To be fair, LinkedIn didn’t create this strange dialect of professional life. Corporate people were flattening themselves long before social media came along. LinkedIn just gave the habit a showroom, a place where everybody could watch everybody else perform.
I have this friend, we’ll call him Glen, mostly because his name is Glen. Glen is outgoing, naturally funny, and easy to talk to. He has a way of speaking that pulls you in and relaxes you. So when he told me he’d been asked to speak at a conference one weekend, I didn’t hesitate when he asked if I wanted to come along.
As I sat in the room listening to the other speakers, I kept thinking they all sounded the same. Same topic, same buzzwords, same careful inflection. I was champing at the bit for Glen to get up there and show these clowns how to actually talk to a crowd.
Finally, he did. Dressed in a blue suit, with a fresh haircut and reading glasses, Glen looked like a hip college professor. You could feel the room shift when he stepped to the podium. He carried himself with more ease than the three speakers before him, and for a moment it seemed possible that here, at last, was someone worth listening to.
Then he started speaking, and I found myself wondering what the hell had happened to my friend Glen.
He sounded like all the others. Same buzzwords. Same gentle conference voice. Same careful, soothing delivery, as if he were addressing a room full of delicate people who might shatter if he put any actual personality into the thing. Gone was his spark, his pull, that quality he has when a room starts leaning toward him without realizing it. Instead of sounding like himself, he sounded like the version of himself he thought the conference wanted.
He spoke in a corporate rhythm, using corporate words and making corporate gestures. The water glasses started snoring. When he finished, the applause was polite and completely forgettable. Afterward, he asked what I thought. I told him I missed hearing him speak, because the robot I’d just listened to wasn’t him.
To his credit, he knew exactly what I meant. He said that’s how those events work. You try to slip something new in, but you can’t sound too strange, too direct, or too off-script. So you adjust.
There’s adjusting, and then there’s surrender. Glen’s usual style, the one that makes people listen, got flattened into the approved language of the room. By the end, he didn’t sound like himself at all. He sounded like everyone else, which is another way of saying he disappeared.
LinkedIn Didn’t Invent This Voice. It Perfected It
To be fair, LinkedIn didn’t create this strange dialect of professional life. Corporate people were flattening themselves long before social media came along. LinkedIn just gave the habit a showroom, a place where everybody could watch everybody else perform credibility in public and quietly start borrowing the moves.
Spend enough time there, and you start to see the pattern. A certain tone gets rewarded because it sounds polished. A certain kind of phrasing travels because it feels safe. A certain kind of insight keeps showing up because it is not especially insightful, but it is dressed in the right clothes. Before long, people begin to sound less like themselves and more like what they think professional people are supposed to sound like.
That would be annoying enough on its own, but the bigger problem is that brands do it too. They start picking up the same rhythms, the same swollen little phrases, the same fog of importance. They don’t speak plainly when plain would do. They don’t say something sharp when sharp would help. They reach for language that sounds businesslike, which often means it has been scrubbed of personality, surprise, and any sign of an actual pulse.
The result is a voice that’s hard to object to and even harder to remember. It sounds respectable and informed, and it seems like it belongs on a panel with a branded water bottle nearby. What it doesn’t sound like is alive.
And that’s the trap. Once a brand starts speaking in this borrowed tone, it may feel more legitimate for a while, but it also becomes harder to tell apart from the fifty other brands doing the exact same verbal cosplay.
The Problem Isn’t Professionalism. It’s Sameness in a Blazer
This is where people can get touchy, because the minute you make fun of business language, somebody decides you must be arguing for chaos. You’re not. Nobody is asking brands to show up barefoot, overshare, or talk like they’ve had two margaritas at lunch. The issue isn’t professionalism. The issue is what happens when professionalism gets mistaken for personality, and every sentence starts dressing for a promotion it’s never going to get.
A professional voice can still be sharp, warm, clear, and recognizably human. It can still carry judgment, confidence, and even a little charm. What it cannot do, at least not for long, is survive on polish alone. The moment every sentence starts to sound as if it has been cleared by six cautious adults and a legal department with poor circulation, the brand stops sounding trustworthy and starts sounding managed.
That’s an important distinction, because a lot of brands aren’t lifeless by accident. They are lifeless by procedure. They keep reaching for language that feels acceptable in the room instead of language that feels true to the people they want to reach. In the short term, that can feel sensible. Nobody gets nervous. Nobody objects. Nobody has to defend a sentence with any real backbone in it.
But the market does not reward language simply because it was approved without incident. People respond to language that feels like it came from somewhere, that carries a point of view, a little heat, some sign of life. If your version of professionalism strips all that out, what you’re left with isn’t credibility. It’s camouflage.
