📖A generic voice is the path of least resistance. It feels safe because it sounds like everyone else. But safe is invisible.
The Pit of Despair
Most brand guidelines read like they were written by committee. Professional. Approachable. Trustworthy. Innovative. Inhuman. Tasteless. Soul destroying.
A generic voice is the path of least resistance, not the path to being heard. We need to be creatively courageous, and avoid the "safety" of proven ground. Generic voices feel safe because it sounds like everyone else. Safe is invisible. We should fear "safe". It is the pit of despair, where creativity dies and reader's interest dies on the front porch.
It's also a total waste of your real value. Neil Gaiman once wrote:
"The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. - Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
He was talking about art. Any art. Marketers and founders will recognise that this applies to your business, it's messaging, branding and content too. The thing that differentiates you from your competitor isn't your colour scheme, or your website. It's the way you see the world, and how you show up for it. It's the product you release. It's the things you choose to say.
The real reason people don't like AI generated content, is because it lacks connection. It lacks you!
My opinion here is that AI writing itself, isn't the root issue. It's the safety it produces. The repetition of generic, safe tone! It is actually possible to create a really representative "AI clone" of yourself, but it takes loads of effort. No LLM will do it right out of the box. Without proper training, the words might read OK, but they'll convey no emotional weight.
When that happens we learn nothing about who you are. They often could apply to a bank, a wellness app, or a dog food company. This is the trap of the generic voice. It's what happens when nobody makes an active choice to express themselves.
Problem: Authenticity became a buzzword.
When we talk about brand identity, it's usually shorthand for logos, colours, typography – the visual layer - and yes, visuals matter because they're often the first thing people notice, they make people feel like they've landed in the right place. But voice keeps them in the room. This is why an authentic voice, with a clear offer matters.
The temptation might be to roll your eyes, and think "here goes the another marketing guru" - but Clarity is tied directly to the strength of your offer / product. Authenticity is tied directly to the strength of your voice.
Don't let words like "Clarity" and "Authenticity" be dismissed. Smart people may have heard these words alot, and buzzwords can be rendered meaningless - but the point is important. When you are able to voice the story of how your product became what it is, customers feel the journey you've been on, and that breeds real affinity. Affinity, creates demand and intent.
Matthew Dicks, who has spent decades studying what makes stories land, puts it this way:
"The best stories feel inevitable. Every detail serves the whole." - Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks
Brand voice works the same way. When it's working, every touchpoint feels like it belongs to the same story – whether that's a homepage headline, a customer service email, or a social media post. That customer journey begins to feel inevitable, undeniable, and simple.
This forms your narrative thread, and roots it in your own voice - which becomes foundational, and impossible to fake. Even if I employed the best AI tools in the land, when your voice is done right - it is too unpredictable to replicate reliably. That's because you are unique, and so am I.
Finding my own thread
Within Thread and Stack, this idea sits at the centre of everything I think about. The timeless art of storytelling, and the very modern challenge of cutting through noise fuelled by bots. That tension is deliberate.
The work I do sits between old craft - humanity, thought, literature, narrative - and new tools - AI workflows, databases, agents, models. Human psychology and digital systems.
The visual identity of Thread & Stack signals this: a woven, serif font, illustrations that evoke books, art, galleries, human creativity. MY VOICE. My interests, I quote the authors I like, I take inspiration from my own life, hobbies, colleagues and sources of inspiration.
The Stories that Bind Us
Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans conquered the world through our ability to tell stories. From cave paintings, to the earliest form of writings - we created stories, increasingly sophisticated - to warn of danger, missteps, and to encourage success.
"Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths." Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
A throughline he draws is that when cave-era humans invented a lion-headed god figure to make sense of the world and bind a community together around a shared belief, that became so powerful that modern humans turned that same symbol into the Peugot brand.
Harari contends that the behaviour hasn't gone away, we still do the exact same thing - but over the years, where we once called ideas gods, we increasingly bind ideas around groups of people and intent - which we call a brand. Peugeot the company, like the lion-man, is a fiction comprised of complex structures - and a narrative thread that everyone agrees to believe in, and that collective belief is what gives it real-world power. If we all stopped believing that Peugeot was a company worth respecting, it would soon lose power, just like a god or myth.
My point is, that your voice is how you tell that story. It contains more than you might expect: an emotional temperature that runs through everything (are you warm or cool, urgent or patient?), a rhythm and pacing that shapes how ideas land, word choices that carry different weights. Perhaps most importantly, it's about what you leave out – the clichés you refuse, the jargon you avoid, the restraint that says as much as the words themselves.
Soulful Stories Pay Off.
Finding your real voice takes archaeological excavation. It's this logic that lies behind Simon Sinek's focus on "Start with Why" because when applied on an individual level it roots you in yourself. It requires you to know what you actually believe before you can be consistent about expressing it.
Once you arrive there though, when your story is told by the voice that lived it - you come from a place of earned authority. It creates connection that proves to be powerful, and engaging. You can't generate it with a template, though people may try.
It gives your customers, communities and audiences a clear reason to choose you, and remember you. People start to recognise you. They read your work and think, "this could only be them."