Your Signature is the Brand You Can’t Design
There’s a pop in the left side of my neck, just below the ear. It’s not a satisfying, joint-releasing crack, but a tight, angry little signal that I’ve been holding my head at the wrong angle again. Probably for the last 3 hours. It’s the posture of forced concentration, of trying to contort my thoughts into a shape they weren’t meant to hold. It’s the physical manifestation of building a box and then trying to cram yourself inside it, hoping nobody notices the awkward limbs sticking out.
We do this constantly with our words. We call it “brand voice.” I once spent a week-a full, billable week-crafting a brand voice guide for my own one-person operation. It had columns. On one side, “We Are…” and on the other, “We Are Not…” It was filled with beautiful, aspirational words like “erudite but not academic,” “witty but not flippant.” I printed it out. It looked professional. Then I wrote my next article and violated 13 of my own rules in the first 233 words. The document was a monument to a person I thought I should be, not the person who was actually typing the words. The entire exercise was a failure.
I used



















