels wrong, you can ask whether the voice slipped or whether the tone missed the reader's mood. Those have different fixes.

The four dimensions of tone

Lists of tone words run to hundreds of entries, and few of them help a business. Nielsen Norman Group cut the problem down to four spectrums, each with two ends:

• Formal or casual. Contractions, everyday words, and short sentences pull you toward casual.
• Serious or funny. Whether you attempt humour at all, regardless of whether it lands.
• Respectful or irreverent. How you treat the subject, which is different from how you treat the reader.
• Matter-of-fact or enthusiastic. How much emotion you put into the message.

Their research found that people do notice shifts along these dimensions, though the effects in realistic copy are modest. They also suggest picking a handful of specific tone words and some "anti-tone" words, the qualities you want to avoid. Their example is a university that wants to sound authoritative without sounding pedantic.

Here's one message, a late delivery, written four ways so you can see the dimensions move.

• Formal, serious, matter-of-fact: "Your order has been delayed. We expect it to arrive on Thursday."
• Casual, serious: "Your order's running late. It should be with you on Thursday, and we're sorry for the wait."
• Casual, enthusiastic: "Bad news first: your order's running late. Good news: it's on a van and lands Thursday."
• Casual, funny, slightly irreverent: "Your parcel took the scenic route. It's back on track and due Thursday."

None of these is wrong. The right one depends on your brand and on how annoyed the customer already is. The last version reads fine for a £12 candle and terribly for a wedding dress.

Tone of voice examples from four brands

Each of the brands below handle humour, warmth, and authority differently, which is why they're worth comparing.

Mailchimp: plainspoken with dry humour

Mailchimp describes itself as the experienced business partner its customers wish they'd had, and backs that with four traits: plainspoken, warm and relatable, a translator of jargon, and dry humour. The useful bit is the priority order. Their guide states that being clear always comes before being entertaining, and if you're unsure whether a joke works, you keep a straight face.

The style tips underneath are blunt: active voice, plain English, positive language. Short rules like these are easy for a new writer, or a model, to follow.

Monzo: three principles with clear boundaries

The Monzo tone of voice guide is built on three principles: straightforward kindness, everyday magic, and warm wit. What makes it strong is that each principle says where it applies. Straightforward kindness covers everything Monzo writes. Everyday magic belongs mainly to brand and marketing writing. Warm wit lives almost entirely in marketing, with the odd surprise in the app.

That scoping solves the classic problem of a jokey brand making jokes in a fraud alert. Monzo also gives a test anyone can run, reading your copy out loud to check it sounds like something you'd say face to face, and it treats humour as a seasoning to use sparingly.

GOV.UK: plain English as the whole voice

Government writing has a reputation for being dense, which is what makes GOV.UK's approach useful. Its A to Z style guide says all content on GOV.UK should be written in plain English, and the rest of the guide is a long list of specific word and formatting decisions.

The lesson for a small business: a voice can be almost entirely made of clarity rules, and still be recognisable. If you're in a serious category like finance, health, or legal, start here before you start on personality.

Contengi: our own guidelines

We'll show ours too, since it's the one we know best. Our voice is confident without being loud, and we describe it as a highly competent friend who's cracked the thing you're stuck on and will tell you straight, probably with a dry comment or two.

The rules underneath do most of the work. We write in British English and sentence case, use spaced hyphens instead of em dashes, keep paragraphs to two to four sentences, and keep a banned list of the words that turn up in every machine-written LinkedIn post. We also keep humour subtle and earned, and never let it cost us authority.

A brand voice guidelines template

Your guide should fit on two pages. Longer guides don't get read, by people or by AI tools with a crowded prompt. Use these sections.

1. Who you're talking to. One paragraph on your reader: what they know, what they're worried about, and how much time they have.

2. Three or four voice traits. For each, write one line on what it means and one line on where it stops. "Direct: we say what we think in the first sentence. We don't pad with throat-clearing intros."

3. Where you sit on the four dimensions. Mark each spectrum, then add your tone words and anti-tone words. For example: "Casual, mostly serious, respectful, matter-of-fact. Tone words: dry, plain, warm. Anti-tone words: hype, smug, corporate."

4. Tone by situation. A small table with rows for the moments you write in most, like social posts, blog posts, onboarding emails, bad news, and complaints. Say how much humour and enthusiasm each one gets.

5. Words you use and words you avoid. Your product terms, how you refer to customers, and a banned list. Be specific. "Avoid jargon" gets ignored, while "say 'use', never 'utilise'" gets followed.

6. Mechanics. Spelling standard, heading case, numbers, Oxford comma, and punctuation habits.

7. Before-and-after rewrites. Five or six real sentences from your own content, each rewritten in your voice with a note on what changed. This is the section new writers learn the most from.

If you want a deeper walkthrough of keeping a voice consistent once it's written down, our guide to maintaining brand voice with AI covers the day-to-day side.

How to make AI write in your tone of voice

Pasting "be friendly and professional" into ChatGPT or Claude gets you the same output everyone else gets. Models respond much better to examples than to adjectives. Anthropic's own prompting guidance calls examples one of the most reliable ways to steer Claude's tone and structure, and recommends wrapping them in example tags so the model can tell them apart from instructions.

So give the model your before-and-after rewrites and three or four pieces of your best published writing. Then add your banned words as a hard list, because models drift back to stock phrases under pressure.

Keep all of this in one place the model reads every time, rather than re-pasting it into each chat. Our guide to setting up a brand knowledge base for AI covers how to structure it. Then check outputs against your banned list before anything goes out, which is the cheapest defence against AI slop you'll find.

How to tell if your tone of voice is working

Read it out loud. If a sentence sounds like nothing you'd say to a customer's face, rewrite it. This catches more problems than any checklist.

Then ask readers. Nielsen Norman Group suggests showing people your content and asking them to pick words that describe it, or rate it on a scale between two ends of a dimension, like funny and serious. If you were aiming for funny and respectful and readers keep choosing "snarky", you've drifted toward irreverent.

Finally, look at your last ten published pieces side by side. If they read like they came from different companies, your guidelines are too vague or nobody's using them.

Frequently asked questions

What are examples of tone of voice?

Formal, casual, serious, funny, respectful, irreverent, matter-of-fact, and enthusiastic are the eight ends of Nielsen Norman Group's four dimensions. Brands combine them, for example Mailchimp's plainspoken, dry humour or Monzo's straightforward kindness and warm wit.

What are five examples of tone words?

Dry, warm, plain, playful, and authoritative are five useful ones for a business. Pair them with anti-tone words, like smug or pedantic, so writers know where the line sits.

How do I determine my brand voice?

Start with your reader and the three or four traits you want them to notice. Then rewrite five real sentences from your site in that voice. If the rewrites feel like you, write the traits down. If they don't, adjust the traits.

How long should brand voice guidelines be?

Two pages is plenty for a small business. Shorter guides get used, and they fit into an AI prompt or knowledge base without crowding out the task.

Can tone change while voice stays the same?

Yes, and it should. Your voice stays fixed across channels, while your tone shifts with the situation and the reader's mood, from playful on social media to plain and careful in a complaint reply.