Claude Projects and Instructions for a Consistent Brand Voice

#01Why not just paste your brand guide each time?

You can, and many people do. But it costs usage every time, you'll forget to do it when you're in a hurry, and each colleague will paste a slightly different version. The result is inconsistent copy and a lot of wasted messages.

Claude now gives you three places to keep context that persist across chats. Anthropic's help centre describes the difference clearly: instructions apply broadly to everything you do; Projects hold static knowledge for one area of work; and Skills hold procedures that Claude loads dynamically when a task calls for them (Anthropic). Used together, they mean every brand task starts with the right context without you thinking about it.

#02What goes in your account instructions?

Account instructions live in Settings and apply to every conversation, in every project. Keep them short and personal: things that are true whatever you're working on.

Good candidates:

• your role and company in one sentence;
• spelling conventions, such as UK or US English;
• general formatting preferences, such as "prose by default, bullets only when I ask";
• habits you want, such as "tell me when you're unsure of a fact".

Don't put your whole brand voice here. If you also use Claude for personal tasks or for other clients, brand rules will leak into everything. Brand voice belongs in a project.

I'm a content marketer at [company], a B2B software company.
Write in UK English. Use prose by default and bullets only when
I ask or when a list is genuinely clearer. When you're unsure of
a fact, say so rather than guessing. Keep answers concise unless
I ask for depth.

#03How do you build a brand-voice Project?

Projects are available on every plan, including the free plan, where you can create up to five (Anthropic). Each project has a knowledge base and its own instructions, and both apply to every chat inside it.

A few details from Anthropic's documentation matter here:

• Claude can't see the project name or description. Don't rely on calling it "Brand voice – formal" to tell Claude anything. Put everything that matters in the instructions or knowledge.
• Context isn't shared between chats in a project unless it's in the knowledge base. A great decision in one chat won't carry to the next unless you add it.
• On paid plans, large projects switch to RAG mode automatically as knowledge approaches the context limit, so Claude retrieves the most relevant parts rather than reading everything (Anthropic).
• Team and Enterprise plans can share projects with colleagues, as "Can view" or "Can edit".

What to upload to knowledge:

1. Your brand guide, or the parts about voice, tone and terminology.
2. A product fact sheet: names, features, prices, claims you can make and claims you can't. This is the most important file and the one most teams forget.
3. Five to ten examples of your best real copy, across formats: a blog intro, an email, a landing page section, a social post. Label each with what it is and why it's good.
4. An audience summary: who you write for, what they care about and what puts them off.
5. A word list: preferred terms, banned terms and how to write product names.

Keep files tidy and current. Anthropic's usage tips suggest removing project files you no longer use and keeping instructions concise (Anthropic).

#04What should the project instructions say?

Describe the voice, the audience and the rules, with reasons. Here's a template.

You're writing for [company]'s marketing team. Our readers are
[audience], who are [busy/sceptical/technical] and value [x].

Voice: [3–4 adjectives], explained:
- [Adjective]: we [behaviour], e.g. "[short example]".
- [Adjective]: we avoid [behaviour] because [reason].

Always use the product fact sheet for names, features and prices.
If a fact isn't in it, ask me rather than inventing it.

Before finishing any draft, check it against the word list and
flag any claim that isn't supported by the fact sheet.

Format: [house conventions: headings, sentence case, numbers].

The line "ask me rather than inventing it" is doing a lot of work. It turns a risk, made-up product details, into a question you can answer.

#05How does memory interact with projects?

Claude's memory can carry useful context between chats, and each project has its own separate memory, so what Claude learns about one client or product doesn't spill into another (Anthropic). Anthropic's help centre also describes a setting to stop a project using your account-wide memory, and an option to turn memory off for a single chat.

Our view: for brand work, treat memory as a convenience rather than a source of truth. If something matters, such as a new tagline or a banned claim, put it in the project knowledge or instructions where everyone can see and edit it.

#06When should you use a Skill instead?

