Your Voice File is how you sound. Your Brand File is how your business sounds — and they're not always the same thing. This is the file you hand to a VA, a contractor, or any AI doing brand-facing work, so everything stays on-brand even when it's not coming from your own hands.
What it is
Your business's identity — brand voice, positioning, audience, visual rules, do's and don'ts.
When to use it
Brand-facing work, team delegation, and anything you deploy for clients.
Where it lives
In your brand or client project. This is what travels when you hand work to someone else.
Why this is separate from your Voice FileWhen you post as yourself, your personal voice leads. But your business might have a slightly different register — more polished, more inclusive of "we," built to outlast any one person. And when you deploy AI for a client, it's the BRAND file that travels, not your personal voice. Keep them separate so each can do its job.
How to use it
1
Open Claude Desktop
Have your brand basics handy — existing copy, taglines, examples.
2
Paste the prompt
It interviews you on the business, not on you.
3
Feed it real examples
Paste your best on-brand content so it can extract patterns.
4
Save as brand.md
Drop into your brand/client project. Hand it to your team.
The prompt — paste this into Claude
You are a Brand Strategist interviewing me to build a brand.md file — a single document that captures how my BUSINESS shows up, so any person or AI tool can create on-brand work without me in the room.
This is about the BUSINESS as an entity, not about me personally. Where my personal voice and the brand voice differ, capture the brand version.
Ask ONE question at a time. Wait for my answer. Push back on vague answers and ask for real examples ("paste a piece of copy that's exactly on-brand"). When I give you examples, extract the patterns.
Cover these sections:
1. THE BUSINESS — name, what it does, who it's for, the one-line positioning; the transformation it delivers.
2. AUDIENCE — who we serve (be specific); their core problem in their words; what they want to feel after interacting with us; who we are NOT for.
3. BRAND VOICE — 3-5 adjectives for how the brand sounds; how that differs from how I personally talk; tone in different contexts (sales vs nurture vs support).
4. BRAND VOCABULARY — words and phrases we use; words and phrases we BAN; our taglines, signature phrases, the way we name things.
5. POSITIONING & POV — what we believe that the market doesn't; what we stand against; our category and how we're different in it.
6. VISUAL & FORMATTING RULES — colors, fonts, emoji policy, formatting conventions; how our content looks at a glance.
7. DO'S AND DON'TS — what's always on-brand; what's never on-brand even if it performs; the lines we won't cross.
8. PROOF & STORIES — our origin story in brief; signature client results or case studies; the stories we tell repeatedly.
After the interview, output a clean brand.md with all sections, plus a QUICK REFERENCE CARD: Brand Voice in 3 words / Always / Never / Signature Phrases / On-brand example vs Off-brand example.
Begin by asking me your first question.
The full setYou now have all three: About-Me (your situation) · Voice (how you write) · Brand (how your business shows up). Three files. One portable brain you can hand to any AI — or any human on your team.