Authentic Brand Voice? Everyone sounds the same now.

I've been reading websites all week. Client work, mostly. And what strikes me, what I keep noticing as I sit here with my coffee going lukewarm (I dislike that), is how identical they all sound (I dislike this, too).

"We're passionate about helping companies transform their operations." "Our mission is to empower teams to unlock their full potential."

I wonder:: but do you mean it? Did someone actually sit down and think "yes, this is what we want to say"? Or did they merely reach for the words that sounded like what a company should say?

I don't doubt the passion existed once. Someone started this company because they noticed something, cared about something. But somewhere between the caring and the website, the language got, hmm, - processed, flattened. All the sharp edges removed until what remains could mean anything at all. (Yet another bullet point on my dislike list) It bothers me more than it should, perhaps.

I started keeping a list yesterday. Just words that kept appearing: Passionate Mission Believe Transform Empower Innovative I'm up to twelve websites and every single one uses at least three of these words. It's like there's some handbook no one told me about. "The Approved Vocabulary for Business Writing, 2025 Edition."

Though of course there's no handbook. It just happened somehow, I suppose. One company said they were passionate and it worked, or seemed to work, so another company said it. And another. Until now we're all saying it and I'm not sure any of us mean anything by it anymore.

The passionate team. Always there on the About page. Always diverse in the photograph (I noticed this morning they're usually standing in a bright, naturally-lit office, or sometimes outside, laughing). Always collaborative in the description. Always driven by a shared mission. This mission always involves transforming something. Or empowering someone. Or both.

This morning I opened five company websites. Just to test my theory. Three of them (and I mean this literally) failed to tell me what they actually did. I sat there clicking through homepages trying to understand: what does this company make? Software, presumably. But software for what? One mentioned "solutions." Another talked about "platforms." A third used "ecosystem" three times in two paragraphs. I had to scroll. Click through to features pages. Read several paragraphs of this language that kept gesturing at meaning without quite arriving there. And finally I'd understand: oh, project management software. Oh, a scheduling tool. Oh, this one is... I'm still not entirely sure what that one does, actually. The language had worked so hard to sound inspiring that it forgot to be clear.

Authentic brand voice as performance

Everyone wants authentic voice now. Every conversation I have with clients, every agency pitch deck I review. It's all about authenticity. Being genuine. Finding your unique voice. And so companies try very hard to sound authentic. They use casual language (lots of "we're" and "let's"). They tell founding stories. They share their values. They perform authenticity with such consistency that I've started to wonder if the performance itself has become the template.

I mean: "authentic" has become its own kind of corporate speak, hasn't it? A style to adopt rather than a quality that emerges from actually saying what you mean. Last week I spoke with a founder who'd just received copy from an agency. "They've made us sound professional," she said. But there was something in her voice. Was it uncertainty? Maybe disappointment.

I asked to see it.

Professional turned out to mean: stripped of anything specific. Anything opinionated. Anything that might reveal how this particular founder thinks about this particular problem she'd spent three years trying to solve. The agency had done exactly what she hired them to do. They'd made the company sound like a company. Which is to say: they'd made it sound like every other company. I didn't know how to tell her this without sounding unkind. So I asked instead: "Is this what you wanted to say?"

Long pause. "I'm not sure anymore."

What disappears

It's not just distinctiveness that gets lost, though that certainly disappears. What bothers me more is the clarity. When everyone uses the same language, the language stops referring to anything real. "Passionate about helping companies" could mean you make software or sell consulting or deliver office supplies. "Empower teams to unlock potential" could describe a project management tool or a meditation app or a corporate training programme.

Is it that the vagueness feels safer? Specificity requires commitment - saying what you actually do, what you actually think, what you've actually noticed that others might not have. It means the possibility of being wrong. Or unpopular. Or different in a way that makes some people uncomfortable. The template protects against this. If you sound like everyone else, you can't be blamed for sounding wrong. You've followed best practices. Said what companies are supposed to say. But (and I keep coming back to this) no one remembers it. No one quotes it. No one reads your About page and thinks "ah, this is different, this is them."

What actually works

There are companies whose writing sounds different. Not many, but they exist. I've been trying to work out what they're doing. And what I notice is: they're not trying to sound different. They're trying to be clear about what they actually think. They use specific language because they're describing specific things. They have opinions because they've noticed something others haven't. They sound like themselves because they haven't outsourced their thinking to a template.

Voice isn't something you develop through brand guidelines, I don't think. Not the ones that specify three adjectives and a tone ("friendly but professional, warm but authoritative" - I saw this exact phrasing twice this week). Voice is what emerges when you pay attention to what you're actually trying to say, and then say it as clearly as you can. This requires forgetting about voice entirely, paradoxically. Forgetting about sounding authentic or passionate or innovative. Attending instead to the thing itself - what you do, why it matters, what you've noticed about the problem that others haven't.The voice follows from that. You can't manufacture it in advance.

The cost

Invisibility.

When you sound exactly like your competitors, potential clients can't tell you apart. They choose based on price, or features, or some other metric. Your words built upon authentic brand guide voice give them nothing to distinguish you by. And more than that, sameness suggests sameness of thinking, doesn't it? If you can't describe your work in language that's distinctly yours, why should anyone believe you approach the work itself any differently? Your writing is evidence of how you think. When it sounds like a template, it suggests template thinking.

It's late afternoon now. The light's changed. I should stop and make dinner. But I keep thinking about that founder. "I'm not sure anymore what I wanted to say."

It's become so normal we've stopped noticing. But clients notice. Or rather, they don't notice you. Which is worse. The question isn't whether you want to sound different. The question is whether you have anything different to say.

If you do - if you've noticed something about your work, your industry, your clients that others haven't - then the writing part is simpler than it sounds. You just have to say what you actually mean. That's the hard part, I suppose. Knowing what you mean. If you need help working that out, I work with companies on exactly this. Not voice guidelines or brand adjectives, but the harder work of discovering what you actually want to say. Get in touch if that sounds like what you need.