The Mosaic Approach to Crafting a Brand Voice with Authenticity
By Philip Eliot

If you’ve ever stared at a client’s style guide and wondered how to write in a voice that’s not your own, this is for you.

When I first encountered the term “brand voice,” I froze. I wanted to write well — but I had no idea how to make someone else’s message feel authentic.

I was only in Week 4 of AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure [now Seven-Figure] Copywriting and had, totally by accident, already landed my first client: a chain of boutique hotels in the heart of London. I’d written a sales presentation for a high-flying events director who used it in their job interview. She got the job — and was kind enough to pass my name on to the marketing director.

I was hired the next day.

But the struggle began when my first official assignment came in: to write content for the hotel brochure — in their “brand voice.” I had no idea how to do that.

So, being the sort who believes every crisis can be completely solved, or at least avoided, in a bookshop, I did what any sensible book lover might do: I went to a bookshop. And I hid.

That’s where I found Vivian Gornick’s book The Situation and the Story.

Flip the Impossible Tiles

Gornick had me from the start. Here was a writer in a surprisingly familiar situation: struggling to locate her voice on the page. Wondering why she was such a fraud.

I, of course, was trying to find my client’s voice — but that’s the gift of a storyteller like Vivian Gornick: The personal becomes universal. And somehow, in her struggle, I found the beginning of a solution to mine.

The truth was, I wasn’t scared of writing, I was scared of faking it. And as soon as I heard the words “brand voice,” I felt completely out of my depth. I frantically began trying to construct entire sentences with word lists from the brand style guide.

A bit like playing Scrabble with a rack full of Zs and Xs — trying to build something sensible out of impossible tiles.

But hiding in that bookshop, doing my trick of “reading intently to keep the world at bay,” I came across these words:

“The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject in hand.”

I paused. I reread it. Then again. And again.

We Are Not Already There

The longer I sat with that sentence — “imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject in hand” — the more it started to do something …

What Gornick revealed was that every act of writing — whether personal narrative or persuasive copy — asks the same essential question: Who is speaking, and why should the reader trust them?

Steadily, these words recalibrated how I thought about writing.

Writers are not the “person” on the page. Writers “write” the person onto the page. That shift changed everything.

Build a Mosaic of Understanding

The mistake I’d been making was one of vanity. I believed a writer brought the whole of themselves to every piece of work. And the greater the whole, the greater the work. Vivian Gornick gave me permission to look at it from a different point of view.

Just like in a presentation, you don’t bring your whole self — you bring the part that’s needed. The suit, the tie, the confidence, the charm. You choose what to emphasize. You compose a version of your “self” that fits the moment.

Voice, I learned, isn’t something you find, and it isn’t something you inherently own. It’s something you build — deliberately, piece by piece.

I hadn’t faked the presentation that won my friend the job — I’d listened. I’d understood her hopes, shaped them through craft, and, using the tools I’d learned from the AWAI course, translated them into something persuasive and true.

So I stopped looking for style. Instead, I started imagining the part of myself who might naturally speak for that place.

And I listened. I asked hotel staff questions — not about branding, but about what they thought. What they liked and didn’t like. What they cared about. I took notes. Fragments. Odd turns of phrase. I paid attention to the way they spoke, the rhythm of their sentences, the offhand details that gave that place and time its unique character.

Then I wrote as them.

What emerged wasn’t just a tone. It was a perspective. A personality.

So what does this mean for you, the copywriter? It means you start by asking, “Who am I here? What matters now? What part of me understands this message, this audience, this tone?”

From there, the writing becomes not just persuasive, but personal.