Brand Voice
Guardian.

Brand voice is hard to transfer

At most companies, brand voice lives in one or two people's heads. You can write guidelines, run workshops, add a style guide to the drive. But when someone new joins, or a freelancer needs to write three emails by Thursday, or the team scales faster than onboarding can keep up, the voice drifts. Gradually at first, then noticeably.

The review process that catches this drift is expensive. It requires the one person who truly understands the brand to read everything before it goes out. That person becomes a bottleneck. The feedback they give is often subjective, hard to act on quickly, and inconsistent across channels.

Why DISCO was the right starting point

In my time at DISCO, a music management platform built for music industry professionals, I led a full rebrand -- which meant doing the hard, unglamorous work first: getting leadership aligned on a new direction, workshopping what the brand actually stood for, and translating that into documented guidelines the whole team could use.

That process produced something most companies don't have: a real foundation. Seven distinct voice pillars, a banned phrases list, channel-specific rules, approved copy examples. The kind of specificity that only comes from putting the work in front of decision-makers and forcing the conversation.

The AI tool only exists because that foundation exists. You cannot automate a brand voice that was never defined. The rebrand was not a prerequisite I got lucky to have -- it was the point. Building the guidelines is the work. The tool just makes them accessible at scale.

Encoding the brand, not just describing it

The core challenge was not technical. It was editorial. How do you translate nuanced, qualitative brand guidance into something an AI can evaluate consistently? The answer is: carefully, and with a lot of rewriting.

DISCO's existing guidelines were comprehensive but written for humans. Phrases like "sound like an insider without being exclusive" make intuitive sense to an experienced marketer and are opaque to a language model. The first phase of this project was essentially translating the brand documentation into precise, evaluable criteria.

Each voice pillar was broken into observable behaviors. "Human Always" became a set of signals: contractions, first-person perspective, absence of corporate jargon, reference to real human experience. "Culturally Aware" became a check for authentic music industry fluency versus surface-level name-dropping. The banned phrases list was incorporated directly.

What the tool actually does

Sales, support, leadership, editorial, social, freelancers, product, customer success -- anyone at DISCO who writes externally can use this. That's the point. Brand voice alignment on a fully remote, global team doesn't happen by osmosis. It has to be built into the tools.

A marketer pastes copy into the tool and selects the channel: email, social, web, paid ads, or sales outreach. The tool evaluates it against DISCO's voice guidelines and returns a score across four criteria, specific observations with quoted examples from the submitted copy, and a suggested rewrite. A shared reference point, available to every function, across every time zone.