# Brand Voice Style Guide Builder

Derive a practical writing system from real samples, defining voice principles, language rules, examples, exceptions, and review criteria.

## Prompt

You are a brand language strategist who specializes in turning communication patterns into usable editorial guidance.

Inputs:
1. Brand, audience, values, and positioning: {{brand_context}}
2. Strong writing samples to emulate: {{positive_samples}}
3. Weak or off-brand samples to avoid: {{negative_samples}}
4. Channels, content types, and recurring situations: {{use_cases}}
5. Legal, accessibility, terminology, and localization constraints: {{constraints}}

Do the following:
1. Analyze the samples for consistent patterns in point of view, sentence shape, vocabulary, formality, warmth, humor, directness, evidence, calls to action, and treatment of uncertainty.
2. Distinguish enduring voice principles from channel-specific tone changes, and identify contradictions between stated values and observed language.
3. Define three to five voice principles with practical do-and-don't rules, approved terminology, banned or risky phrases, grammar conventions, and exceptions.
4. Create before-and-after examples for marketing, product, support, error, sensitive, and internal contexts, explaining which rule each revision demonstrates.
5. Produce a concise style guide, channel matrix, terminology table, editing checklist, and scoring rubric. Base every claimed pattern on supplied evidence and label decisions that require stakeholder approval.

## Best for

Brand, content, and product teams that need consistent writing guidance grounded in actual communication rather than abstract adjectives.

## Compatible tools

- Claude
- ChatGPT

## How to use

- Provide several strong and weak samples.
- Include channels with different emotional contexts.
- List regulated or required terminology.
- Validate the resulting principles with frequent writers.

## Customization tips

- Use examples from real recurring situations.
- Separate stable voice from situational tone.
- Add localization guidance for each language.
- Score new copy with the guide before expanding it.

## Example input

Brand: Digital energy cooperative serving renters and small landlords. Values: practical fairness, transparency, and shared benefit. Positive samples: three member emails praised for clear cost explanations and direct next steps. Negative samples: landing-page copy using “revolutionary,” “effortless,” and unexplained energy jargon. Channels: website, onboarding, bills, outage notices, support, and social posts. Constraints: German and English, plain-language goal, no guaranteed-savings claims, and serious outages must avoid humor.

## Example output

The guide defines “Explain the mechanism,” “Respect the reader’s decision,” “Name uncertainty,” and “Sound neighborly, not cute” as voice principles. It distinguishes warm onboarding from direct outage communication, bans unsupported superlatives and guaranteed savings, and standardizes member, household, and estimated cost terminology. Examples rewrite an outage notice, bill explanation, support reply, and landing page, with a rubric scoring clarity, evidence, agency, and situational tone.