Four Ways to Craft a Better Brand Voice in the Age of AI
Here’s a practical guide to defining, protecting, and scaling your brand voice alongside AI.
Good writing isn’t just about putting words on a page — it’s about making ideas feel alive, human, and impossible to ignore.
Wait, PAUSE! Did you feel that? Did you hear the gears and levers cranking in that sentence? Yes, that opening line was written by AI. If you caught it, congrats; your robot detector is more advanced than most.
AI sentences like that opening line are everywhere these days: on billboards, in commercials, radio ads, love letters, even eulogies. But don’t worry, this isn’t another one of those “Is it AI?” pop quizzes. And it’s not another save-the-copywriters, anti-AI manifesto. Although if you do see a copywriter out there in the wild, please buy him/her a coffee. They’re tired of defending the em dash — and they love coffee!
But seriously, we’re not here to bash artificial intelligence. Sure, sometimes it can be churn out some silly content (see: images of people with six fingers or backward knees, or meaningless clichés in writing), but for the most part it’s an extremely useful tool that has completely revolutionized what we can do and how quickly we can do it. The problem is: When every brand starts using the same tools, things can start to sound the same. If you look at modern media closely, you might notice similar sentence structures to that opening line (AI loves the “It’s not this — it’s that” sentence structure). And you might notice similar turns of phrases, or similar (often neutral) tones of voice.
As a leading creative marketing agency, we fully embrace the power of AI. But, as a superhero’s wise uncle once said, with great power comes great responsibility. That’s why we always want to make sure your brand doesn’t end up sounding like every other brand using the same tools. Because when everything sounds like everything else, nothing stands out.
So here are four ways to craft a stronger, more memorable brand voice in the age of AI.
1. Define a Distinct Voice for Your Brand, Before Using AI
AI can help you write and it can help you decide what information to convey, but it can’t tell you who you are — it can’t define your brand. That’s on you.
Your brand’s message is what you say. Your brand’s voice is how you say it. And that how is where recognition, personality, and connection come through.
These days, brands often skip the groundwork. They don’t define their tone, personality, word choices, rhythm, or even their humor. Unfortunately, this has resulted in world full of bland content that looks fine on paper but conveys little to the audience.
Deciding whether your voice will be warm, whimsical, sarcastic, optimistic, or any combination of attributes is an important first step in creating a recognizable, memorable brand. Whenever we are building brands from the ground up, revamping existing brands, or helping develop brand guidelines, we always make this a cornerstone of our process. This helps us and marketing teams align to an established standard, and it helps us tailor AI generated content toward the brand’s voice.
If you don’t decide who your brand is, AI might take liberties. And AI hasn’t figured out the whole personality thing, because, well … it’s not a person.
2. Use AI for Thinking, Not Writing
AI is very good — almost magical — when it comes to certain tasks. It can summarize a 70-page document in a matter of seconds. It can generate multiple variations of sentences or paragraphs. It can reorganize meeting notes into something coherent. Long story short, it can help you explore, analyze, iterate, and more. But it shouldn’t be responsible for the emotional core of your brand.
When brands depend entirely on AI for their headlines, taglines, and storytelling, they often lose the human emotion behind the message. They end up with content that communicates but doesn’t connect.
In short: Let AI help provide and organize the raw materials. And let humans build the structure. Which brings us to the next point …
3. Add the Human Touch: the Emotional, Weird, and Specific Stuff AI Can’t Replicate
AI can create technically and grammatically sound writing. But humans — and human weirdness, for lack of a better term — are the ones who make writing interesting. Just like people, brands that stand out have their own quirks. The rhythm. The pacing. The word choice. The humor that feels like a real person behind the brand.
To be recognizable, to be memorable to your audience, your brand needs a voice that feels relatable, like a friend, or a character in a movie or a novel. One of Ernest Hemingway’s best pieces of writing advice was: Write dialogue so that each character is easily recognizable. According to Hemingway, quotes shouldn’t need attributions. Instead, each character should have their own unique way of speaking so that they are immediately distinguishable on the page without the need for “Sally said” or “Bob said” at the end of every quote.
Although they’re sometimes hard to pinpoint, human speech has intangible attributes that identify the speaker. The closer your brand can get to having its own personable quirks, the more relatable and recognizable it will sound. Like characters in a Hemingway novel, you should strive to make your brand’s content recognizable even if the viewer can’t see your logo. Of course, this is a virtually unreachable goal, and it requires interplay between design, imagery, and copy, but if you treat that objective as your north star, you can get pretty close.
Human texture makes writing memorable and turns content into connection. Add human texture, whenever possible.
4. Let Humans Lead and AI Assist
In the age of AI, the brands that win are the ones that know how to use AI the best — without sacrificing their unique voice.
That means:
- Humans set the voice
- Humans guide the ideas
- Humans edit the output
- Humans bring what AI can’t: intuition, emotion, and sometimes just straight-up weirdness.
Of course, even the sharpest marketing teams can use a partner who knows how to protect, shape, and scale a brand voice. At Adcetera, we have over 40 years of experience helping brands to define (or rediscover) their voice, build messaging systems, craft human-centered creative, and — more recently — use AI strategically.
A major part of our approach is our One Voice Program (OVP): a strategic methodology designed to align what your brand looks like, sounds like, and feels like. In a world where AI can create infinite variations of everything, OVP ensures your brand is always guided by a north star.
Ready to Find Your Voice — and Keep It?
When AI can generate endless content in seconds, a clear, human brand voice is what creates recognition, trust, and connection. The brands that stand out aren’t louder — they’re more intentional about how they show up and how they sound.
At Adcetera, we help brands define, protect, and scale their voice through thoughtful strategy, human-centered creative, and responsible use of AI. If you’re ready to stop blending in and start sounding unmistakably like yourself, let’s talk.