TrueCar Brand Voice and Style Guide

I created and maintained the TrueCar brand voice and style guide, updating it frequently to note changes in the terminology we used, and to add new value props and research findings as they came in.

Role: Senior Product Writer

Timeline: Ongoing

Teams who used this style guide: Product/UX, Marketing, Corp Comms

Problem solved: Alignment of brand voice and style across product areas and marketing channels.

Summary

  • Why the style guide was needed: Across product and marketing channels, including the website, vehicle reviews, social media, blog, and more, we needed a unified system for brand voice, tone, and mechanics.

  • Biggest challenges: Surfacing these guidelines to siloed teams like the vehicle review team and making sure they followed them.

  • What changed: The introduction and use of the style guide created a unified brand voice across channels.

  • Business/user impact: Customers felt guided by and spoken to by TrueCar as a single brand, rather than a fragmented system of silos depending on where they were in the car-buying process.

Selected Slides

Table of contents

The TrueCar personality as we define it.

How we speak about dealers.

The meaning of TruePrice and how we use it.

Why we don’t use the word “breakdown.”

Value props we use when we talk about price.

Value props we can use throughout our end-to-end and Deal Builder experiences.

More granular copy guidelines.

Guidelines around gender and harmful stereotypes, as well as the use of first- and third-person pronouns when speaking to the customer.

UX-specific copy guidelines.

Legal issues we should keep in mind when writing copy.

Want to take a look at the full Content Style Guide?

Here it is.