A strategy tells you where to go; governance provides the vehicle to get there safely.
This explores the ROI of consistency and the hidden costs of rogue content.
The hidden cost of inconsistent content
A tone of voice isn't just brand fluff, it's how your business shows up in the world.
That's important because people buy personalities (hasn't the influencer and political landscape proved that?!). And a personality builds trust, especially if people like it - makes them feel seen, heard and understood.
A brand is a personality. The colours are the style, how you identify goths, rockers and hippies just by looking at them. And the tone of voice is the personality.
Imagine if you were chatting to someone and then when you went to their house or workplace, they turned into a robot.
That's what happens when you lose brand identity as you move people closer to what it is you actually want them to do, buy.
Research conducted while I was at Aviva showed that tone of voice was lost in two clicks.
That means brand wasn't the problem, content governance was.
In a race to meet deadlines, we forget what's important.
How we show up in the world.
And this costs. People interact with a brand between five and seven times before they decide whether to buy from you, that's across different platforms and media. Imagine if they interacted with someone totally different every time.
We know 82% of consumer buy from brands they trust - this can only be built with consistency of interaction and personality.
It's not just consumers, 66% of B2B execs say they disengage from content that's inconsistent as it looks incompetent.
To you, it's just "words on a page". To them, it's trust.
Why AI demands stricter governance in 2026.
(The rise of hallucinated brand values and why humans must remain the "governing" body).
We were drowning in digital landfill content created to meet SEO and algorithm demands. We've now got AI slop to contend with.
Before we had standardise, homogenous brand values and tone of voice.
Let me guess, diversity for the former and clear for the latter.
Everything looks and sounds the same anyway.
Now we're all putting the same prompt into the same machine to get the same answer.
It's not AI, it's you, stupid! (that was a deliberate mimicking of AI prose, if you got it then you know what I mean).
Content has to add value, wherever it is.
From an error message to a white paper.
It needs to answer the question, so what.
Measuring the ROI of governance.
Business like numbers (which is why I think we're in the crisis and innovation stagnation) so if you want to tell your leaders about governance, get your analytics skills sharpened.
- Track how long things take you, you can do this in tools like Jira or Workfront
- Calculate how long it takes to onboard a new starter
- Find out about brand recall
- Create a pixel in the backend to track a reader's movements, if they come back and buy after following a consistent journey, the argument is won.
