“Make it sound like us” needs a few receipts

“Friendly, confident, authentic.”

A coffee shop, a tax firm, and a drum machine could all claim those words. Please don’t make them sound the same.

Give the writer the choices behind the adjectives. What do you notice? How would you explain it? Where does the sentence start trying too hard?

Give the adjective an example

Here’s a fictional neighborhood bakery.

Brief:

We’re warm, playful, and passionate about quality.

Possible copy:

Discover our delicious handcrafted pastries, baked with passion
to bring a little joy to your day.

Perfectly pleasant. Already forgotten.

Now add a concrete direction:

Talk about the food itself. Use short, conversational sentences.
A little humor is welcome. Skip “crafted with passion.”
Today’s cinnamon buns have crisp edges and a soft middle.
They’re available from 8 a.m.

Revised copy:

Crisp edges. Soft middle. Cinnamon buns from 8.
Napkins strongly encouraged.

The bun does the heavy lifting. The napkin line adds a wink. Breakfast survives without becoming a spiritual journey.

Would every bakery say it? Hopefully not.

Separate your voice from your customer’s words

Joanna Wiebe’s voice-of-customer approach uses research to find the concerns and desires that belong in the message.

That gives you two different inputs:

Suppose an agency’s customer says, “I’m tired of sending the same explanation to three different people.” That can lead to a clearer message than “streamlined collaboration.” It doesn’t mean you should copy the customer’s entire tone or publish their words without permission.

If you don’t have customer interviews yet, write down the assumption and test it in a conversation. A convincing AI-written customer quote still has one small problem: no customer said it.

Leave an edit the next draft can use

“Too generic.” Fair. But the writer now has a review of the problem and no directions home.

Vague note:

Make it more us.

Useful note:

Keep “crisp edges, soft middle.” It describes the bun.
Remove “a moment of indulgence.” We wouldn’t say that at the counter.

The second note names what to keep, what to change, and why. It also keeps a scoped decision scoped: removing that phrase from a bun post doesn’t mean your brand can never use emotional language.

This is the thinking behind carrying brand context and creative feedback into Overdrive Lab’s writing workflow. A writer has a better starting point when the brief includes actual choices you’ve made. You still decide whether the result sounds right.

A small voice brief to try

Here are three pieces of our writing we like.
Under each, I’ve noted what to keep doing.
Here are two phrases we rejected and the reason for each.
Here is the reader’s question, in their actual words.
Here are the facts for this draft.
Write two versions with different angles.
Don’t copy sentences from our examples.

Read the drafts aloud. Would you say the opening to a real customer? Does the useful detail survive if you remove the joke? Can you explain why you prefer one version?

That last answer is valuable. Save it beside the example. “More authentic” gets useful when you can point to what you mean.

Next read: Better AI copy starts before “write me a post”.