Hey, it's Alex.

Every time I work with a new client - I run a little test.

I pull one piece of copy from six places - their current homepage, product page, welcome email, Instagram caption, an ad, and a customer service reply.

Then I read them back to back.

For most brands - they sound like they were written by six different people. Because they were.

This is the tone of voice problem.

Most brands spend months on their visual identity, colours, fonts, photography, and almost no time defining how they sound.

And even if they do - it sits in some PDF, looking pretty, but never used.

The result is a homepage written by a copywriter, Instagram captions written by a VA, emails written by a marketing manager, and customer service replies written by someone who's never read any of the above.

The customer doesn't see these as separate channels. They see one brand that can't make up its mind.

Here's a simple exercise we run with brands. While we usually do a more extended version - I’ll keep this one quick and easy - plot yourself on four spectrums:

Formal ← → Casual
Serious ←→ Playful
Aspirational ←→ Relatable
Direct ←→ Poetic

Most founders can do this instinctively.

The problem is they've never written it down, which means everyone else on the team is guessing.

Once you've plotted your position, the next step is the vocabulary guide.

15 words your brand uses.

15 words your brand never uses.

This sounds simple. It's transformative.

One of our clients added "ritual" to their brand vocabulary and banned "routine." Same concept, completely different energy. That one-word change shifted the tone of every product description, every email, every social caption.

Suddenly the brand felt intentional instead of functional.

The real test is what I call the "This, Not That" exercise.

Take your homepage headline and write two versions - the generic version and the version that sounds unmistakably like your brand.

If you can't tell the difference, you don't have a tone of voice yet.

Your products might be unique. But if you sound like every other brand in your category, nobody will stick around long enough to find out.

Last week I started to share some ecommerce strategy videos.

After recording 17 videos for the upcoming M-nus launch that teach brands how to grow their profit online, these were simple - and it’s the start of a pattern from me.

Moving forward, I’ll be consistently posting strategy and problem-solving videos on my LinkedIn, as well as my upcoming YouTube.

This is what I live and breathe and do every day anyway, so while I have some interesting concept videos coming out with the help of characters from Suits, Breaking Bad, Parks & Rec, and The Office - sometimes you just need some solid insight into what’s going on and what to focus on.

Two videos from last week:

The response to the M-nus waitlist opening last week blew me away - the waitlist is now far larger than the number of slots we're opening in July.

As a reminder - M-nus connects to your Shopify, Klaviyo, Microsoft Clarity, Meta, GA, Gorgias, and more.

It then generates you an exact plan of action items and the exact steps to implement yourself - all focused on profit backed by your data and our insights.

All you need is 15 minutes a day to tick these off.

Once a task is done, M-nus tracks the financial gains to demonstrate the increased profits based on that task.

Plan complete? Generate the next, and continue to scale your profit.

Every single recommendation is based on your data and filtered through my 5C framework - specifically designed to focus on getting more of your ideal customers, and moving your brand into a category of one:

Waitlist subscribers get notified first of the opening slots. Once they're gone, they're closed until we open them again.

Next week - I’ll be sharing an update on how you can use M-nus brand brain to generate your retention campaign strategies using your data and our customer persona data, and even build the emails and flows inside Klaviyo for you.

Reply "Waitlist" and I'll add you to the waitlist.

Thanks for reading!

Alex Murton
Shopify for Lifestyle Brands
Co-Founder @ Studio Almond & Almond Labs.