Use a Skill when you have a repeatable procedure, not just knowledge. Anthropic's distinction is helpful: projects hold what Claude should know, while Skills hold how to do a specific task, and Claude loads them only when the task calls for one (Anthropic).

Good marketing Skills include "write a product update email", "turn a webinar transcript into a blog post", "check copy against our claims policy" and "write LinkedIn posts from a press release". Each describes steps, format and checks.

Skills are available on all plans and need code execution switched on. You'll find them under Customize > Skills. A Skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that starts with a name and a description; the description tells Claude when to use it, and the body holds the instructions (Anthropic). Skills follow an open standard, Agent Skills, so the format isn't locked to Claude (Agent Skills).

Here's a simple Skill you can adapt:

---
name: product-update-email
description: Write a customer email announcing a product update,
  in our brand voice. Use when asked for a release, feature or
  update email.
---
1. Ask for the release notes if not provided.
2. Identify the one change customers will care about most.
3. Write a subject line under 50 characters and preview text
   under 90.
4. Body: 120 words max. Open with the benefit, then how to use it,
   then one link. No exclamation marks.
5. Check every feature name against the product fact sheet.
6. Return the email, then a list of any claims you couldn't verify.

On Mac, on Pro, Max, Ultra and Team plans, you can also record yourself doing a task and let Claude propose a Skill from the recording, according to Anthropic. Anthropic warns not to show passwords or sensitive information while recording.

#07How do you test that the voice is right?

Run a blind test. Ask Claude, inside the project, to write three short pieces you've already published: an email, a social post and a blog introduction. Mix them with the originals and ask a colleague to spot which are which. If they can easily tell, look at what gives the AI version away, and add a rule or an example to fix it.

Then ask Claude to critique itself against the guide: "Compare this draft with the examples in project knowledge. Where does it sound least like us? Rewrite those sentences." This catches drift better than reading the draft yourself, because Claude compares against the examples rather than a vague impression.

#08From MentionX data: why a fact sheet matters for visibility tooOriginal data

Method. Read-only aggregate queries over MentionX scans from 22 August to 29 October 2026 (UTC): 2,217 engine runs (2,154 completed) across 18 anonymised projects and six engines.

The product fact sheet you build for Claude is also the kind of content AI engines cite. In MentionX's aggregates across six engines, here's how citations split by page type:

Our view: docs and pricing pages earn a small but real share of citations. If your fact sheet is good enough to keep Claude accurate, a public version may help engines describe you accurately too.

Limits. A convenience sample of mostly B2B software projects, run through engine APIs, which can behave differently from the consumer apps. Perplexity, Copilot and DeepSeek figures come from a single day (26 October 2026), so treat them as a snapshot, not a trend.

#09Worked example: Ledgerline's brand project

Ledgerline is a fictional accounts-payable tool. Figures are illustrative.

Priya sets up a project called "Ledgerline voice". She uploads the brand guide, a two-page product fact sheet, eight examples of the team's best copy and a word list that bans "seamless", "revolutionary" and "hassle-free".

Her project instructions describe the voice as "plain, practical and slightly dry", with an example and a reason for each word. The key line says: "If a price, integration or feature isn't in the fact sheet, ask me."

In the blind test, a colleague spots two of three AI drafts. Both open with a question, which Ledgerline never does. Priya adds "Don't open with a question; our readers find it gimmicky" to the instructions. In the second test, the colleague guesses wrong on all three. She then shares the project with the team as "Can view", keeping editing to herself and the content lead.

#10What should you set up before the next lesson?

Write your account instructions, build the brand-voice project and create one Skill for a task you do every week. Run the blind test. If you're also working on how AI engines describe your brand, our guide on making your brand unambiguous to AI explains why consistent names and facts matter outside Claude too.

Next: from brief to draft, where you'll use this project for long-form content. Or return to the Claude for Marketers track.

#11How do you keep the project healthy over time?

Assign an owner. Projects drift when everyone adds files and nobody removes them. Review the knowledge base monthly: remove outdated product details, replace weaker examples with stronger ones and check the word list against recent copy. When something big changes, such as a rebrand, a new product or a pricing update, update the fact sheet the same day.

