Words: Adam Ketterer – Founder
Category(s): Content, Positioning
Date: 26th January 2026
If you’re a B2B marketer thinking about investing in your brand’s tone of voice, you might be shopping around for agencies, comparing and contrasting their approaches. You might also be asking Google or your LLM of choice to remind you what the hell TOV actually means.
And 96% of the time you’ll hear that tone of voice isn’t what you say – it’s all about how you say it (or, more often, write it).
Which sounds like fine advice until you actually try to follow it.
The truth is, this approach is at least half wrong. (It’s almost as wrong as a Simon Sinek-esque purpose-led, why-first approach, but that’s another post for another day.) The problem, in short, is that when you approach TOV by putting style (the How) above or before substance (the What), you’re headed for trouble.
There’s no disputing that TOV is all to do with how you speak and write. But in the What-vs-How stakes, brands mess up when they forget that The What always wins, especially in B2B. Voicey vibes might win your prospects’ immediate attention – only long enough for them to figure out if what you’re selling really does live up to the implicit promises you’ve made with its stylistic (ie its more How-y) verbal packaging. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, that’s when you’ve set yourself up for How-first failure.
How-first TOV failure: How it happens
TOV is just done badly a lot of the time. It’s slapped on as an afterthought, on slide 46 of 60 on a brand deck. And yes, agencies are often to blame. If you find yourself in a TOV workshop playing brand personality bingo, then allow me to be “expert but human” and “friendly yet informative” with you now: you’re wasting your time.
And if it starts feeling like a soundalike exercise, you’re officially allowed to eject yourself from the meeting. (Who remembers when you couldn’t open a brand deck without seeing Innocent back in the day? Or MailChimp, or Slack, Surreal or whatever oat milk is the latest go-to reference.)
Don’t get me wrong: TOV is important. But POV is more important.
This isn’t a rant against TOV. It’s the opposite. TOV can be a powerful force for fame and differentiation. But, in B2B at least, TOV isn’t as good at creating differentiation as it is at heightening your real differentiation, as captured in your positioning strategy and your point of view on the market. That is, your TOV should come from (and can amplify) your POV.
And I believe TOV heightens differentiation most effectively when it most accurately and naturally embodies that POV in the words you use to express it.
Tone of voice should be emergent
If you do the hard work of B2B positioning right, and you’ve distilled that positioning down to its purest elements, then when you come to putting it all into a story, that story will already start to reveal its character to you.
In other words, B2B tone of voice should be emergent. If you have a POV and a story worth telling, and you have fun while you do it, its style will emerge with its substance.
If you have to “wordsmith” it or get a committee to decide which brand archetype you are, it’s probably too late.
Granted, this is usually easier in startups than it is in bigger or more mature companies, because in startups the founder is usually the one telling the story the most often, and it will naturally take on their style. One example of this that I love is courtesy of Rohit Jha, CEO and cofounder of Transcelestial, a company building high-speed, low-cost connectivity via [checks notes] space lasers. I remember looking at the Twitter account (as it was in the pre-X days) of Jha, who describes himself as a “huge nerd”, and his bio simply said “Pew pew”.
I checked back recently and he’s updated it, sadly, but I was pleased to see the spirit lives on in his LinkedIn headline, where he summarises his role as “Lasers @ Transcelestial”. (Note the flex to a slightly more formal tone on the professional social network.) That’s a niche but lovely show of emergent TOV in my book. And that energy of Jha’s is evident in the main company tone of voice too. (Contrast it with Starlink and, much like its sister SpaceX, you get much more of a lofty, Star-Trek-earnestness coming through but less of the childlike excitement.)
This is not a groundbreaking idea
I don’t mean to sound all “dOn’T FoRgEt tHe wHat, gUyyyS”. I know you know all this. Smart “TOV” people have already drawn attention to the long-overdue rebrand the practice sorely needs. Different point, but also interesting: Harry Ashbridge, AKA the guy who wrote Monzo’s TOV guidelines, says “tone of voice is jargon and we should drop it.”
He suggests “writing principles” as a better alternative. “Good writing principles force people to think about content, structure, context, audience, and a whole host of other things alongside.” Yes. Hard agree. And I’d add that now and again it pays to cut the word “writing” from “writing principles” and remember that our principles – not moral beliefs but deeply held truths about the problems your company solves, and how you solve them – should guide our communications too.
But when agency types crack open their Jungian brand archetype cards and start to read your brand’s palms, it’s easy for B2B marketers to lose sight of what’s real.
The What is what’s real.
Get that right and your How will emerge.