Tuning Your Voice: Trends in Brand Language

Imagine you’re a marketer for a running shoe company. It’s time for a client-facing email blast. How do you start? “Dear Valued Customer”? “Hello”? “Hey Speedy!”? Questions like this underline the importance of brand voice—the projection of a brand’s identity that marketers hope will land with the public. Brand voice manifests in visual elements, like logos and colour palettes, but also in all the language an organization puts out; even a humble email greeting says something about a brand.

Brands stand to gain or lose a lot depending on how their voice shapes consumer perception. A well-executed voice can familiarize audiences with a brand and set down that important stepping stone to loyalty called trust. Marketers do well to consider elements like tone (is our messaging playful? Sombre?), register (are we too formal? Too informal?), word choice (is our vocabulary empowering? Inconsistent?), and other nuances that shape communication.

The digital age and changing consumer sensibilities have led to brand messaging trends that are worth a look from a linguistic angle. This instalment of Language Matters does just that.

Short Is Sweet

Ever come across television commercials from the 1950s? What stands out is just how wordy they seem today. Early- to mid-20th century ads often detailed physical features of products (and consumers had the patience to listen). This dynamic was spoofed by an episode of the animated series Family Guy in which a long-winded ’50s-era TV ad for Raisin Bran ends with the following jingle:

Post Raisin Bran
Made with raisins, which are grapes that have been dried in the sun for a long period of time,
And bran, the hard outer layers of cereal grain,
Along with germ, it is an integral part of whole grains.
Post Raisin Bran

Catchy, right?

Things are different today. Brand messaging favours short, simple sentences, fragments and imperative commands. Marketing departments often set guidelines for average sentence or word lengths, for example, to keep copy zippy and smooth. Such a style imparts a bold, confident voice in as little time as possible. Apple is known for its sleek, minimal messaging that echoes its products’ design. A tagline like “Power. It’s in the air.” to describe its MacBook Air laptop cuts through technical clutter with the stamp of concision.

Informal Is In

Modern brand voice is trending casual—hella casual. Marketers are meeting consumers where they are: online and on their phones. And because consumers and brands now have so many avenues for interaction, companies have begun to view client contacts as “conversations” to nurture as opposed to “targets” to sell to. This informal stance has a formal name: conversational human voice. Its main parts are message personalization (using someone’s first name instead of Valued Client, say), invitational rhetoric (the way brands invite dialogue and feedback) and informal speech (everyday language as opposed to jargon).¹

On this last point, some organizations are trying to capture the vibe of social media snark—sassy or sarcastic language common to social media that blurs the line between affectionate joshing and outright roasting.² More common to casual brands, social media snark boasts successful case studies. Wendy’s has a reputation for serving up posts that roast its competitors, its customers and even itself. Sometimes it weighs in on world events far removed from casual dining. The day after a brazen theft of priceless jewelry from the Louvre in 2025, Wendy’s chimed in with the following post on X:³

ok so maybe don’t hang it in the louvre

The point here isn’t to pitch burgers but to show that the brand is up on the codes of sarcastic textspeak—relaxed punctuation and capitalization, for example—and to hopefully score some humour points that get its post reshared across social media.

Keep It Local

Wendy’s roasting voice wouldn’t work everywhere. Acceptable registers differ depending on audience and context. An underwear company with a quirky, youthful vibe might use cheeky wordplay in ways that a professional virology lab would avoid like the plague. Localization—adapting one’s brand voice to bob and weave with the nuances of a communication situation—is key to modern marketing. Brands clued in to the linguistic features of local markets, such as slang, idioms and the prevalence of other languages, appear more relevant and welcoming. Regarding word choice, younger people might not be accustomed to the formal style of legacy broadcast media, with many growing up watching social media personalities with far more relaxed speaking styles. Elevated language in luxury branding plays well, meanwhile. Social language variation is the technical term for this, and brands that want to thrive today need to master it.⁴

Brand Your Weird

The deliberate misuse or bending of grammar for rhetorical effect has made its mark on modern brand messaging. In the 2000s, Pepsi raised eyebrows with its slogan “More Happy”, which flies in the face of rules for English comparatives (happier being the correct form). But if we ignore convention and cast the adjective happy as a noun, the soda brand’s tagline fits right in with a trending rhetorical device in brand messaging known as anthimeria—the use of a word as a part of speech not usually assigned to it.