For teams, decide who can edit. Anthropic's sharing options let you give most colleagues "Can view" access, so they can chat in the project without changing it, and reserve "Can edit" for the people who own the voice. That keeps one source of truth while letting everyone benefit from it.

#12Can you share Skills across a team?

Yes, and for a marketing team that's where Skills pay off most. Anthropic's help centre says that on Team and Enterprise plans, organisation owners can provision Skills for everyone, and those Skills appear automatically in each member's list (Anthropic). Colleagues can also publish Skills to the organisation. That means one well-tested "product update email" Skill can serve the whole team, and when you improve it, everyone gets the improvement.

Anthropic also publishes its own Skills, for example for creating Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, and partner companies offer Skills that work with their tools. Plugins go a step further by bundling Skills with connectors, so a single install can give Claude both the procedure and access to the tool it needs (Anthropic).

A sensible order for a team:

1. Build the brand-voice project first, because every Skill depends on good knowledge.
2. Write two or three personal Skills for your most frequent tasks and use them for a fortnight.
3. Promote the ones that work to the organisation, with a short description of when to use them.
4. Review shared Skills every quarter and retire any nobody uses.

Our view: resist the urge to write a Skill for everything. A small set of well-maintained Skills beats a large library of half-finished ones, and it's much easier for new joiners to learn.

#13How do you turn your best content into a voice guide?

Most brand guides describe the voice in adjectives, such as "confident but friendly", which Claude can follow only loosely. A better voice file shows patterns. You can have Claude build one from your own content.

Attached: 12 pieces of our content that we think sound most
like us (emails, posts, a landing page). Analyse the voice:
1. Sentence length and rhythm, with examples
2. How we open and close pieces
3. Words and phrases we use often; words we never use
4. How we handle numbers, jargon and humour
5. How formal we are with readers ("you", contractions)
6. What we do that most companies in our category don't
Quote examples for each point. Then write this as a voice
guide of no more than 400 words that a new writer could use.

Read the result critically. Delete anything that describes what you'd like to be rather than what's actually in the samples, and add rules from your brand team. Save the final version as a file in the project. Picking the samples is the important part: use content that performed well and that the team agrees sounds right, not just the most recent.

#14What's a good project instructions template?

You're helping [company]'s marketing team write [content types].

Always:
- Follow voice_guide.md. If it conflicts with a request, ask.
- Use only facts from product_facts.md (dated [month]). If a
  needed fact isn't there, write [needs fact: ...].
- Use British/American spelling.
- Write for [audience], who already know [what they know].

Never:
- [banned phrases, claims, competitor mentions]
- Invent customer names, quotes or numbers.

When I share a draft, assume I want edits, not a rewrite,
unless I ask for one.

Keep it short. Anthropic's prompting guide suggests explaining the reason behind instructions so Claude can generalise, which works better than a long list of bare rules (Anthropic).

#15What happens when a project gets too big?

On paid plans, Anthropic says that when project knowledge approaches the context window limit, Claude automatically enables retrieval (RAG) mode to expand the project's capacity (Anthropic). In that mode Claude searches the project files for relevant parts rather than reading everything for every message.

That's useful for big archives, but it changes how you should organise files. Put your voice guide, banned words and current product facts in short, clearly named files, and refer to them by name in instructions ("Follow voice_guide.md"). Don't bury critical rules inside a 60-page brand book where retrieval might not surface them. If the project mixes old campaigns with current guidance, Claude may pull outdated material; archive old files in a separate project.

#16How do you fix voice drift?

The "write like this, not like this" pairs are the single most effective addition. Two sentences side by side, one on-brand and one off-brand, show the difference more clearly than any description.

#17Common questions

How do I make Claude write in my brand voice? Create a Project with your brand guide, a product fact sheet and real examples, and describe the voice with reasons in the project instructions.

What's the difference between Projects and Skills? Projects hold knowledge for an area of work. Skills hold step-by-step procedures that Claude loads only when a task needs them.

Are Projects available on the free plan? Yes. Anthropic says free users can create up to five projects.