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In 1985, Coca-Cola made one of the most infamous brand decisions in history. They changed the formula of their flagship drink into something people had grown up with, and introduced it as New Coke. The backlash was brutal, and within 79 days, they reversed course. 

Brand identity is the accumulated feeling people have built up over time, and when you mess with that feeling, people notice immediately.

To create the same kind of inconsistency, you only need three team members writing content with three slightly different mental models of what your brand sounds like. 

Your brand needs a Brand Voice Skill, which is purpose-built instructions that encode your brand's voice once and make it available to every writer, every campaign, and every piece of content from that point on. 

Let’s build one!

Companies maintaining a consistent brand presentation across all platforms see revenue increases of 23% to 33%, according to multiple studies tracking brand performance. Brand dilution is a business crisis, and 52% of senior professionals at mid-sized and large businesses report that poor brand consistency costs their companies more than $6 million in lost revenue annually. [Shout Out Studio] 

OpenAI Discontinues Support for Sora, Winds Down Disney Deal. OpenAI plans to discontinue its Sora AI video generator six months after the high-profile launch of a standalone app for the service, as the company works to simplify its portfolio of artificial intelligence products. [Source: Bloomberg]

Anthropic's Claude Projects enables persistent, team-accessible AI workspaces. Projects allow you to create self-contained workspaces with their own chat histories and knowledge bases. Within each project, you can upload documents, provide context, and have focused chats with Claude, making it the right infrastructure for a Brand Voice Skill that anyone on your team can use. [Source: Anthropic]

Why Brand Consistency is So Important for AI Search Discovery. Today’s search landscape includes multi-channel, AI-driven discovery paths where users expect direct and synthesized answers that match what they’re looking for. When brand content is consistent across key channels such as websites, blogs, and social pages, brands strengthen their trust signals and visibility as AI plays a bigger role in how audiences find information. [Source: Jasper AI] 

Here’s how to have a working Claude Project for your Brand Voice Skill that any marketer on your team can open and use to produce on-brand content without writing a single brief or explaining your voice from scratch.

Before you write a single instruction, audit your own work. Pull 8–12 (or more) pieces of content that you consider definitively on-brand, ranging from blog posts, emails, social captions, ad copy, whatever represents your brand at its sharpest. 

Look for patterns across them, such as sentence length, humor, or professionalism, and assess how you write in first-person plural ("we believe") or directly to the reader ("you"). 

Go to Claude.ai, create a new Project, and name it clearly: "Brand Voice [Your Company Name]." This becomes the shared workspace your team accesses, and every team member who opens it gets the same Claude, pre-loaded with the same context.

The Project has two key areas you'll use: Project Instructions (the system prompt) and uploaded files. 

Your Project Instructions should cover four layers, and the more specific you are, the better Claude performs.

Describe your brand's voice in a specific language. "Professional and friendly" (that's everyone), instead consider something like "We write as a confident senior marketer talking to a peer. We're direct, authoritative, and we explain complex ideas in simple terms without ever talking down to the reader."

List specific dos and don'ts based on your content audit. 

Example: Do use contractions. Do open with the most important point. Do cite data when making a claim. Don't use passive voice. Don't use buzzwords like "synergy," "leverage," or "unlock." Don't write paragraphs longer than four sentences. 

Ten rules per column is a strong starting point, and every rule should be something you've observed in your own writing.

Tell Claude about your audience. "Our primary reader is a B2B marketing manager at a 50–500 person company. They're low on time, numerate, and sceptical of hype. They respect evidence, distrust vague claims, and have read enough mediocre thought leadership to spot it immediately."

Specify your structural defaults so Claude doesn't have to guess. "Blog posts use H2 and H3 headers every 200–300 words. Paragraphs are 2-4 sentences, emails stay under 250 words, LinkedIn posts use 3-5 short paragraphs without bullet lists, and Ad copy leads with the problem, not the solution."

Close the instructions with a clear directive: "When I ask you to write content, apply this voice profile without me asking. When I give you a draft to improve, preserve my meaning, but align everything to the rules above."

Once your instructions are set, upload 3-5 of your best content pieces directly into the Project as files. Label them clearly: "Example: blog post," "Example: email campaign," "Example: LinkedIn." These examples give Claude a living reference for your voice

The combination of written rules with real examples is what separates a functional Brand Voice Skill from a generic style prompt. 

Ask Claude to produce what you'd typically write for a blog intro, an email subject line, and a social caption, and evaluate it honestly to see whether it sounds like your brand or drifts, then refine your instructions based on what you see. If Claude is too formal, add "We never sound stiff or corporate" to your tone description. If it keeps using em-dashes incorrectly, add it to your don'ts. Most Brand Voice Skills reach a solid state after two or three rounds of testing.

Once you're satisfied, share the Project link with your team, and from that point on, every team member works from the same voice-trained Claude. 

The Brand Voice Skill forces you to articulate your brand's voice in precise, clear language. That document becomes your onboarding guide for new writers, your brief for agencies, and your answer to anyone who asks, "Does this sound like us?"

To create a tone of voice for myself, I used a slightly different approach. I prompted Claude Cowork to scrape X and the rest of the internet for my content to create a brand voice skill for myself.

While it had trouble scraping X (since plenty of companies don’t like “their” content scraped by bots), it found an old Substack of mine, plenty of articles I wrote, and social posts on other platforms.

The brand voice guide it came back with after Claude went and did its research was honestly very impressive.

Granted, some things it pulled from old content I wrote 5+ years ago, I see differently now, but the tone of voice and my general way of expressing myself online are very spot on.

I combined my new brand voice skill with a humanizer skill I got from GitHub and a viral Twitter post skill I created based on a viral format post I found online. Then, I prompted it to “write me 25 absolute bangers for LinkedIn covering the latest news and developments in SEO and AI Search from the past week.”

Out of the 25 posts it spat out, about 5-8 were honestly pretty good.

After a bit of editing and making them a bit more “me,” I posted a few of them on LinkedIn, and the first few were my best-performing posts of the last twelve months.

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Use this prompt with your preferred LLM to extract a first-draft brand voice profile from your existing content.

The Scenario: 

You are the Head of Content at a B2B SaaS company. You want to build a Brand Voice Skill in Claude, but need help articulating your voice consistently enough for a system prompt.

The Prompt:

I'm going to share several pieces of our brand's content. Analyse them carefully and produce a Brand Voice Profile I can use as a Claude Project system prompt. 

The profile should include:

Current Situation:

Questions:

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Coca-Cola got its formula right and then nearly broke it by changing it. Most marketing teams let each person interpret the brand voice however they like, until the accumulated variations add up to something that no longer feels like the original.

AI accelerates whatever system you have, with a shared Brand Voice Skill that includes clear rules and real examples. AI accelerates this coherence, an underrated competitive advantage in marketing.

Until next time, keep exploring the horizon. 🌅

Alex Lielacher

P.S. If you want your brand to show up in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, reach out to my agency, Rise Up Media. That's what we do.