Building a Brand Voice That AI Can’t Replace with Dave Harland

Welcome back to Market Movers: Building Brands and Links with Linkifi! Your backstage pass to building brands through SEO, digital PR, and entrepreneurial creativity. Hosted by Nick Biggs and Chris Panteli of Linkifi.

This episode features Dave Harland, the legendary copywriter, LinkedIn entertainer, and co-founder of Copy or Die. Dave shares why brand tone of voice is everything in today's AI-saturated world, why humor and human experience still reign supreme, and how brands can stand out by being unapologetically real.

Key Talking Points:

🧠 Why Your Brand Voice Matters More Than Ever Without a clear tone of voice, your brand sounds inconsistent, forgettable—and easy for AI clones to copy.

🎭 How to Craft a Distinctive Voice (Using Celebs!) Dave’s simple hack: model your brand tone after a famous figure to anchor style, attitude, and vocabulary.

⚡ The Danger of Fast-Tracking Creativity with AI Choosing from 50 mediocre AI outputs isn’t real creativity. Dave warns about losing the journey that makes your brand unique.

😂 Why Humor Beats Buzzwords Every Time Forget jargon and safe headlines—authentic humor taps into human emotion, wins attention, and drives loyalty.

🤖 What AI Still Gets Wrong About Copywriting From clumsy puns to lifeless metaphors, Dave breaks down why chatbots will never fully replace creative human writers.

💥 Launching 'Write the Funny' Dave’s new course helps brands and copywriters infuse real humor into their writing—without sounding forced or fake.

Quotes from Dave Harland:

"If you don't define your tone of voice, your brand will sound like a Frankenstein's monster stitched together by different writers."

"Chatbots aren't funny. They're like a 15-year-old at a disco—awkward, clumsy, and missing the point."

"If you want mediocrity fast, sure, use AI. If you want brand magic that makes people feel something, you need a human brain."

"Fast-tracking creativity strips away all the tiny moments that make something truly original."

"You can't build a brand voice by parroting your customers' words back to them. You have to be you."

Takeaways & Strategy Highlights:

✅ Anchor Your Voice to a Personality Pick a real person—celebrity, fictional character, or public figure—as inspiration to develop a vivid, relatable brand tone.

✅ Define Tone Early or Pay Later Without clear voice guidelines, you'll confuse your audience and force every new writer to guess (and mess it up).

✅ Use AI Only to Save Time on the Boring Stuff AI is useful for repurposing content across formats—not for inventing your big brand ideas.

✅ Make Your Copy Unmistakably Human Real experience, humor, nuance, and lived emotion can’t be faked by bots—and that's your brand's edge.

✅ Treat Copywriting as Brand Strategy, Not a Task Good writing isn't just words. It's positioning, personality, and persuasion baked into every sentence.

About Dave Harland:

Dave Harland is an award-winning copywriter, LinkedIn humorist, and co-founder of Copy or Die. With nearly two decades of experience helping brands create unforgettable tone of voice, Dave blends sharp humor with smart strategy. He’s a sought-after speaker, trainer, and now course creator, helping businesses inject real humanity (and belly laughs) into their copy.

 

🔗 copyordie.co.uk

🎯 thewordman.co.uk/course

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