Open any brand’s Instagram captions next to a competitor’s. Swap the logos. See if you can tell them apart without the logo. Most of the time, you can’t, and that’s not a coincidence of bad writing. It’s the predictable output of thousands of brands following the same voice guide template, built on the same handful of slides, written by the same generation of agencies telling clients to “sound more human.”

The result is a kind of uniform. Everyone’s wearing it. Nobody looks like themselves.

The ‘relatable brand voice’ playbook finally broke itself

Around the early 2020s, brand voice guidelines went through a specific shift: be funny, be self-aware, admit your own flaws before the internet does it for you. It worked, for a while, because it was rare. A brand that could roast itself in a reply stood out against a sea of corporate caution.

But the tactic got documented, templated and sold as a formula. Now almost every mid-size brand’s social account runs the same playbook: a slightly self-deprecating bio, a meme format borrowed from three months ago, a reply guy tone in the comments. The strategy that was supposed to differentiate brands from each other has become the thing that makes them indistinguishable. When everyone adopts the same signal for “we’re relatable,” relatable stops meaning anything.

How a tone guide became a costume everyone wears the same way

Most brand voice documents describe adjectives, not arguments. They say “witty,” “bold,” “approachable,” and then hand a content team a list of words to avoid and a list of words to use instead. That’s tone direction. It tells a writer how to phrase something. It says nothing about what the brand actually thinks.

Without an underlying point of view, a tone guide is just a costume. Anyone can put it on, which is exactly the problem: a competitor can read the same three adjectives off a different brand’s guide and produce content that’s functionally identical. The guide was supposed to protect distinctiveness. Instead, it standardised the performance of distinctiveness.

What Gen Z is actually reacting to: sameness, not seriousness

A lot of marketers read Gen Z’s eye-rolling at “relatable” brand content as a rejection of humour or informality. That’s a misdiagnosis. The reaction is to repetition, not register. When a thousand brands make the same joke format in the same week, the joke stops being evidence of personality and starts reading as evidence of a template. Gen Z audiences are unusually fast at spotting a format once it’s been used enough times to become recognisable as a format, and once they spot it, the brand underneath it becomes invisible.

That’s the core of why do brands all sound the same: not because they’re all trying to be funny, but because they’re all copying the same visible signals of personality instead of developing their own reasoning.

Brand voice versus point of view, and why the difference matters more than tone

Voice is how something is said. Point of view is what a brand actually believes about its category, its customer or the problem it exists to solve. A tone guide can tell a writer to use short sentences and avoid jargon. It can’t tell them what the brand thinks is wrong with the industry, what it refuses to do that competitors do, or what it would say if nobody was watching the engagement numbers.

Two brands can share an almost identical tone (short, funny, a little blunt) and still sound completely different if one has a real opinion and the other doesn’t. The opinion is what makes the tone load-bearing. Without it, tone is decoration on an empty argument, which is one reason so much AI-assisted brand content reads flat even when the sentences are technically fine.

A four-question test to run before you publish anything in ‘brand voice’

Before a piece goes out under a brand’s name, it’s worth running it through four questions:

• Does this say something our competitor would disagree with, or could they publish the exact same line?
• Is there an argument here, or just an adjective (funny, bold, warm) dressed up as content?
• If we removed the logo, would a reader know which brand said this?
• Are we reacting to a trend, or using the trend to say something we actually believe?

A tone guide can’t answer these. A point of view can.

Three brands that replaced personality with perspective, and what changed

The brands that read as distinctive right now generally aren’t the loudest or the quirkiest. They’re the ones whose content keeps returning to a specific, repeatable belief, something you could paraphrase even without seeing their logo: a stance on how their product should be used, who it’s for, or what the rest of the category gets wrong. That consistency of argument, not consistency of jokes, is what reads as a voice over time.

Before the next content calendar meeting, pull up your brand’s existing tone guide and run it through the four questions above. Count how much of it describes personality and how much of it describes an actual position. If the answer is mostly the former, that’s the gap worth closing, and it’s worth reading why AI written content fails for a closer look at what happens when tone has nothing underneath it.