The brand voices we need right now
Words and inspiration for your 2025 tone of voice refresh
If 2024 felt like a movie, 2025 is following suit. Trump tirades, Zuckerberg talking about needing more “male energy” in corporate America and Elon. Everything about Elon. Trust is at an all-time low, misinformation at an all-time high, and AI has infiltrated everything – our LinkedIn posts, brand “hey bestie” content, and our bedrooms. (There’s a wild article about a woman and her AI lover in the links below).
But chaos has its upsides: it creates space for different voices to emerge. While tech bros yell louder and AI churns out bland corporate soup, brands have an opportunity to show up differently. To be the voices of calm in the storm, of brutal honesty in the sea of bullshit, of genuine connection in our increasingly artificial world. We know the tone of a lube brand won’t solve any real problems but they might make us all feel a bit more human. Or at least horny?
Last week we wrote about 2025 trends like social rewilding and positive friction; this week we’re talking about the voices we need in 2025. We hope they give you some inspiration for your tone refresh.
Beautiful / Awe-inspiring
While Zuckerberg wants more aggressive male energy in corporate America a lot of us are craving deeper connections to nature, people and community. As one reader Amar Patel (from Bluejeans and Moonbeams) commented last week on our 2025 trend deep dive: “so much of this feels like a revolt against being excessively online.” What if a brand’s voice could remind us to look up from our phones and notice the way the sunlight catches morning dew? Think Ffern: the Somerset-based perfume house which turns fragrance into pure poetry. Their seasonal drops read like love letters to the natural world – the precise moment a fig ripens in the Mediterranean sun. It’s not just about pretty words, but creating moments of pause, wonder and connection to something bigger than our feeds.
Brutal honesty
Trust is at an all-time low. The theme showed up over and over again in those 2025 trend reports. Between fake reviews, outlandish product claims, and that slightly terrifying article in The Cut about menopause products launching on vibes alone, people are desperate for some real talk. But don’t just put “honest” in your tone of voice guidelines, go for brutal honesty. Challenge yourself to tell customers the good, the bad and the “maybe this isn’t for you”. Tell them where you fucked up and how you fixed it (CC. Ace & Tate’s B-Corp announcement). It’s not just refreshing – it builds trust.
Team-led / knowledgeable / wholehearted
As AI gets eerily good at mimicking human voices, we need more actual humans showing up. Not the hyperactive, mini-mic, viral-chasing TikTok-style content we’re all slightly exhausted by, but experts and knowledgeable people sharing real expertise. The people that live and breathe the brand every day. That use it themselves. Think product descriptions on websites written in first-person from “Cora, Head of Product here” or newsletters written by people who actually know and care about their stuff.
Quiet / Mysterious / Intriguing
I love this quote from Hayley Nahman’s newsletter back in 2022: “People on social media are constantly trying to destigmatise being “try-hard,” because you can’t really be online without trying. But it will never work. It will always be more compelling to garner people’s admiration naturally than to do it on purpose, and the people best at that will always be the most interesting, culturally speaking.” But it’s 2025 and most haven’t got the memo. We need some brands to play that role – to stop shouting from every possible platform and try intriguing us with fewer more impactful words. Be mysterious! Hard to get! Supreme do this supremely well, with sporadic, cryptic teasers that generate real-life lines around the block.
Dry / Deadpan
Between climate anxiety and general world chaos there are a lot of earnest brand voices out there trying to save us all. And it’s leading to purpose fatigue. If you’re not a brand that’s saving the world, let’s balance it out with some that take it all with a pinch of salt. Think Cards Against humanity who sold nothing for $5 on Black Friday (and made $71,145) and once crowdfunded digging a giant hole in the ground for no reason as a holiday campaign. “Is there some sort of deeper meaning or purpose to the hole? No.”
Quirky / Random / Eccentric
Want to keep your job as a copywriter? Write something an AI would never dream up. Be unpredictable in a predictable world. Think Palace's eccentric product descriptions or Hairy Mary's gloriously flippant about us page: "NOT A LONG-HAIRED NOTORIOUS PROSTITUTE FROM ANCIENT EGYPT, BUT A SHORT-HAIRED WENCH FROM PERTHSHIRE." The more random the better.
Sexy / Horny
You’ve seen the headlines. Gen Z aren’t having sex. People spend more time on dating apps than getting down. So what if brands could help turn us back on? I went to look up what actual sex brands are doing with tone of voice and was dismayed. Maude’s latest content was painfully functional: “have sex, burn calories” and “is sex good for your skin?”; Dame, similarly unsexy “commited to changing the way sexual wellness and pleasure is understood and experienced” and Aussie condom brand “Get Down” talks about “protect thy taco”. We get the strategy for those brands, but it’s not exactly making us want to jump in the old sack. Where are the brands turning us on? Bringing sexy back. Obviously this would not work for a lot of categories. (I still remember going to Joe & The Juice and being so cringed out when I was asked to leave a tip or my number. Not hot.) But what about more flirty food, lingerie, perfume…and sex brands.
The Vortex
If you didn’t read our trend newsletter, catch up here.
We wrote about the f*** it attitude of brands when it comes to tone of voice last year. 2025 feels like a similarly f*** it kind of time. For more inspo read here.
One of the best headlines this week about the tech bros.
She is in love with a Chat GPT. It’s hotter than her marriage.
Sustainable marketing needs brutal honesty.
There’s a whole book dedicated to Palace’s brilliant product descriptions.
“People will tell you to “be everywhere on social!” but 99% of the time, the result is thin content littered around the web that makes your brand look like it was hijacked by the free version of ChatGPT. Unless you have a massive team, focus on being great at a few channels where your audience spends most of their time.” More gems on the new rules of content marketing here. A guide for people trying to make great content inside the corporate machine.