What are the key takeaways from this Everyone Hates Marketers episode?

Key insights include: **Voice Authenticity Audit:** Collect all communications—website, emails, sales materials, internal documents—and read them objectively asking what personality emerges. Compare competitor voices using the same lens to identify gaps between intended and actual brand personality perception.; **Personality Over Values:** Base brand voice on specific personality attributes like "direct but warm" rather than corporate values like "integrity" or "innovative." Use adjectives you'd describe a real person with, avoiding ubiquitous terms competitors could claim equally well.; **Practical Voice Testing:** Write actual content samples in the new voice before creating guidelines. Push the envelope to test boundaries, then pull back appropriately. This reveals what works in practice versus theory and builds team confidence through tangible examples.

What did Elevate Your Voice and Bethany Joy discuss on Everyone Hates Marketers?

Bethany Joy explains how to develop an authentic brand voice that permeates every customer touchpoint, from auditing current communications to creating specific personality attributes that guide consistent messaging across organizations. Key topics include: **Voice Authenticity Audit:** Collect all communications—website, emails, sales materials, internal documents—and read them objectively asking what personality emerges. Compare competitor voices using the same lens to identify gaps between intended and actual brand personality perception.; **Personality Over Values:** Base brand voice on specific personality attributes like "direct but warm" rather than corporate values like "integrity" or "innovative." Use adjectives you'd describe a real person with, avoiding ubiquitous terms competitors could claim equally well..

How long is this episode of Everyone Hates Marketers?

This episode is 54 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Everyone Hates Marketers

Elevate Your Voice: How to Craft a Brand Presence That Clings Like a Fart in a Lift

June 27, 2023

54 min episode · 2 min read

Elevate Your Voice,Bethany Joy

Episode

54 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Sales & Revenue, Philosophy & Wisdom, Science & Discovery

AI-Generated Summary

Published Dec 25, 2025

Key Takeaways

✓Voice Authenticity Audit: Collect all communications—website, emails, sales materials, internal documents—and read them objectively asking what personality emerges. Compare competitor voices using the same lens to identify gaps between intended and actual brand personality perception.
✓Personality Over Values: Base brand voice on specific personality attributes like "direct but warm" rather than corporate values like "integrity" or "innovative." Use adjectives you'd describe a real person with, avoiding ubiquitous terms competitors could claim equally well.
✓Practical Voice Testing: Write actual content samples in the new voice before creating guidelines. Push the envelope to test boundaries, then pull back appropriately. This reveals what works in practice versus theory and builds team confidence through tangible examples.
✓Implementation Through Listening: Ask content creators across the organization what they need to adopt the new voice—examples, vocabulary lists, dos and don'ts. Address structural barriers like approval processes that dilute voice consistency before distributing guidelines.

What It Covers

Bethany Joy explains how to develop an authentic brand voice that permeates every customer touchpoint, from auditing current communications to creating specific personality attributes that guide consistent messaging across organizations.

Key Questions Answered

•Voice Authenticity Audit: Collect all communications—website, emails, sales materials, internal documents—and read them objectively asking what personality emerges. Compare competitor voices using the same lens to identify gaps between intended and actual brand personality perception.
•Personality Over Values: Base brand voice on specific personality attributes like "direct but warm" rather than corporate values like "integrity" or "innovative." Use adjectives you'd describe a real person with, avoiding ubiquitous terms competitors could claim equally well.
•Practical Voice Testing: Write actual content samples in the new voice before creating guidelines. Push the envelope to test boundaries, then pull back appropriately. This reveals what works in practice versus theory and builds team confidence through tangible examples.
•Implementation Through Listening: Ask content creators across the organization what they need to adopt the new voice—examples, vocabulary lists, dos and don'ts. Address structural barriers like approval processes that dilute voice consistency before distributing guidelines.

Notable Moment

Joy describes a hospice whose warm, humor-filled environment contrasted sharply with their cold, clinical website copy written like a stern school matron, demonstrating how organizations unknowingly project inauthentic personalities that repel rather than attract their ideal audiences.

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Episode Transcript

What happens if you take three struggling freelance marketers, lock them in a seventeenth century cottage, and don't let them live until we fix their businesses? In August, I rented an old cottage in rural Ireland and invited copywriter Rob, ecommerce designer Laura, and book coach Vicky, three freelancers desperate to stand the fuck out. And over two days, I ripped everything apart, their offers, their messaging, their branding, their lead gen to find what was really holding them back. This is the concept of a new YouTube channel that I'm launching. You can watch the first episode for free right now. It's half an hour long. It's supposed to be entertaining as well as practical. I hope you'll enjoy watching it. So please set half an hour aside to watch it around your morning coffee, breakfast, lunch break, or on the bus or at the gym, whatever. The link to access this new YouTube channel is in the episode show notes. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to watch it. And then, you know, the usual to like it, comment, to share, talk about it around you if you like it. Thank you so much. Your brand voice should be like a fart in a lift. Absolutely, inescapably everywhere. Yep. That's really embarrassing. That's the one you've quoted. Bonjour, bonjour, and welcome to another episode of everyone hates marketers.com, the no fluff marketing podcast for people sick of marketing. Bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Launier. In today's episode, you will learn how to find your voice as a brand that actually sticks, gets embedded in your organization, and really makes difference. My guest today is a self confessed one trick pony. She's a brand voice strategist. She's been a copywriter both in house and for digital agencies. She works with brands across many sectors. She's traveled more than 40 countries. She has two kids. And I'm just gonna read to you a quote that I saw from her recently which is I've got two small children, so I'm used to working with stubborn, distracted, uncooperative humans who always think they know best. And I think that's a very, very good description of what parenthood is about. So anyway, Bethany Joy, very happy to have you on board. Welcome. Great. Thanks. Happy to be here. What are the main symptoms of a poor voice from a brand? Probably a voice that is inauthentic when a brand is clearly trying to talk to you in a way that isn't actually true to who they are and what they're like. And I think you can tell quite quickly where there's a disconnect between how a brand wants to put themselves across, and how they actually are when you really engage with them. I think authenticity is such a a kind of buzzword, but in the in the most real, literal sense of it, I think a voice that, yeah, kind of shows a brand, inadvertently is trying to be someone …

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