Tone of Voice Examples From Small Brands That Sound Human

The best tone of voice examples from small brands share one habit: they write the way a real person at the company would talk to a customer, and they keep doing it everywhere. The four examples below, Innocent, Who Gives A Crap, Monzo and Mailchimp, all started small, and what carries over to your business is the method, not the jokes.

We use British spelling here and a studio's eye: we design logos and websites, so we see every day what happens when good visuals sit next to flat, anonymous copy. The brand looks like a person, then talks like a brochure.

What the best tone of voice examples have in common

Nielsen Norman Group describes tone along four dimensions: humour, formality, respectfulness and enthusiasm, according to NN/g. Each dimension is a scale, so a brand can sit anywhere between funny and serious, or formal and casual.

The same research group tested this on users. In NN/g's study of tone and brand perception, tone of voice affected how friendly, trustworthy and desirable users found a brand, and casual, conversational, enthusiastic tones performed best. That was a test on sample sites, so treat it as a strong hint, not a law for every industry.

Across the examples below we see the same four habits:

• They pick a position on the scales and stay there.
• They use the words their customers use.
• They keep the voice in small, boring places such as labels, error messages and delay notices.
• They change the mood, not the personality, when the situation gets serious.

Innocent: small print written like a person

Innocent began in 1998 when three friends spent £500 on fruit and sold smoothies from a stall at a London music festival, according to Wikipedia's summary of the company history. It is now over 90% owned by Coca-Cola, so it is no longer small. The voice, though, was built when it was.

The Irish Times described the labels as chatty and chirpy, with no boring business speak. The banana phone and the invitation to "pop round to Fruit Towers" came about, according to a founder, because there was all this space to fill on the packaging.

The lesson for a small business is practical. Look at the space nobody designs: the back of the box, the invoice footer, the "thank you" page, the out-of-office reply. Those are free voice slots.

Who Gives A Crap: one register, used everywhere

Who Gives A Crap sells toilet paper and donates half its profits to sanitation projects. The humour is not confined to the packaging. Bolger notes that the brand keeps the same tone in email and on social media, and its newsletters use the same toilet humour and dad jokes as the website and packaging.

Consistency is the point. A joke on the box and a stiff corporate email a week later would break the spell. If you want to see how this works visually, our 9-grid test for social media applies the same logic to images.

Monzo and Mailchimp: plain words and a voice that bends

Monzo publishes its writing principles. One of them is about who is responsible for the message: the guide says the passive voice partly distances the writer from the message, as stated on Monzo's tone of voice page. "We have delayed your order" owns the news. "A decision has been made" hides it.

Monzo also shows where humour belongs. Its guide says a joke is fine in Year in Monzo because readers expect a light-hearted experience. A bank can be funny in a yearly recap and straight in a fee notice.

Mailchimp's public style guide makes the same split between voice and tone. It says the voice doesn't change much from day to day, but the tone changes all the time, and that it is always more important to be clear than entertaining, per the Mailchimp Content Style Guide. If you want the full theory, see our practical guide to brand voice and tone.

Tone of voice for a B2B manufacturer

Humour is not required. Many of our clients are manufacturers and engineering firms, and for them a human voice usually means plain, direct and specific. We covered the visual side of this in B2B branding for manufacturers.

The rewrites below are invented examples from our studio, not quotes from a real client. They show the kind of change we mean.

The human versions are shorter, they name a person or a reason, and they commit to something checkable. That last part matters for trust. A friendly sentence that promises nothing reads as filler.

How to find your own voice in an afternoon

You do not need a naming workshop. You need an hour with ten real pieces of your own writing and a pen.

1. Collect ten real texts: homepage headline, three emails, a quote, a complaint reply, a LinkedIn post, a delivery notice, an About page, a job ad.
2. Mark each one on the four NN/g scales: funny or serious, formal or casual, respectful or irreverent, enthusiastic or matter-of-fact.
3. Notice where the pieces disagree. A casual blog and a stiff quote template is the usual pattern.
4. Choose one position per scale for the whole business, and allow one exception rule, such as "no jokes in complaints".
5. Write five words you use and five you never use. Add three before-and-after sentences like the table above.
6. Put the page next to your logo files and colours. Our article on what goes in a brand style guide shows where it belongs.

Test the result on someone outside the company. If they can tell which of two paragraphs is yours, the voice is working.

Where MalbarDesign prices fit in

Tone of voice lives in your words, but it needs a visual home. We work on that home at fixed, final prices (we are not a VAT payer):

• Logo Start, €310: 2 concepts, 2 revision rounds.
• Logo, €430: 4 concepts, up to 4 revision rounds, vector files SVG/AI/EPS/CDR plus JPG/PNG, 12 months of free edits.
• HTML website, €1,060: up to 10 pages, enough room for a homepage, About page and service pages written in your voice.
• Sonic Logo, €290 introductory (€390 regular): your voice in sound, for brands that want to be recognised without a screen.

Delivery is within 5 business days. If none of the first logo concepts works, you get a full refund within 5 business days. The full list is on the pricing page, and our sonic branding service covers the audio side.

Check your brand before you rewrite anything

If your copy sounds like everyone else's in your industry, the logo and website often do too. We offer a free 5-point brand check: send us your details on the contact page, and you receive a one-page PDF within 48 hours on business days. There is no sales call.

Bring one homepage headline and one customer email. Those two pieces usually show what your voice is now and what it should become.