Once you’re aware of this, it’s hard not to notice. Think of Lexus asking you to “Experience Amazing” or Edward Jones telling you, “Let’s find your rich.” Amazing isn’t a noun, and rich isn’t something you “find”, but brands are betting that their non-standard grammar will draw attention and signal a fun vibe.⁵

A Human Touch

Authenticity is another north star in modern branding. Brands know that digital-savvy consumers have developed a spidey-sense for empty corporate platitudes. At the same time, younger people especially cock a collective brow at messaging that tries too hard to appear cool or relatable. Ever roll your eyes at an older relative who tossed in some youth slang they read on the Internet (or maybe you’ve been that relative)? The same embarrassment kicks in if brands attempt to appear more hip or funny than they are. The term corporate cringe (one of many subcategories of cringe spawned by Gen Z to point out awkward behaviour) is nowadays levelled at brands appearing to pander to consumers through syrupy emotional appeals or lame attempts at humour.

In lieu of forced gaiety or jokes, brands are increasingly trying to personalize their voice with playful touches. One trend here is the use of personable sender names in email. Messages labelled “John from Apple” or “The Wealthsimple Team”, for example, might land better with recipients than generic terms like “Accounts” or “Customer Service”. A minor detail, perhaps, but such finer points have become more relevant with the advent of AI across organizations. Some people remain apprehensive about communicating with bots and models, especially when their use isn’t disclosed, so many brands are doubling down on human touches where possible.

Story Time

Social media and influencer culture have nudged regular people to think about brand voice too. Paired with a cultural groundswell that celebrates individual empowerment and business acumen, brand voice today leans into the language of stories to help people communicate their selling points.

There have long been metaphors for life as a book, like turn the page or a new chapter. But there seems to be an intensification of storytelling language in branding to lend higher importance to experiences. Take the recent explosion of the word journey. Its head definition in Antidote’s dictionary reads, “an act of travelling from one place to another, especially if it is difficult or if these places are far apart”. Its use has approximately doubled since the 1990s when people started swapping it for combat-tinged words like battle or fight to describe living with cancer. That usage then veered into general well-being parlance in the 2010s (health journey). Today, the word’s figurative sense, especially in social media, is used to “romantic[ize] ordinary or unpleasant experiences”⁶ that hitherto were just things one did. Training for a marathon is a journey. A yoga session is a journey. Adjusting your diet to incorporate more omega-3 fatty acids is a journey.

The same goes for how organizations talk about themselves. The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. using the word storyteller doubled from 2024 to 2025—some 50,000 listings.⁷ Why? For one thing, the word points out that brands reach viewers through curated outlets (YouTube channels, Instagram pages, podcasts, etc.) whose management demands work beyond what the word editorial captures. It also underlines a truism in modern marketing: It’s not enough for brands to sell a product—they have to sell a story about themselves. This story then helps people realize their identity as discerning consumers whose buying habits say something about them. (The phrase vote with your wallet has peaked in recent years as a descriptor for how our purchases reflect our values.)

To wit, modern marketing (girded by psychology) shows us that the kinds of words a brand favours activate relatable archetypes in the minds of consumers. If your target market buys into a certain lifestyle—like that of a boundary-pushing outlaw—your brand’s lexicon should favour that conception. Harley-Davidson foregrounds language that reads as assertive, adventurous and conventionally masculine because that’s (presumably) their target market: bold travellers who skew male. Their ad copy is full of words like pursuit and adventure, which play into the connotation of hitting the road on one of their motorcycles. Other words common to their ads, like freedom and soul, suggest a higher calling to “live life to the fullest”. A brand’s language shapes the story consumers want to tell about themselves.

Spread the Word

Brands tweak their messaging to suit different outlets and audiences, but they start from consistent key identifiers that unify company culture, cement brand recognition and build loyalty among customers. Internal usage guides, text correctors and AI technologies aid in applying these identifiers. Marketers attuned to the nuances of words have a leg up in spreading bold messaging aligned with their voice. From relaxed email greetings to inflated vocabulary, the evolving trends of brand language are a journey worth following.

If you’d like to learn how Antidote can help preserve a brand’s voice across an organization, check out the Customizations section of our user guide.

This article was concocted by

Antidote’s linguists