Bland by design: Why your verbal identity never stood a chance

It’s a familiar scene: months spent perfecting logos, agonising over colour palettes, and refining visual elements down to the pixel—only for your brand to open its mouth and sound exactly like everyone else. Common verbal identity mistakes plague even sophisticated marketing teams, leaving your words and language generic and forgettable despite your best intentions.

This isn’t an accident or simple oversight—many verbal identities are bland by design, doomed from inception by fundamental flaws in how they’re created.

While visual identities often receive lavish attention, brand language frequently becomes an afterthought, resulting in copy that lacks personality and fails to differentiate.

The Harvard Business Review highlights the crucial role a strong brand voice plays in reinforcing a great brand.

Let’s explore why so many brands end up sounding the same, and how you can avoid joining their ranks.

Why so many verbal identities fall flat

Before diving into solutions, we need to understand the root causes.

Most forgettable brand voices don’t simply happen—they’re the product of specific oversights and misconceptions about what verbal identity really is.

It was never strategic to begin with

Most brand language problems begin at the foundation. Rather than approaching verbal identity as a strategic asset, many organisations treat it as window dressing—an exercise in finding cleverer ways to say the same things everyone else is saying.

True verbal identity isn’t about stylistic flourishes or witty headlines. It’s about articulating your brand’s unique perspective, values, and positioning through language.

When verbal identity development starts with “How should we sound?” rather than “What do we uniquely stand for?”, you’ve already laid the groundwork for mediocrity.

At Fabrik, we often see brands skipping the crucial strategic groundwork. They jump straight to tone workshops without first establishing the core messages that differentiate them.

The inevitable result? A verbal identity that might sound pleasant but says nothing compelling.

Mistaking tone of voice for verbal identity

Perhaps the most common of all brand messaging pitfalls is conflating tone of voice with a complete verbal identity. Your tone—whether warm, authoritative, playful or direct—is just one component of how your brand communicates.

A robust verbal identity encompasses far more:

• Core messaging pillars and propositions.
• Brand narrative and storytelling frameworks.
• Distinctive vocabulary and language principles.
• Messaging hierarchies and priorities.
• Communication guardrails (what you won’t say).

Imagine trying to build a compelling character in a novel using nothing but adjectives to describe their speaking style.

Without beliefs, history, motivations and distinctive phrases, they’d remain flat and unmemorable—exactly like brands with tone guidelines but no deeper verbal strategy.

Over-reliance on generic tropes

Look at most brand guidelines and you’ll find the same handful of tone descriptors: friendly but professional, approachable yet authoritative, innovative but trustworthy. These contradictory pairings rarely translate into distinctive communication.

Instead, they lead to brand language problems that manifest as:

• Buzzword dependency (disruption, innovation, empowerment).
• Risk-averse language diluted by committee.
• Empty claims indistinguishable from competitors.
• Artificial constraints masquerading as “professionalism”.

This verbal safety net might avoid offending anyone, but it also prevents your brand from saying anything memorable or meaningful.

Brand voices become interchangeable, and audiences struggle to connect with what feels like corporate ventriloquism rather than authentic communication.

What causes a weak brand voice?

Understanding the organisational and cultural factors behind tone of voice mistakes can help you avoid them. These issues often run deeper than simple writing problems.

Lack of ownership

When everyone nominally “owns” the brand voice, nobody truly does.

Without senior-level championing and clear accountability, verbal identity often becomes:

• A marketing-only initiative without cross-functional buy-in.
• A one-time project rather than an ongoing discipline.
• Subordinate to visual identity considerations.
• Disconnected from customer experience design.

Verbal identity requires dedicated ownership—not necessarily by writers alone, but by brand guardians who understand its strategic value.

Without this, guidelines collect digital dust while communications default to the path of least resistance.

No connection to brand strategy

Language that doesn’t flow from your core strategy will inevitably sound generic. Many organisations develop their verbal identity in isolation from—or even in contradiction to—their positioning and values.

Effective brand language is the natural expression of your strategy, not a creative exercise layered on afterwards.

When verbal and strategic disconnects occur, audiences sense the inauthenticity immediately. Your messages lack conviction because they’re not anchored in genuine brand truths.

This misalignment creates inconsistent tone of voice across touchpoints.

