The Drop | Your Brand Voice Isn't a Style Choice.
It's an Excavation.
TL;DR: Most brand voice advice gives you a list of adjectives. That’s not your brand voice — that’s a costume. Your real voice was already there before any strategy document. The work is excavation, not construction.
Every brand voice exercise ends the same way.
You sit down with a worksheet, a coach, or a ChatGPT prompt. You answer questions about your audience, your tone, your values. You come up with five adjectives. Warm. Direct. Strategic. Approachable. Authentic.
You put them in a document. You tell your AI tools to “write in this voice.”
And the content comes out technically correct — and completely lifeless.
Here’s what nobody says out loud: those adjectives aren’t your brand voice. They’re a description of the brand voice you wish you had.
The problem with constructing a voice
Most brand voice frameworks treat voice like something you design. You research, you decide, you document, you implement.
It makes sense on paper. It rarely works in practice.
Because the creators whose content actually stops the scroll — the ones who sound like nobody else, the ones readers would recognize in three sentences without a name attached — they didn’t construct their voice. They excavated it.
They went inward, not outward.
They looked at what they were already carrying, not what their audience wanted to hear.
Pomalo. Not as a content strategy. As an orientation.
What I found when I stopped constructing
This year I did something that had nothing to do with content strategy.
I looked at my DNA results. I sat with my birth chart. I thought about the village where my father was born — a place between the Adriatic sea and the Velebit mountain you can only find if you already know it exists.
And I found my brand voice there.
Not in an audience research document. Not in a competitor analysis. In the things I had been carrying so long I forgot they were mine.
The Balkan directness that doesn’t soften hard truths but somehow makes them easier to hold. The Adriatic patience that knows some things only come when they’re ready. The ancestral stubbornness that refuses to call good work small — no matter who says piccole.
None of that is on a brand voice worksheet.
All of it is in every piece of content I write.
Constructed vs. excavated — how to tell the difference
Constructed brand voice sounds like:
Adjectives that could describe a hundred other creators in your niche
Content that’s technically on-brand but doesn’t feel like you wrote it
A voice that works in some formats but disappears in others
Writing that requires constant effort to maintain
Excavated brand voice sounds like:
Something people would recognize as yours before they see your name
Content that costs you less effort, not more — because it comes from somewhere real
A voice that gets stronger under pressure, not weaker
The thing people mention when they say “I don’t know what it is, but I love how you write”
The difference isn’t talent. It’s depth of source material.
Where to start digging
You don’t need a DNA test. You don’t need a birth chart.
You need three questions and enough honesty to answer them properly:
1. What do you carry that you didn’t choose?
Heritage, upbringing, culture, language, the way your family dealt with hard things. The humor that was in the room before you understood why. The phrases that cut straight to the bone in three words.
2. How do you actually work — not how you think you should?
Are you a planner or a recognizer? Do you think linearly or in flashes? Do you write early or late? Do your best ideas come from systems or from stillness?
3. What would you never say — and why?
Your brand voice is partly defined by what it refuses to be. The corporate softness you won’t perform. The urgency language that makes you cringe. The personas you’ve tried on and shed.
The answers to these questions are your real brand voice document.
Everything else is formatting.
The gap worth closing
Here’s what I’ve noticed working with creators on brand voice:
The problem is rarely that they don’t have a voice. It’s that there’s a gap between the voice that’s already there and the voice that’s showing up in their content.
Sometimes that gap is small — a few adjustments and it closes fast.
Sometimes it’s structural — the content is built on a persona that was never really theirs.
Either way, the work starts with knowing where you actually stand.
That’s what the AI Voice Gap Diagnostic was built for — to show you exactly where your current content diverges from your real voice, before you spend another month producing content that almost sounds like you.
Start there. Then we dig.
Anita 🧡
If this landed — I’d love to know what you found when you dug. Reply or drop it in the comments. The real answers are always the most interesting ones.