# Category Adaptations Per-category voice guidance. The five-phase method (Discover → Define → Document → Deploy → Defend) is the same across categories; the **inputs, attributes, and tolerances change**. If the user's category is not covered here — politics, religious organisations, defense, gaming, healthcare professional comms, adult content, sports teams, fintech-crypto — trigger Phase 2 (Research) before defining voice. --- ## Table of contents - [B2B SaaS / Tech / Developer Tools](#b2b-saas--tech--developer-tools) - [B2B Services / Consulting / Agency](#b2b-services--consulting--agency) - [B2C / D2C Consumer Brands](#b2c--d2c-consumer-brands) - [Non-profit / NGO](#non-profit--ngo) - [Volunteering / Community Organisations](#volunteering--community-organisations) - [Industrial / Manufacturing](#industrial--manufacturing) - [Product-led Companies](#product-led-companies) - [Personal Branding / Solopreneurs / Creators](#personal-branding--solopreneurs--creators) - [Public Sector / Government](#public-sector--government) - [Categories requiring deep research](#categories-requiring-deep-research) --- ## B2B SaaS / Tech / Developer Tools **Reference brands:** Stripe, Linear, Notion, Mailchimp, Slack. **Buyer is a committee.** Champion, economic buyer, technical evaluator, end-user, security/procurement — the same voice must produce content credible to all five. The 2025 10Fold survey reports 39% of B2B marketers identify maintaining voice and quality as a top challenge. **Default attribute set:** - Plainspoken expertise (avoid jargon for marketing top-of-funnel; allow for technical docs) - Confident but not cocky - Specific over abstract (named opinions, original POV) **Watch for:** - "Empower teams", "supercharge", "next-generation", "AI-powered", "leverage" — ban explicitly. These phrases are LLM-bait and signal lack of distinct POV. - Generic AI-generated thought leadership is the new "spray and pray". Original perspective is the moat. - Product UI strings are upstream of marketing voice. Linear and Notion treat them as brand copy. If product writing and marketing writing don't coordinate, two voices emerge. **Pitfall:** writing for the SVP buyer while ignoring the engineer end-user creates two voices. Either pick one and modulate, or formally split (Stripe does both: dev docs vs marketing). --- ## B2B Services / Consulting / Agency **Voice substitutes for product.** Buyers cannot test the service before purchase; voice is the proof of competence and culture-fit. **Default attribute set:** - Demonstrably expert without preaching (Sage with Caregiver substrate) - Specific case-study language; never abstract "transformation" prose - Warm but never matey **Watch for:** - Voice of partners matters. Agencies are bought as a partner-by-partner decision; the firm voice and partner voices must be coherent, not identical. - "We help organisations transform their operations through data-driven insights" — ban this sentence shape across all consulting clients. It is the single most common cliché in the category. **Pitfall:** humour rarely translates outside specific category niches (creative agencies, DTC strategists). Irreverence reads as unprofessional in management consulting, accounting, or law. --- ## B2C / D2C Consumer Brands **Reference brands:** Oatly, Liquid Death, Innocent, Wendy's, Patagonia. **Voice is a brand asset and a moat.** Distinctive voices have built billion-dollar D2C trajectories. But distinctiveness must be earned, not borrowed. Per Do Words Good: _"customers are able to spot brands that are riffing on other brands' voices."_ **Default attribute set:** - Boldly distinctive (willing to alienate non-buyers) - One archetype lean (rare to span more than one + adjacent) - High-frequency lexicon (catchphrases, named concepts) **Watch for:** - **Wackaging** (Nick Asbury, 2011) — the "chatty, matey" tone Innocent invented in 2000 and dozens of brands copied. A copied voice is a discount voice. Lucie Bright (former Innocent copywriter), The Guardian, 2014: _"To be honest, we were mucking about when we started... We've always talked to everyone in the same way we talk to our friends, but with fewer swear words."_ - **Be willing to alienate.** Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario explicitly designed against polished bottled-water norms. _"We're just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do."