Brand Identity Copywriting Is More Than Just Words


Antoinette Walton

February 2026

I use UpWork to get jobs sometimes. But mostly, I use it as a sort of pulse check for what’s going on in my industry. When I search for projects related to brand identity work, 9.9 times out of ten, they’re looking for a visual brand identity. 


The logo, brand colors, typography —  things of that nature. 


That is all fine and good but it’s not the full picture of what a brand identity is nor is it doing the concept justice.


There are 3 stages of brand identity work.

Stage 1. Visual identity

Stage 2. Verbal brand identity 

Stage 3. Operationalized brand identity


Why do we need a brand identity anyway, visual or otherwise?


Well for starters, if we’re just going to focus on the visual aspects of brand identity, it offers cohesion to the design team. Now we know how we want to present our brand visually and it's all in this neat little book. 


That’s stage 1. Any business can benefit from stage one brand identity work. Without it, you risk brand dilution. A website with totally different color schemes and logo compared to business cards or brochures makes the business look new, not credible, and untrustworthy with more discerning buyers. 


Stage 2 is where we level up and graduate. Stage 2 brand identity work is for growing orgs who’ve either outgrown their current brand identity, positioning or messaging, or never documented it in the first place.

Stage 2 verbal brand identity: Positioning

Getting stuck on stage 1 brand identity when you need a stage 2 brand identity is not a fun place to be. Many businesses don’t even know that stage 2 exists. They think brand identity stops and starts with the visuals and then are left wondering why their content across channels and made by different creators has no cohesion. Again, this risks making the business look new, not credible, and untrustworthy. And it makes content creation an exercise in frustration for the team and the business owner. 


When team members don’t have a single source of truth for what the business does, for whom, and why, you fall into a habit of checkbox marketing. We need a blog, so we get a blog. We need LinkedIn posts, so we create them. 


But why? And to what end? And for whom? 


Stage 2 brand identities allow your brand to focus on what type of messaging and strategy is going to be the most effective for your business. You get out of checkbox marketing purgatory and you prevent burning out on creating a bunch of busywork, random content that goes nowhere.

Stage 2 is where we start to answer the following:

  1. What are the brand’s core values?
  2. How do we use the core values to inform the brand’s personality archetype?
  3. How do we convey that personality in the brand’s voice and tone?
  4. How do we effectively communicate and differentiate the brand and its offerings (positioning and messaging)?
  5. How easy is it for customers to get the offering?
  6. Does the cost justify the perceived value of the offering?
  7. Will my prospect look smart for buying it?


Stage 2 brand identity is where the copywriting comes into the equation. 


Too many brand identities made at this stage begin and end with numbers 1 to 3. But number 4, and the subset of questions beneath it, is absolutely critical to effective brand identity copywriting.


Personality versus logistics

Having a strong brand personality is important. It helps differentiate the brand, and it offers structure for content creation. For example, McDonald’s brand is more comforting, almost like a caregiver type brand, whereas Burger King is much more irreverent and almost veers into bully brand territory. 


You could make a cogent argument that both brands are selling the exact same things, but the experience they sell is different and is meant to appeal to different customer profiles. The way the brand personality is conveyed (through voice and tone in its content) is a vehicle for that appeal. 


But while personality helps with positioning, differentiation and brand recall, it doesn’t help us with our messaging. If you have a brand identity that stops at questions 1-3, you’re missing out on the one part of stage 2 brand identity work that is meant to directly support pipeline:


Answering the 3 buyer questions — how easy? How much? How smart?


These are the logistics. This is where you take your messaging (that’s the answers to those questions) and use it to tee up sales. If your content can effectively and consistently answer those questions, then marketing and sales are more aligned. Friction lessens while conversions increase. Your brand identity graduates to brand identity copywriting.


Stage 3: Operationalized brand identity copywriting

The first types of brand identities I made were stage 2, and stopped at questions 1-3. While my pleistocene era brand identities were high quality and did help my clients, they had two fundamental flaws:


  1. They were missing the logistics.
  2. They were limited in how they could be operationalized. 

Let’s do this in order and focus on number 1 fatal flaw first.

Sure, these brand identities helped my clients articulate their core values. This helped them start thinking about positioning. You see the problem? Momentum got lost. They didn’t go all the way with it. The brand identities gave them the instructions for how to say the thing, but not what the thing was. 


Logistics were missing. And logistics are where conversions live and die. Positioning and messaging are the keys to selling. Saying something cool in a unique voice may get attention. If it’s really good, it may even hold it. But it won’t capitalize on it. Personality is just the first step in the dance between your ideal customers and your brand — the icebreaker. 


Once I figured this out and started doing the messaging portion of the brand identity work, I discovered that way too many of these clients couldn’t even answer those questions! 


They’d come to me and my agency partners for marketing help. They thought this could help them improve the pipeline. If they’d had the fundamentals down, it would have. But they didn’t. I pretty much stopped doing just voice, tone, and personality and started including messaging work for my brand identity clients.


Results improved across the board:

  • Cohesive messaging across channels
  • Cohesive personality, voice, and tone across assets
  • Sales experienced less friction
  • Onboarding clients AND new team members became easier
  • Content started contributing to pipeline

Fatal flaw 2 was the potential money leak.

Those results? They were only gotten because those teams had the resources in place to operationalize their brand identity. Many teams didn’t. They’d put all this work and cost into the brand identity, then it would just sit there in a Drive folder. 


If they didn’t have a content strategist, editor, and/or project manager, operationalizing their brand identity wasn’t feasible. If no editor, who was going to ensure the writers were consistently producing content with the correct brand personality? If no project manager, who was going to ensure effective distribution? Who would create the briefs? If no strategist, who would ensure the content answered the buyer questions?

. . . you see where I’m going.

This was a problem that I believed an LLM like ChatGPT could solve. So, I started training custom GPTs on aspects of the brand identity, depending on where the bottlenecks were for the organization in question. 


They had a team of creators? AI could be used as a brand editor. It could also help craft effective briefs. Or even help an internal subject matter expert draft content. Either way, they had the brand identity and the tool they needed to fully operationalize it.


See the Results of the ProCopyCat Brand Identity Copywriting System

If you want to see how this looks in practice and what kind of results my clients have gotten, check the case studies: