Claim
"Write like YOU speak. Not how people generally speak, but how you specifically speak." Specific verbal tics, rhythms, analogies, and odd references are assets, not liabilities. In a market where most B2B copy is interchangeable, distinctive voice is the primary conversion mechanism — and it's the ultimate anti-AI signal because AI cannot replicate one specific person's voice.
Mechanism
Most copy advice flattens to "write conversationally," which produces generic conversational copy. Harland goes one level deeper: write your conversation, not the abstract median. Dollar Shave Club worked because it sounded like one specific guy who found the razor industry absurd. The voice was inseparable from the brand. Companion rule: people don't want to know how proud you are of your company — they want to know how you'll change their life. Every sentence starting with "We are proud to…" is about the company; delete and rewrite from the reader's perspective.
Conditions
Holds when:
- The founder or copywriter has an actual distinctive voice to preserve.
- The brand is willing to alienate the readers who don't fit (specificity is the cost).
Fails when:
- Enterprise B2B selling to procurement where neutrality reads as professionalism.
- Multi-author content programs where consistency across writers matters more than any one voice.
Evidence
"Write like YOU speak. Not how people generally speak, but how you specifically speak."
"People don't want to know how proud you are of your company. They want to know how you'll change their life."
— Dave Harland / The Word Man (synthesized from operator's published work)
Signals
- Brand voice doc names one specific human and lists their verbal quirks.
- Copy review test: "Read this aloud. Does it sound like the named person?"
- "We are proud to" and similar phrases are explicitly banned in style guides.
Counter-evidence
Multi-author content teams (HubSpot, Atlassian) deliver scaled SEO traffic with deliberately neutral, consistent voice. Voice-as-moat depends on a specific person staying with the brand; founder-voice strategies break when the founder leaves.
Cross-references
- (none in current corpus)