_ **Pitfall:** the "we want to sound like Oatly" brief. The strategy underneath the style is the differentiator, not the surface style. Borrowed voices age fast as audiences detect the imitation. --- ## Non-profit / NGO **Reference brand:** charity: water. **Voice carries the moral case.** Scott Harrison (charity: water founder) built the voice around hope rather than guilt: _"I saw charities using shame and guilt to manipulate people into giving."_ **Default attribute set:** - Hope-led, not guilt-led - Concrete protagonist over statistics - Specific scene, specific name, specific number — abstraction kills donor empathy **Watch for:** - Voice differs across donor segments. Major-donor letters vs broad-appeal email vs grassroots social are three tones of one voice. Document each. - Storytelling is the foundation. Tyler Riewer (charity: water content lead, former ad creative) brought ad-craft storytelling to the org. **Pitfall:** mission drift in language. A 30-year-old org's voice has often calcified into jargon ("capacity building", "stakeholder engagement", "theory of change"). Audit annually and rewrite using the words actual beneficiaries use. --- ## Volunteering / Community Organisations **Voice must be permissive.** People sign up to give time; a hectoring tone kills the funnel. **Default attribute set:** - Inviting, not prescriptive - Reader's identity foregrounded ("you, who care about X"), not the org's mission - Light on rules, strong on principles — chapter leaders in many cities cannot be policed centrally **Watch for:** - Equip chapter leaders with a one-page voice card and a banned-phrases glossary, not a 30-page guide. - Founder voice often becomes the only voice — growth then requires a painful transition. Document the voice as detached from the founder early. **Pitfall:** mission-statement language ("we believe that every person deserves...") in volunteer-facing copy. Volunteers are not donors; they want to know what they'll _do_, not what the org _believes_. --- ## Industrial / Manufacturing **Reference brands:** Caterpillar, 3M. **Reliability is a voice attribute.** Voice supports perceived safety, precision, and certainty. Industrial buyers distrust marketing prose. **Default attribute set:** - Plainspoken expertise - Reliability-as-tone — short sentences, named specifications, no hedging - Specifications and case studies as primary brand surfaces **Watch for:** - Most industrial brand voice work fails by treating spec sheets as off-limits. They are the brand. The font, sentence structure, and unit conventions of a spec sheet shape buyer perception more than the website does. - Resist "B2B = boring" defaults. Caterpillar and 3M have invested in distinctive voice with real returns. **Pitfall:** corporate-anonymous tone. The phrase "industry-leading solutions" is the death rattle of industrial brand voice. --- ## Product-led Companies **Reference brands:** Duolingo, Linear, Notion, Slack. **Product UI is the largest single voice surface.** Empty states, onboarding strings, error messages, button labels, confirmation dialogs see more impressions than any blog post. **Default attribute set:** - Functional first in-product; flourish moves to marketing - Coordinated UX writing and brand writing (same owner or tight pairing) - Mascot-led humour only where it doesn't bleed into transactional flows (Duolingo gets this right; most imitators don't) **Watch for:** - Modulation between marketing and in-product is the hardest call. Marketing can be playful; in-product must be functional first. NN/g's error-message walkthrough is the canonical teaching case. - Slack's "Copy Principles" (Andrea Drugay) explicitly unify marketing, product, and partner-agency writing under one set of attributes. **Pitfall:** mascot-led humour leaking into payment failures, account suspensions, security warnings. Wrong register in transactional copy destroys trust. --- ## Personal Branding / Solopreneurs / Creators **Voice and person are the same thing.** No translation layer between brand and self. **Default attribute set:** - Captured phrases, not just attributes — solopreneur voices are recognisable by micro-tics (sentence openings, signature questions, sign-offs) - One archetype lean - Stable over time — re-platform without re-voicing **Watch for:** - Codify your voice for future delegation. When you hire your first ghostwriter or VA, you need a one-pager describing how you sound. Run NN/g 4-dimensions on yourself. - Chasing platform-native norms (LinkedIn-isms, TikTok cadence) until the voice becomes platform-shaped rather than person-shaped is the most common failure mode. **Pitfall:** the voice becomes a parody of itself when the creator outsources writing without first capturing the voice in a guide. Ghostwriters default to platform clichés. --- ## Public Sector / Government **Reference brand:** GOV.UK. **Clarity is a civic duty, not a stylistic choice.