For decades, marketers and communication specialists were told to fix one essential problem: Brands sounded too corporate and often painfully predictable.
Every message, copy, creative, and content felt like it was approved by multiple stakeholders, dipped in jargon, and then released in the world with all the traits of an instruction manual.
Then came a time when brands were now told to loosen up, be relatable and talk like real people, and join the hype or conversation and catch up with the trend. They were no longer just expected to advertise. They were expected to participate.
So, in today’s era, there is a kind of brand voice that instantly feels familiar; overly casual, aggressively witty.
In many ways, that shift was necessary; consumers had grown tired of robotic messaging. They wanted brands to sound warmer, quicker, and more aware of the world people live in. Especially in India, digital culture changes at an incredible pace, and online language seems to evolve by the day. The moment a brand starts sounding distant, it risks becoming irrelevant.
But somewhere in the race to become more human, many brands lost sight of their core voice.
Instead of developing a distinct voice, they began borrowing one. Instead of learning how to communicate with personality, they started performing various personalities. And, in the gap between authenticity and performance, lies some of the most awkward brand communication of this digital age.
The Great Race to be Relatable
Somewhere along the way, reliability became a KPI.
In India, this shift is especially visible. Over the last few years, Brand-Com has moved far from traditional ad copies and content.
In today’s era, brand voice is shaped by Instagram comments, cricket banter, meme pages, creator culture, and the everyday chaos of the internet. Now, brands are expected to react quickly, speak casually, and show cultural presence in real time.
This has genuinely created some smart marketing campaigns. We have seen brands integrate moment marketing well into their existing campaigns, turn social media into a personality-led channel, and speak in ways that feel more alive.
The intention was understandable. Culture moves fast, audiences are fragmented, and attention is brutally expensive. Traditional marketing language often feels invisible in feeds dominated by creators, communities, and constant conversation. So brands adapted. Or tried to.
But relatability cannot be mass-produced like packaging design. It has to come from a real understanding of who the brand is, who the audience is, and what kind of relationship exists between the two. When that understanding is missing, the result is painfully familiar: forced informality, borrowed slang, recycled meme formats, and copy that sounds less like a person and more like a brand impersonating one.
Consumers can sense that immediately, because people do not just hear tone. They hear intent.
Why “Sounding Human” So Often Goes Wrong
The phrase itself is misleading. Brands are not humans, and audiences know that. No one expects a beverage company, a fintech app, or a B2B SaaS platform to literally behave like a friend. What people want is not human imitation. They want communication that feels clear, relevant, and emotionally intelligent.
When brands misunderstand this, they begin confusing surface-level casualness with authenticity. They swap clarity for cleverness. They replace insight with internet slang. They believe lower-case letters, chaotic captions, and self-aware jokes automatically make them culturally fluent. They do not.
A brand saying “we understood the assignment” in 2026 is not inherently fresh. It may just be late.
And lateness is one of the biggest risks in meme culture. By the time a trend reaches most brand approval systems, it is often already over. Worse, audiences know it is over. So the brand does not look plugged in. It looks like it arrived at the party carrying a joke everyone stopped laughing at yesterday.
That is not personality. That is a delay disguised as relevance.
Forced informality is the new corporate jargon
Brands often talk about corporate jargon as the enemy of good communication, and rightly so. Phrases like “leveraging synergies” and “driving scalable impact” should be stopped.
But forced casualness has become its own kind of script. It is just packaged differently. Instead of “leveraging synergies,” we now get captions that are overly chatty, brand replies that try too hard to be savage, and product communication dressed up in meme-speak for no real reason.
One of the more damaging assumptions in digital marketing today is that “casual” automatically means authentic. It does not. A brand can use slang and still sound fake. It can be witty and still feel over-engineered. It can be loud and still say nothing memorable.
Sometimes the most effective communication is the one that feels clear, sharp, and confident, not the one trying hardest to sound cool.
This is especially relevant in India, where categories like fintech, edtech, health, and personal finance depend heavily on trust, wherein excessive informality can make a brand feel less approachable. Consumers may enjoy a playful post now and then, but when the relationship involves money, learning, or well-being, credibility matters more than a clever caption.
The imitation problem
A lot of brands today are trying to imitate a tone popularised by a handful of internet-savvy players. The issue is not that these brands have a distinct voice. The issue is that everyone else has started chasing that same energy without earning it.
The outcome is a feed where multiple brands, across completely different categories, begin to sound strangely interchangeable. A food delivery app, a skincare label, a fintech startup, and a media brand all start posting with the same self-aware humour, the same meme-first approach, the same “we are just like you” language.
But audiences do not remember brands for sounding generic online. They remember them for sounding specific.
That specificity is what most brands lose when they start chasing tone trends instead of developing a voice rooted in their own identity. What does the brand believe? How should it speak when it is not reacting to a trend? What emotional role does it play in people’s lives? What kind of humour suits it, if any?
These are harder questions than “Should we use this meme format?” But they are far more important.
Authenticity comes from knowing what the brand believes, how it sees the world, what emotional role it plays in people’s lives, and how that should translate across touchpoints. It is less about sounding casual and more about sounding coherent.
Engagement is not the same as brand strength
Much of the pressure to sound human comes from how platforms work. Humour gets shared, snark gets noticed, and trends bring quick engagement. So teams start optimising for reaction.
But reaction is not the same as resonance.
A post can perform well and still weaken the brand over time. It can go viral and still be forgettable. It can get laughs while making the brand seem insecure, overeager, or unsure of itself.
That matters because brands are not creators. They may borrow from creator culture, but they are building something more lasting: trust, memory, preference, and meaning. That takes more than fast internet instincts. It takes editorial discipline.
The strongest brands are not always the funniest. More often, they are the most consistent. They know when to speak, how to adapt, and when not to force relevance.
In Indian marketing, that kind of restraint is often undervalued because speed gets rewarded more visibly than judgement. But judgement is what turns a performance into a real voice.
What Brands should rather aim for
The solution is not to go back to bland corporate language. Audiences have no patience for that either. The answer is not less personality. It is more coherence.
Brands do not need to sound human in some generic sense. They need to sound believable.
Believable for their category, their audience, for the platform, and believable for the moment.
That may mean being witty for some brands, warm for others, direct for some, restrained for others. But whatever the tone is, it needs to feel earned. It needs to come from a clear understanding of brand identity, not from panic about staying culturally relevant.
Indian consumers are not expecting brands to become their friends. They are expecting them to stop sounding fake.
And in a world full of brands trying very hard to act like people, the ones that will stand out are those that remember a simpler truth:
Authenticity is not about sounding like everyone online.
It is about sounding like yourself, only better.
