Verbal Identity.
The words your brand uses — and the words it refuses.
Why this specifically.
Most brand books have a page called 'Tone of Voice' with three adjectives ('confident, warm, sharp'). It's useless. We write verbal identities with 40+ real examples, a banned-words list, a sentence-grammar guide, and a comparative table showing how a rival brand would write the same sentence differently.
Verbal identity is the layer where cheap Indian marketing gives itself away. The homepage says 'Empowering brands to unlock their true potential' — a sentence no human has ever said out loud. We refuse to ship that. Every line goes through a 'would a founder say this on a call?' test.
Our verbal identity engagements produce a document short enough to actually read (12–18 pages) and specific enough that a freelance copywriter in Pune can write on-brand LinkedIn posts without a Slack conversation.
What ships to you.
Voice profile
Six dimensions (formality, warmth, humour, directness, complexity, confidence) scored 1–5 with real examples at each extreme.
Sentence grammar
How long our sentences are. How we start them. How we end them. How we handle numbers, jargon, acronyms, currency, dates.
Banned-words list
40+ words we don't use. 'Solutions'. 'Ecosystem'. 'Journey'. 'Unlock'. 'Delight'. With a one-line reason each.
Signature phrases
10–15 phrases only this brand uses. The verbal fingerprint. Repeated across surfaces until customers start echoing them back.
Comparative rewrites
Same sentence rewritten in your voice vs. a rival's vs. a generic-industry voice. Trains new writers in five minutes.
5-step process, no filler.
- 01AuditRead every existing surface: homepage, decks, product copy, emails, sales scripts. Identify the voice we already have (usually inconsistent).
- 02Reference gatheringNot competitors — writers we admire. A novelist, a critic, a podcaster, a magazine. The voice is triangulated from those, not from Salesforce.
- 03DraftingVoice profile + grammar + banned list drafted. Applied to 20 real sentences from your current site so we can see it working.
- 04Team workshopTwo-hour session with your marketing and sales team. They write in the new voice with us in the room. Anyone can veto anything.
- 05RolloutHomepage, top 5 emails, top 3 sales scripts, and the founder's LinkedIn bio all rewritten before we hand over.
The numbers.
Questions smart clients ask.
Yes — we offer a retainer where one of our writers handles founder LinkedIn, essays, and podcast prep. Priced by hours, not by post count.
Resistance is data. We run the workshop with your writers so the voice belongs to them, not us. If a rule doesn't survive that room, it gets cut.
We can direct verbal identity in Hindi and coordinate translators for other languages, but we write English natively. For Hindi-native brands we recommend a language partner.
Only if it's the whole document. Ours is 15% of the guide. The other 85% is what to do. Constraints make writers faster, not slower.
More inside Brand Strategy.
Kick off Verbal Identity.
30-minute strategy call. We diagnose live. No decks, no theatre.