** GOV.UK's house position is that plain English is mandatory. Sarah Richards (former GDS Head of Content Design), 2014: _"if we use a lot of adjectives and describing words, people will think it's spin... so we find that if we just write very plainly, very clearly, very directly, everybody understands."_ **Default attribute set:** - Plain English (reading age of 9 is the inclusion principle, not infantilising) - Politically neutral but never anonymous - Specific actions, named services, no jargon, no Latin abbreviations - Sentence length: average 15-20 words (Attorney General's Office UK Writing Style Guide, February 2015) **Watch for:** - Avoid contractions that confuse non-native readers. GOV.UK avoids negative contractions (don't, can't) for this reason. - Banned-word list is the gold standard: replace "agenda" with "plan"; "deliver" with "make/create/provide"; "leverage" (unless financial) with "influence/use". - Tone shifts by service (DVLA vs HMRC vs NHS) but voice principles do not. **Pitfall:** writing for ministers rather than citizens. Build a review test that catches it (e.g. "would the reader at the bus stop understand this sentence?"). --- ## Categories requiring deep research The categories below have voice norms shaped by audience, regulation, and platform that override generic guidance. Trigger Phase 2 (Research) before defining voice for any of them. | Category | Why research is required | Likely constraints | | --- | --- | --- | | **Political / Advocacy / Campaign** | Voice is a coalition signal; tells listeners which group they're in before content arrives. Trade-off between precision and reach is category-specific. Crisis tone is the default tone. Slogans, refrains, cadence are intentional. | Campaign finance laws; platform policy; faction signalling | | **Religious organisations** | Voice carries doctrinal alignment; readership often spans devout and seekers, requiring careful modulation. | Doctrinal review processes; multi-language sensitivity; community norms | | **Defense / Military / Veterans** | Voice norms vary by audience (active-duty vs veteran vs civilian recruit) and by national context. | OPSEC, classification, public-affairs review processes | | **Gaming** | Audience-native register (gamer literacy varies by genre); platform constraints (Discord, Twitch, Reddit); rapid trend cycles. | Platform community norms; rating/age restrictions; rapidly shifting slang | | **Healthcare professional comms** | Two registers (clinician-to-clinician vs clinician-to-patient); regulatory liability on claims. | FDA, MHRA, EMA review; medical claim substantiation; informed-consent language | | **Adult content** | Platform constraints, age-gating, payment-processor restrictions; audience expectations vary by sub-category. | Payment processor TOS; platform AUP; age verification jurisdictions | | **Sports teams / leagues** | Fan-identity voice mediated by team history; rival-team handling; player privacy. | Player likeness rights; league communication policy; fan tribalism | | **Fintech / Crypto** | Regulatory landscape changes monthly; trust language is heavily scrutinised; community-native register on crypto. | FCA / SEC / MiFID II claims rules; FINRA promotion rules; community/forum norms | | **Cannabis / Regulated substances** | Country-by-country legality; payment processor restrictions; advertising bans on major platforms. | Jurisdictional advertising bans; platform AUP; trust-and-safety reviews | | **Insurance / Legal services** | Liability language; regulatory review; trust-vs-empathy balance. | State/national regulator review; ABA / SRA / Bar advertising rules | **Research brief template** (passed to the Phase 2 sub-agent): > Research current tone-of-voice norms for `` brands in ``. Cover: 1) typical voice attributes for the category; 2) common pitfalls and how audiences react to off-tone copy; 3) 2-3 reference brands with publicly observable voice patterns (cite primary sources); 4) regulatory, cultural, or platform constraints on voice. Report in under 700 words with sources cited inline.