Product marketing sounds different from corporate communications, which differs from social media—not through intentional tone flexing, but through strategic confusion about who you really are.

Poor implementation

Even brilliantly crafted verbal identity guidelines fail when they’re:

• Inaccessible to the people who need them.
• Too conceptual or abstract to apply practically.
• Insufficiently supported with examples and tools.
• Not integrated into creation workflows and templates.

Too often, implementation becomes an afterthought. Guidelines are shared in a single presentation, then expected to magically transform all brand communications without training, reinforcement or practical application tools.

The result is a forgettable brand voice that employees might theoretically know about but struggle to consistently embody in their daily communications.

How to stop sounding like everyone else

Creating distinctive brand language doesn’t require linguistic gymnastics or radical originality. It demands strategic clarity, courage and consistency.

Start with strategy, not style

Reframe verbal identity as a strategic imperative rather than a creative nicety.

This means:

• Deriving key messages from your positioning and value proposition.
• Identifying the specific beliefs and perspectives that set you apart.
• Establishing messaging priorities that reflect business objectives.
• Articulating what you stand against, not just what you stand for.

By starting with strategic foundations, you avoid superficial verbal treatments that only affect how you say things, not what you’re actually saying. The most persuasive brands don’t just sound different—they say different things altogether.

When verbal identity flows from strategic differentiation, it becomes much harder to produce bland, generic communications. Your messages have inherent distinctiveness because they express a unique market position, not just a stylistic preference.

Define what makes you different

Generic brand voices emerge when organisations fear distinctiveness.

Creating language that resonates requires making choices about:

• The specific audience segments you prioritise (and those you don’t).
• The conversations you want to own versus those you’ll leave to others.
• The vocabulary that reflects your specific expertise and perspective.
• The conventions of your category that you’re willing to challenge.

This approach moves beyond vague tone directives to establish genuine verbal differentiation. Rather than saying “we’re conversational,” articulate the specific conversational territory only your brand can credibly occupy.

Consider asking tougher questions: What perspectives do we have that our competitors don’t? What language would we never use, even if it’s standard in our industry? What do we believe that some of our audience might disagree with?

Create usable, inspiring guidelines

The best verbal identity isn’t just compelling—it’s implementable.

To avoid brand communication strategy gathering dust, create guidelines that:

• Include abundant examples showing principles in action.
• Provide side-by-side comparisons of “before and after” applications.
• Offer modular components that work across different formats and contexts.
• Demonstrate tone flexibility across various scenarios and audiences.
• Include templates, frameworks and practical tools for everyday use.

The more actionable your guidelines, the more consistently they’ll be applied. This means acknowledging the realities your teams face when creating communications, from tight deadlines to compliance requirements.

A particularly effective approach is creating a “verbal identity toolkit” rather than just a traditional guideline document.

This might include customisable headline frameworks, message templates for common scenarios, and even AI-assisted writing tools that embody your brand principles.

By transforming abstract guidelines into practical writing aids, you dramatically increase adoption across your organisation.

Additionally, consider creating a simple verbal checklist that busy creators can reference when reviewing content. Rather than expecting perfect recall of comprehensive guidelines, give them practical tools that make strong brand language the path of least resistance.

For example, a one-page “scorecard” that asks key questions about strategic alignment, distinctiveness, and authenticity can be far more effective than extensive documentation that goes unread.

Final word: Your brand voice deserves better

Your brand’s verbal identity shouldn’t be an afterthought or a mere stylistic exercise. It’s a powerful strategic asset that can build recognition, connection and preference when developed with intention and implemented with consistency.

Most brands don’t fail because their verbal identity broke—it failed because it never really existed in a meaningful, strategic sense. It was a collection of adjectives and preferences rather than a distinctive expression of the brand’s unique position and perspective.

To create language that truly differentiates, treat verbal identity with the same strategic rigour you apply to other brand assets. Define what makes you meaningfully different, not just tonally different.

And remember that how you speak should always serve what you need to say.

The most powerful brands don’t just look different—they sound different because they are different. Their verbal identity isn’t a cosmetic layer; it’s the authentic expression of their purpose, promise, and perspective in the world.

When you approach verbal identity as a strategic imperative rather than a creative exercise, your brand won’t just avoid sounding generic—it will become genuinely unmistakable.

Fabrik: A branding agency for our times.