How a Brand Starts Talking Like This
It rarely happens in one dramatic collapse. No brand wakes up one morning, throws open the shutters, and announces that from this day forward it will sound like a lukewarm keynote. The slide into sameness is usually quieter than that. A phrase gets borrowed because it feels credible. A line survives because nobody objects to it. A sentence from a deck sneaks into a homepage, then another follows, and before long, the whole thing is built out of language that has already been approved elsewhere.
That’s part of why the problem can be hard to spot from the inside. Each choice feels reasonable on its own. A safer word here, a softer claim there, a little less attitude, a little more polish. Nobody thinks they’re draining the life out of the brand. They think they’re making it clearer, more mature, more professional. What they’re often doing is removing the exact qualities that made the language feel distinct in the first place.
The other problem is that this kind of writing comes with a built-in illusion of competence. Because it sounds familiar, it feels usable. Because it resembles what successful companies say, it starts to seem like the right way to sound. That logic is seductive, especially in rooms where nobody wants to be the person defending a line with any flavor in it. Borrowed language can feel safe because it has already survived somewhere else. It has references. It has credentials. It also has no pulse.
So the brand slowly stops speaking from itself and starts speaking from the pile. A bit of jargon here, a bit of conference English there, a little polished fog laid over the whole thing until the original voice is barely visible. By that point, the issue is no longer whether the writing is technically fine. The issue is that nothing in it feels owned.
The Cost of Sounding Like Everyone Else
The trouble with this kind of language is not that it sounds terrible. It’s that it barely sounds at all. It passes through the air without leaving much behind. Nobody recoils from it, but nobody leans in either. It does the job in the narrowest possible sense, which is often how brands end up mistaking it for success.
That gets expensive in ways people don’t always notice right away. When your language sounds like everybody else’s, your value starts feeling easier to swap out. Your message becomes harder to remember because there’s nothing in it for the mind to catch on to. Even trust can take a hit because people are good at sensing when words are arranged to sound correct rather than to say something real. They may not call it out directly, but they feel the distance.
This is especially painful for brands that are genuinely good at what they do. They may have strong people, strong thinking, and a real point of view somewhere in the building, but none of it makes it into the language. So, from the outside, they look like just another competent company making the same polished noises as everyone else. That’s a waste. Not just creatively, but commercially. If the words don’t carry any signal of who you are, then the market is left to sort you by price, convenience, or whoever yelled last.
And that’s really the cost. Bland language doesn’t just make a brand less interesting. It makes it easier to overlook, easier to forget, and easier to replace.
A Real Voice Has Edges
A real voice is not a branding accessory. It is not something you sprinkle on top once the strategy is done, like parsley on a plate nobody asked for. And seriously, do you eat that stuff or just leave it, I never know. It comes from having preferences, making choices, and being willing to sound like yourself even when the safer option is sitting right there in its sensible shoes, asking to be picked.
That’s where a lot of brands lose their nerve. Not in some dramatic act of self-betrayal, but in the steady refusal to leave fingerprints. They want the benefits of personality without the risk of actually having one. They want to be memorable without giving anyone anything definite to remember. So they keep reaching for language that has already been socially approved by a thousand other bland operators in decent blazers, all murmuring about transformation and value like members of a very boring cult.
But a real voice has edges. Not because it is rude or reckless, but because anything alive has shape. It has rhythm. It has a point of view. It knows when to be plain, when to press, when to stop trying to sound important and just say the thing. You can feel the difference immediately. One brand sounds as if it were assembled by committee to avoid upsetting a folding chair at a networking luncheon. The other sounds like somebody is actually home.
That kind of voice will not please everyone, and that is fine. Pleasing everyone is how brands end up speaking in beige fumes. The goal is not universal approval. The goal is recognition. You want people to hear the language and know there is a mind behind it, a temperament, a set of choices, maybe even a pulse. If your brand voice could be swapped with ten others and nobody would notice, that is not professionalism. That is surrender.
The Takeaway
A lot of brands do not have a voice problem because they lack smart people, good intentions, or useful things to say. They have a voice problem because somewhere along the way, they started confusing approved language with effective language. They learned how to sound polished, careful, and professionally housebroken, then acted surprised when nobody could remember a word they’d said.
That’s the strange little scam of LinkedIn-raised brand language. It promises credibility, but usually delivers camouflage. It helps you blend in with all the other well-behaved adults using the same foggy phrases, the same corporate posture, and the same borrowed tone. You may sound the part for a while, but sounding the part and being worth listening to are not the same thing.
At ThoughtLab, that’s where the real opportunity is. Not in helping brands sound louder, busier, or more dressed up for the meeting, but in helping them recover a voice people can actually recognize when it speaks. One with some shape to it. Some clarity. Some nerve. Because the brands people remember are rarely the ones that sounded the most professional. They’re the ones that sounded like there was an actual mind behind the words.
And that’s really the whole thing. Glen did not lose the room because he lacked ideas or presence. He lost it because he stepped up and spoke in a language that wasn’t his. Brands do it every day. The ones worth paying attention to are the ones that stop.
