Audience context and brand voice

Playbook's AI is only as good as what it knows about your brand. That knowledge comes from three layers of grounding — and the two broadest ones you set once, so every experience you generate afterward starts on-brand instead of generic.

The three layers

From broadest to most specific:

1. Brand voice — how your whole brand sounds and who it's for. Set once, applies everywhere.
2. Audience context — who a particular group of shoppers is: a persona, the buyers of a product line, a seasonal moment.
3. Per-experience context — the specifics of the one experience you're drafting right now.

Playbook stacks all three every time it writes or edits copy, and it reads them fresh at generation time — nothing is frozen into an experience. Edit your voice or an audience, and the next thing you draft reflects it immediately. One rule to remember: when it comes to audience, an experience's own audience always wins over the brand default.

Set your brand voice

Open the Brand page and switch to the Context tab. It has three sub-sections:

Voice

• A one-line brand summary — what you sell, in a sentence.
• Tone & voice — how you talk.
• Tone dimensions — four sliders that pin your register: Formal ↔ Casual, Serious ↔ Funny, Respectful ↔ Irreverent, Matter-of-fact ↔ Enthusiastic.
• Words to use and Words to avoid — the single most underrated field. A short "avoid" list keeps the AI off the clichés your brand never uses.

Audience

• Primary audience — your default shopper. It's a fallback only: any experience that names its own audience overrides it.

Positioning

• Category, price tier, core differentiator, and top benefits — the facts that keep claims accurate and on-message.

The whole tab can be drafted for you — the ✨ button pulls from your products, storefront copy, and ad targeting. One thing to know: it redrafts the entire tab at once, not field by field, so running it again overwrites any edits you've already made by hand. Draft first, then hand-correct. Save it once and you're set.

Add context to an audience

An audience is one group of shoppers you want to reach, and it holds the experiences built to meet them — so you can reuse a strategy and steer the AI across all of them at once. It stretches naturally to a launch, a product line, or a seasonal push, because each of those is really "the people who'd buy this right now."

When you create an audience from the Experiences hub or the Create picker — or edit an existing one — you get the full form:

• A name for the audience.
• A context box prompting "Who are these shoppers? A persona, a product line's buyers, a seasonal moment."
• A Draft with AI button if you'd rather have Playbook write the first version.

(The sidebar's quick-add makes an audience too, but takes just a name — add its context afterward by editing the audience.)

Good audience context is a few sentences: who these shoppers are, what they're being shown, and any framing every experience in the group should share.

How it shapes what you generate

At generation time, Playbook composes your brand voice + the audience's context + the experience's own context into the instructions it writes with. The result is copy that sounds like your brand, fits the group of shoppers it belongs to, and speaks to the specific person in front of it — without you re-typing any of it per experience.

Because the grounding is read live and never snapshotted, keeping it current is the highest-leverage thing you can do: tighten your voice once and every future draft gets sharper.

A few tips

• Be specific in "Words to avoid." It does more work than any positive instruction.
• Use audience context for what several experiences share — the shopper, the angle, the moment.
• Leave the one-offs to per-experience context — the prompt you type in Create.
• Revisit after a rebrand or a new line. The AI will follow your lead the moment you do.

Next: put the grounding to work — Create your first experience.