by: Deedi Brown

Like virtually all other content leaders in the tech industry, I spend a lot of my time in Claude these days. But my favorite thing I’ve used it for isn’t a piece of content. It isn’t compiling data from across our tech stack with fancy MCPs. It isn’t a campaign brief. It isn’t even something our customers will ever see.

It’s our Brand Voice and Positioning Guide.

I know that sounds deeply nerdy. But that’s okay, because I expect most of the people reading this blog will also think style guides are cool — and if you don’t, hear me out, because this 75-page document has become the most useful tool that our broader marketing team and I use every single day.

When I started building this guide a couple years ago, it was meant to be an internal resource for writers on my team. Standard stuff: an overview of the company, style guidelines, voice principles, word usage. But as AI tools became more central to how people work — and as more and more members of the company started using those tools to write (well-intentioned but mediocre) first drafts, I realized this guide could go a lot further. It could give any AI tool the full context it needed to actually sound like us and talk about our product accurately.

These days, the Bubble Brand Voice and Positioning Guide lives as a Google Doc that can be added to the knowledge base of every Claude project or exported for use in other LLMs. Contractors and agencies consistently tell me it’s one of the most helpful onboarding resources they’ve ever received. And most recently, we used it as the foundation of our brand kit in AirOps, enabling us to refresh hundreds of pieces of old content at scale.

When I was in college, I was always the person who made a detailed study guide and then shared it with everyone because I wanted us all to get good grades. This blog post is basically that, but in the real world. I wanted to share what’s in our guide and how I built it, in case you’re feeling inspired to build something similar.

In other words: Feel free to steal it. 

The anatomy of our AI-first brand guide

Cheat sheet

Because most of this guide is very detailed (as it’s intended to be an AI contextual resource first and foremost), this first section is basically one big summary with fast facts for actual humans at my company. It includes copy-pastable company descriptions and key stats (like how many users we have), a positioning overview, an audience overview, and our brand personality at a glance. 

Who is [company]?

This section covers the foundational context anyone needs to understand us. It’s also relatively short (only a few pages long) and a fantastic resource for new employees or contractors.

It starts with a company overview. There’s a list of our values, our PR-approved stats, and information about our founders.

Then there’s our brand convictions — in other words, what we believe. At Bubble, that’s things like “The problem with vibe coding isn’t the vibe; it’s the code.” and “The future is AI speed and human control.”

Finally, we have the “How We Describe Ourselves” section, which provides approved versions of our company description at multiple lengths: a headline/TL;DR (for social media bios and such), a 1-sentence version (for quick introductions), a 3-sentence version (for elevator pitches), and a 5-sentence version (for PR boilerplates). Finally, there are a few iterations of the 3-sentence version tailored for key audiences. 

The company descriptions are printed in green and clearly marked as something people can copy/paste. (The rest of the guide is labeled as internal use only.)

Features & positioning

This is one of the meatiest sections, and it’s where we get really specific about our product. It starts with our competitive landscape and market context, then gives an overview of our differentiation. There’s a comparison table that lays out our product’s advantages versus our two key categories of competition. For Bubble, that’s AI coding tools and traditional code, but obviously this would look different depending on your space.

Then we detail our key benefits with full descriptions of each one. This is followed by a features and talking points section: basically, detailed bullet points on all our key features. This level of specificity is what enables AI (or a new contractor, or someone in sales) to write about our product accurately instead of making things up or being frustratingly vague. It’s also been extremely helpful as I’ve started using AirOps to help update our competitor comparison blog posts, which are super long and detailed.

The section wraps up with positioning guidance for different audience types, because as everyone reading this knows, how you talk to a startup founder is different from how you talk to an enterprise IT buyer.

ICPs & personas

This section helps anyone writing understand who they’re talking to, which content marketers know is important but often gets skipped by people who weren’t trained as writers.

We list out our primary and secondary ICPs with detailed information like who they are, what they need, and why they would choose us. Then we list out the four personas under our primary ICP and go much deeper: demographics, key motivations, pain points, success metrics, preferred features, messaging themes, and a one-paragraph summary of how to talk to them.

Next, we provide guidance on using personas effectively, broken down by team within the company. Not everyone is writing all the time; teams like Sales and Customer Success can still benefit from this info in how they tailor their outreach and strategies. Finally, we include persona-specific tone adjustments and preferred terminology by persona (for example, some audiences respond to “build” while others want to hear “develop”).

Brand personality

As you would expect, this section defines who we are as a brand. We start by outlining our brand attributes — five traits that determine how we show up in the world. Think approachable, trustworthy, and so on.

