At the same end of the spectrum as the radio station—where the voice of the brand is vital—are organizations like law firms, financial services organizations, many government bodies, providers of medicines, and any organization that gives its staff or its customers a set of instructions or a product manual.

For these organizations, the voice of the brand is fundamentally important. Consider a law firm and its relationship with its clients. The moment of truth comes when the clients read something written by one of the firm's lawyers. In that moment, it doesn't matter how brilliant the writer is as a lawyer, or how pleasant they are to deal with—what matters is how easy it is for the clients to use the documents to make decisions about their businesses and their lives.

That moment of truth matters to the reader because the document matters to the reader. If that wasn't so, they wouldn't be reading the document— and they wouldn't pay the firm to write it.

The moment when the document is read is either a brand damaging, or brand enhancing, moment. The person reading the firm's document quickly sees whether the way in which the firm communicates lives up to the claims the firm makes about itself in its advertising and marketing material. The reader can "smell" whether the firm's advertising and marketing puffery reflect the way the firm provides its services.

To make that point using the McKinsey & Company language (quoted above), the reader is made abundantly aware of whether the document—a key aspect of the law firm's behaviour and service—is "aligned" with the firm's claims about itself. If the document fails to live up to the brand, then the firm's brand is damaged. However, if the document and the brand are aligned, then the moment when the document is read is a brand enhancing moment: the client is likely to feel happier about using the firm, paying the invoice, coming back next time, and referring other clients to the firm.

Those moments of truth matter for businesses that rely heavily on documents to communicate with their markets.

But the voice of the brand is even more important in a broader context. The fact that so much legislation and judicial writing is inaccessible to all but the members of the legal profession (and even they have to work pretty hard to make sense of some documents) means that the voice of the brand of the State often:

• damages the community's respect for the rule of law and for the legal profession; and

• damages the State's relationship with its citizens.