# Discourse Brand Voice

> Professional, utility-driven, and authoritative, speaking with the confidence of an open-source industry standard.

## Positioning
Discourse is the customizable, open-source community platform designed for tech companies and enterprises. It serves as a scalable infrastructure for mission-critical conversations, support workflows, and internal collaboration.

## Voice principles
*   **Empowering:** Focuses on what the user can build, own, and control.
*   **Technical but accessible:** Uses industry-standard terminology (SLA, SSO, API) without becoming dense or overly academic.
*   **Direct:** Uses short, declarative sentences that prioritize clarity over cleverness.
*   **Principled:** Emphasizes data ownership, open-source transparency, and long-term reliability.

## Tone by context
| Context | Tone |
|---|---|
| Marketing Hero | Bold and aspirational. Focuses on scale and the "where" of the industry. |
| Feature Lists | Functional and benefit-oriented. Uses active verbs like "Automate," "Protect," and "Scale." |
| Enterprise/Sales | Serious and reassuring. Focuses on security, guarantees, and "white-glove" service. |
| Community/Social | Collaborative and encouraging. Invites users to "get the conversation started." |

## Lexicon
- **Use:** Mission-critical, infrastructure, scalable, customizable, empower, open source, ownership, building blocks, white-glove, workflow.
- **Avoid:** Proprietary "black boxes," vendor lock-in, "social media" (prefers community/conversation), ephemeral (prefers searchable/knowledge base).

## Messaging do's and don'ts
*   **Do:** Emphasize that the user owns their data and can export it anytime.
*   **Do:** Use social proof and hard metrics (e.g., "0.8B+ monthly page views") to demonstrate scale.
*   **Do:** Frame features as solutions to specific business problems like "reducing support costs."
*   **Don't:** Use fluff or vague marketing buzzwords; stay grounded in the "stack" and "codebase."
*   **Don't:** Hide the open-source nature of the product; lead with transparency.
*   **Don't:** Sound like a temporary or "disposable" chat app; position as a permanent knowledge base.

## Evidence
- "Enterprise-grade infrastructure for mission-critical communities"
- "You own your community and your data"
- "Discourse is the customizable, scalable community platform"
- "Support that understands your stack"
- "No black boxes, no vendor lock-in, no surprises."