One foundational distinction I needed to establish early with stakeholders was the difference between brand voice and brand platform. The Sincerely campaign, the playful food-forward advertising voice, was performing well in paid media. But teams were attempting to carry that register into transactional screens where it didn’t belong, assuming that brand consistency meant applying the same tone everywhere. Part of my work was making the case that a consistent brand voice isn’t a single tone. It’s a set of principles that flex appropriately across contexts while remaining recognizably the same brand.

From that foundation, I defined three content principles to guide decisions across every team:

• Informative: content is clear at every level, from page hierarchy down to microcopy. If a user has to pause to interpret something, the content has failed.

• Intuitive: pages are consistent and scannable. Users shouldn’t have to relearn how to read a screen they’ve seen a version of before.

• Engaging: conversational language throughout. We talk to customers, not at them.

  
  

Delivering Guidance How and Where Needed

Principles only work if people can find and apply them in the moment a decision is being made. Because teams worked in different environments (designers in Figma, engineers in Confluence, agencies in PowerPoint decks), I built the guidelines in formats native to each context rather than producing a single document and expecting everyone to adapt to it. I integrated content standards directly into the design system in Supernova, so designers encountered the guidelines at the point of creation rather than after the fact. I produced parallel versions in Confluence for engineering teams and PDF and PowerPoint for external agency partners.

To ensure cross-team alignment, I created a customer journey map showing how voice and tone should shift across the experience. One example of that shift in practice: in the awareness and browse phases, copy was aspirational and warm, written in second person and present tense, focused on possibility. In the post-purchase and account management phases, it became precise and reassuring, using confirmation language with no marketing phrasing and nothing that could introduce doubt at a moment when the customer needed clarity. The same brand, different register, serving a different need. That map gave teams a concrete reference for why the same voice guidelines could produce different-sounding copy depending on context, and why that was correct rather than inconsistent. Following the rollout, I trained teams on the guidelines and established regular office hours for questions in practice.

Outcome

The system reduced the content team’s review burden significantly while improving consistency across the experience, giving distributed teams the tools to make better content decisions independently without waiting for a centralized bottleneck to sign off.