Next comes details on our brand personality. This is where things get fun, and where really “writing in the brand voice” starts to take shape. It includes core truths about us, like “We’ll never pass up an opportunity to cheer you on. (You’ve got this.)” and “We have high standards. But we also don’t let perfectionism stop us.” And then, of course, there’s a “this but not that” list of adjectives to help clarify where our personality lines are. Like, we’re nerdy, but not technical. Thoughtful, but not indecisive. That kind of thing.

And because personality needs to adapt to platform expectations, we break down how our brand shows up differently across social media channels. What works on LinkedIn doesn’t necessarily work on TikTok, and we want to take advantage of the unique features and trends on each platform while still sounding like ourselves.

Voice, tone, & writing guide

Now we’re getting really nerdy, my friends. This section gets into the actual mechanics of how we write. It starts with our brand voice principles — things like “Don’t put words in people’s mouths” and “Eliminate or explain jargon.”

Then we explain the difference between voice and tone (if I had a dime…) and outline common tones we adopt for various content formats. I’m pretty proud of the way we’ve figured out how to quantify that: scores from 1 to 5 on four key dimensions: formal to casual, serious to funny, respectful to cheeky, and matter-of-fact to enthusiastic.

So for blog posts, it looks something like:

• On a scale from formal (1) to casual (5): 4
• On a scale from serious (1) to funny (5): 2.5
• On a scale from respectful (1) to cheeky (5): 3.5
• On a scale from matter-of-fact (1) to enthusiastic (5): 3

We also include three writing examples for different formats: homepage copy, a blog intro, and an onboarding welcome email. For each one, we show an “on brand” version, a “too formal” version, and a “too casual” version so people (and AI) can see the boundaries and understand where the sweet spot actually is.

Style guide and word use

This is the practical nuts and bolts section that settles all the little questions that come up constantly when you’re writing or reviewing copy.

The style guide portion covers punctuation (contractions, Oxford comma, etc.), bullet points (when to put periods at the end, whether to capitalize at the start, etc.), numbers (when to use numerals versus spelling out, using K for thousand, etc.), capitalization (title case versus sentence case for subheaders, etc.), quotes (when to use first/last name versus just first or last, attributing quotes in present tense or past tense, etc.), acronyms, dates and times, and miscellaneous decisions like phone number formatting and which emoji skin tone to use.

The word use portion defines what terms are branded or proper nouns and which are not. It covers product-specific terms — for us, that’s things like “build on Bubble” versus “build in Bubble” and how to properly write about SOC 2 Type II compliance. And it settles common words that could be written multiple ways: frontend versus front-end, OK versus okay, cofounder versus co-founder. You know, the stuff people Slack you about at 4pm on a Friday.

And finally, we have our inclusive style guide, aka guidelines on writing inclusively. For example:

Use inclusive grammar. A person is a noun. When describing parts of their identity, use an adjective. For example, trans men, Black people, women. Avoid: transgenders, Blacks, females.

Then we get specific with style guide choices for race and ethnicity (like capitalizing Black) and gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation (like using they instead of “he or she”).

Building this (one section at a time)

I built this guide over the course of several months, one section at a time, pulling inputs from different teams across the company and working with Claude to integrate everything into a cohesive resource.

For example, our product marketing team had a slide deck about our ICPs and personas. I fed that to Claude along with the sections I’d already worked on, and asked it to help me create something comprehensive enough that an LLM would understand who we’re talking to and how to speak to them. I also looked at examples from other companies — Mailchimp’s style guide has always been a favorite of mine.

The guide has evolved constantly since then. Every time we have a positioning shift or launch a new feature, I provide slides, bullet points, or MRDs to Claude and work with it to integrate the new information. It’s truly a living document.

If I were starting from scratch today, I’d probably give Claude the outline I’ve shared above along with as much contextual information as I could gather about the company, product, and audience. I’d also tell it to search our website and blog to understand how we talk about ourselves currently. Then I’d refine from there, adding specific examples and adjusting the voice to match how we actually sound.

And look, of course you could write all of this without AI. Style guides and brand guidelines have existed forever. But I’ve accepted two truths: first, people are not going to read my style guide (lol), and second, people are going to hand my team AI-generated drafts whether we want them to or not. Having our guide in this comprehensive, AI-first format means people (and their AI tools) can and will actually use it. 

It’s the single biggest unlock that has made our AI-assisted work actually good instead of just okay. And at this point, I can’t imagine operating without it either. ■

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Deedi Brown is Head of Content, Social, and Education at Bubble, where her team gives people the tools to bring their world-changing ideas to life. Before that, she led content at Ellevest, an investment platform built by women, for women. By night (and very early morning) she also reviews books on Instagram and Substack @deedireads. Outside work, you can find her running or knitting Christmas stockings with an audiobook in her ear.