Let's consider a legal example. Several years ago I was employed in the Melbourne office of a national law firm but I worked on secondment in-house for a client in Sydney. One Friday afternoon, a partner I knew slightly in my firm's Sydney office rang and asked me to help him out. He had developed a suite of documents for a client and needed to deliver them on Monday. The documents had to be as plain as could be. He'd gone way over budget and still felt the documents weren't clear enough. Effectively, he asked me to give him my Sunday and edit the documents to improve their clarity. I was happy to help.

A few hours later the documents arrived by courier. There was a covering letter addressed to me:

Dear Sir

We refer to our earlier conversation and enclose the documents for your review. We look forward to your comments in due course.

Yours faithfully
[Name of firm—The partner hadn't even signed his name!]

The letter irritated me. A lot. (Mind you I edited the documents anyway.)

I would have been happy with a handwritten note on a with compliments slip. Something like "Dear Christopher, Thanks for this, I owe you lunch. Cheers [name of partner]".

As I see it, the letter from the lawyer was a classic example of someone automatically using their work-voice. In a Zen sense, the writer was not "in the moment" when he dictated the letter. He did not even remotely consider his audience or his purpose.

8.4 The importance of the voice of the brand: to business and in government

For some organizations the voice of the brand doesn't matter—for example, Levis. We don't care too much about the way Levis writes to us—if it ever does other than in advertising and labelling.

But for some organizations, the voice of the brand is of vital importance— for example, a radio station. If we don't like the voice of the brand of a radio station, we're never going to listen to that station. The radio station has got nothing to give us other than its voice.

So if we had a spectrum showing the relative importance of the voice of the brand to an organization, we could put Levi's at one end of the spectrum and a radio station at the other end.