There is something quietly alarming happening in the world of brand communication. Open any major company’s blog, social feed, or email newsletter and you will find writing that is, by almost every technical measure, excellent. Sentences are clean. Arguments flow. The vocabulary is confident without being obscure. Somebody — or something — has clearly been paying attention to the craft.
And yet nobody is paying attention back.
Engagement rates continue their long decline. Brand emails are opened out of obligation or habit, scanned for the unsubscribe link. Social posts that would have generated conversation five years ago now scroll past in silence. The content is better than it has ever been, and it is landing with less force than ever before. This is not a paradox. It is a diagnosis.
“The problem is not that brand writing has become worse at being writing. The problem is that it has become worse at being human.”
The story of the last decade in brand content is the story of professionalisation. As content marketing matured into a discipline, it developed standards. Style guides multiplied. Tone-of-voice documents codified warmth, clarity, and approachability into repeatable formulas. Agencies learned the rules. Then AI arrived and learned them faster, better, and at effectively zero marginal cost per word. The result is an industry-wide convergence on a kind of frictionless, pleasant, technically accomplished prose that reads like it was written by nobody in particular for nobody in particular — which, increasingly, it was.
Readers feel this. They cannot always name it, but they sense the absence at the centre of the writing. Brand content has become skilled at mimicking the surface properties of trustworthy communication — conversational contractions, strategic vulnerability, the occasional self-deprecating aside — without possessing its actual substance. And the human nose for inauthenticity is remarkably sensitive. We have spent our entire evolutionary history detecting whether the person across from us is genuinely committed to what they are saying, or performing commitment for strategic reasons. We are not bad at this.
The irony is that much of what made brand content feel authentic in earlier, rougher eras was precisely its imperfection. A slightly idiosyncratic word choice, a paragraph that ran a little long because the writer was genuinely excited, an argument that went somewhere unexpected — these were the fingerprints of a person. They were costly signals, in the technical sense: things that would be inefficient to fake. When you eliminate all the imperfection in pursuit of quality, you eliminate the evidence of genuine investment.
“We have optimised for a reader who is evaluating sentences. The actual reader is evaluating intent.”
The deeper problem is a category error about what brand writing is for. Most content strategy frameworks treat writing as information delivery. The job of a piece of content is to communicate a message clearly and persuasively. Optimise for clarity. Optimise for readability scores. Optimise for SEO. Under this view, better writing is always better — the closer you get to frictionless transmission of your message, the more effective the content.
But this is not how persuasion actually works, especially in an era of radical abundance. When every brand is producing clean, clear, professional content, the technical quality of any individual piece approaches irrelevance. What matters is not whether the content is good. What matters is whether the reader believes that the organisation behind it has something real at stake — a genuine perspective, a coherent set of values, a willingness to say something that might cost them something. Technical quality cannot substitute for this. It cannot even approximate it.
Consider what actually builds brand trust over time. It is not a sequence of well-crafted blog posts. It is accumulated evidence of consistent character: the positions a company has taken when taking positions was inconvenient, the things it has admitted when admission was awkward, the arguments it has made that went against its commercial interest. This kind of trust is built through action and demonstrated over years, and no amount of content strategy can shortcut it. What content strategy can do — and what the current approach increasingly fails to do — is create moments of genuine contact between the brand and the audience. Writing that reveals something. Writing with a specific point of view that someone might actually disagree with. Writing that stakes a claim rather than hedging every sentence into soft consensus.
The fixation on quality has also produced a particular kind of timidity. If you are optimising a piece of writing for broad appeal and minimal controversy, you tend toward the centre. You round off the edges. You avoid the specific in favour of the general, the interesting claim in favour of the safe one. The result is content that offends nobody and moves nobody — a distinction without a difference, communicated with professional elegance.
What would actually work? Probably something messier. A company with a genuine perspective on its industry, articulated clearly and defended honestly, even at the risk of alienating some readers. A willingness to write about failure alongside success, with real specificity rather than the choreographed vulnerability that has become its own cliché. Opinion expressed as opinion rather than wrapped in the objective-sounding language of insight.
Writing that sounds like it was made by people who have thought hard about something and are genuinely trying to communicate it — not like it was assembled to perform the quality markers of trustworthy communication.
The upgrade in craft has been real. The problem is that craft was never the bottleneck. Brands do not have a quality problem. They have a character problem — and no amount of better writing will solve it.
(Views are personal)
