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Marketing and Branding1Quick Start

Building a Lightweight Brand Voice Guide

What This Guide Covers

  • How to define your restaurant's voice and personality once, clearly, instead of re-explaining it in every prompt
  • How to turn that definition into a short reference document you reuse across every guide in this library
  • How to test the voice against real examples so it actually holds up, not just sounds good in theory

Why This Matters

Almost every other guide in this library asks you to describe your restaurant's tone somewhere in the prompt, "warm," "casual," "upscale but approachable." If you're typing that out fresh every time, you'll describe it slightly differently each time, and your captions, emails, and posts will drift in tone without you noticing.

A brand voice guide fixes this. It's a short document, built once with Claude, that captures how your restaurant sounds in writing. This is foundational work. It takes less than thirty minutes, and every other Marketing guide gets faster and more consistent once it's done.

Case Study

Olive & Oak Bistro

Olive & Oak had been posting for over a year, but looking back at six months of captions, the owner realized the tone swapped constantly, formal one week, jokey the next, sometimes generic enough that it could have been any restaurant. Working with Claude for half an hour, the owner built a one-page voice guide defining three core traits and a few real example sentences.

Result: Every caption and email written afterward referenced that one document, and within weeks the page started reading like it had one consistent personality behind it.

Step-by-Step Guide

  1. 1

    Answer a Few Honest Questions First

    Before opening Claude, jot down quick answers to these on your own:

    • If your restaurant were a person at a party, how would they talk?
    • What's a sentence you'd never say to a customer?
    • Name one competitor or brand whose voice you admire, and one you specifically don't want to sound like
  2. 2

    Build the First Draft with Claude

    AI Prompt
    I want to define a brand voice for my restaurant, [restaurant name],
a [cuisine/type] restaurant in [city]. Here's how I'd describe it:

If we were a person at a party: [your answer]
Something we'd never say: [your answer]
A voice I admire: [your answer]
A voice I want to avoid: [your answer]

Based on this, give me three specific personality traits that define
our voice, a short paragraph describing the overall tone, and three
example sentences showing the voice in action, one for a social
caption, one for a customer email, one for a menu description.
  3. 3

    Stress-Test It Against a Real Example

    AI Prompt
    Here's a caption I posted recently: [paste it]. Does this match the
voice we just defined? If not, what specifically is off, and how
would you rewrite it to fit?
  4. 4

    Refine Anything That Feels Off

    If a trait or example doesn't sit right, push back directly. Keep iterating until every trait and example genuinely sounds like your restaurant, not a generic version of it.

  5. 5

    Save It as a Standalone Document

    AI Prompt
    Put everything we just defined into a clean, short reference document
I can save and reuse, the three traits, the tone paragraph, and the
three example sentences.

    Save this somewhere easy to find, a pinned note, a doc in your Notion hub, wherever you'll actually look for it again.

  6. 6

    Reuse It in Every Future Conversation

    AI Prompt
    Here's our brand voice guide: [paste document]. Keep this in mind
for everything in this conversation.

    This single step is what keeps your tone consistent across dozens of guides and hundreds of posts going forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if our restaurant has more than one voice, playful on social, formal in emails?

That's normal and worth capturing directly. Ask Claude to define a core voice plus one or two "modes" anchored to the same underlying personality.

How do I know if the voice guide is actually working?

Re-run the Step 3 stress test every couple of months with a recent post. If Claude consistently says it matches with no real notes, the voice has become second nature.

Should every staff member who posts content see this document?

Yes, if more than one person writes captions or responds to reviews. Consistency breaks down fastest when different people are guessing at tone independently.

Can I change the voice guide later if the restaurant's branding evolves?

Yes, and you should expect to. Revisit it any time you rebrand or notice the restaurant's personality has shifted.

This feels like extra work before I even start posting. Is it really worth it?

It's the one guide in this library that makes every other one faster. Once it exists, you stop re-explaining your tone in every single prompt.

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