Your customers don't want a script. They want a personality.
I saw a perfect example on Facebook last week. Someone commented on an Audi post for the new A2 e-tron teaser — genuinely excited, asking about price and availability. The reply?
"We value your enthusiasm and will keep you posted on all news right here."
The customer was ready for a conversation. The brand closed the door with corporate filler. Safe. Bland. Forgettable. Say nothing, offend no one, achieve nothing.
That single reply is the tone-of-voice problem in miniature. The same lifeless language shows up in email copy, ad headlines, website FAQs, post-purchase flows and chatbot responses. It's what happens when a brand optimises for approval over connection — and somewhere along the way decides that sounding like a human being is a legal risk.
Now compare it to Ryanair. They get roasted daily — bags, tiny seats, the lot. Ryanair roasts back. Their 2.5-million-plus TikTok followers didn't show up for cheap flights. They showed up for the personality. The flights are a bonus.
Or Get Baked, the Leeds bakery. When they found their sprinkles contained a banned food colouring, most brands would have issued a quiet apology and gone into hiding for a fortnight. Get Baked leaned into #Sprinklegate with their usual dry, self-deprecating voice. Instagram went from 4,000 to 68,000 followers in 24 hours. Not from a campaign. Not from a PR firm. From a personality.
Ryanair and Get Baked sound like people. Audi sounds like a press release from 2006.
Community management vs community engagement
Stop talking about community management. Start talking about community engagement. Managing implies control. Engagement implies actually showing up. One of those is an ops job. The other is a brand job.
And this isn't a social media shift. It's a whole-brand shift. It has to run through email, product copy, website FAQs, customer service templates — even the out-of-office reply. A single scripted interaction undoes a month of clever content. Consistency is the point.
Try this tomorrow
Pull your last 20 social replies, your last 10 post-purchase emails and your most recent product page. Take the logo off.
Would anyone be able to tell it's you?
If not, you don't have a voice. You have a script. And scripts are why your brand feels interchangeable with the one next to it on the shelf.
Three things to take from all this
- Ditch the script. Safe, templated language protects no one. It just bores everyone who reads it.
- Engage, don't manage. Different mindset. Different job. Different hire.
- Let tone do the work. Ryanair and Get Baked don't rely on campaigns to feel human. Their tone does it every day, for free.
The script isn't protecting your brand. It's just making it forgettable. And forgettable brands get outspent every single time, because they have to pay media to do the job their personality should have been doing.
