Somewhere along the way to becoming a lawyer (or whatever it is we are), most of us develop a work-voice and use it for nearly everything we write—no matter how inappropriate the work-voice is to the audience and purpose of the document.

I think the reason many of us (lawyers in particular) so habitually use our work-voice is because we want to sound professional. Fair enough too. But if we look up and think about "professional" writing, we don't really see anything. So it's difficult to see how to write professionally. Then I think what happens is we decide that in order to write professionally, we'll write in a way that is "formal" and "traditional"—in the hope that that will equal "professional". But "formal" plus "traditional" doesn't equal "professional". It equals pompous and out of date. We can write a letter that's warm, human, clear, and friendly and still be completely professional.

Having thought about voice, let's think about brand.

8.2 Brand

Today, in these communication saturated times, an organization's reputation is expressed through a clearly defined brand. The brand represents the essence of an organization: everything it stands for, and everything that differentiates it from its competitors. To quote the global management consultants McKinsey & Company:

A name becomes a brand, when consumers associate it with a set of tangible, or intangible, benefits that they obtain from that product or service. To build brand equity, a company needs to do two things: first, distinguish its product from others in the market; second, align what it says about its brand in advertising and marketing with what it actually delivers.³⁶

Perhaps the best way to understand the concept of brand is to imagine me offering you a sports car and asking you to choose from 3 leading models each from a different manufacturer. The vehicles are labelled Model A, Model B, and Model C. The trouble is you have to choose your car on the basis of the anonymous manufacturers' vehicle specifications and performance criteria (no photographs of the car either).