One morning last week after finishing a golf lesson, I was standing in the golf course parking lot pondering Melissa McLean Jory. Melissa is a high school classmate I connected with on facebook last year. Melissa is a nutrition expert, specializing in Celiac disease. Because of her deep knowledge and wonderful personality we hired her to speak about blogging and Celiac disease at our GPS (Green Positioning Summit) workshop last year. Melissa writes an excellent blog, and her facebook posts are very well written. Her voice, her tone, her language is positive, upbeat, informative, happy, humorous, and insightful. It resonates with me; the language makes me smile and demands my attention. Kudos Melissa! So, in this parking lot pondering moment I realized how really important voice, tone and language are to advertising and marketing communication.

I then remembered a series of TV spots that we recently were asked to review. The company’s owner was the spokesperson. The spots were excellent and much like Melissa, the owner’s personality and language resonated with me. “Gee”, I thought as I was watching the spots, “I’d love to shop at ­­­________, that’s my kind of store!” Kudos, unnamed supermarket retailer!

Do your marketing pieces support and reinforce the language, tone and voice of your brand? Have you explored what your brand voice should be? Your brand voice and language can help deepen the connection between your company and your customers.

Brand voice is an important part of our brand strategy process.

Integrity is an important and powerful quality. To be referred to as a person of integrity is the ultimate compliment. I have come to realize that my life experience is about the journey toward wholeness, and to seek wholeness, is to live from a place of integrity. To me, conscience is the psychic energy of awareness. Conscience is the alarm that goes off when integrity is at risk, when wholeness is splintered.

“The meeting of our inner and outer lives is called integrity, and the health of our integrity often determines our inner strength and resilience in meeting the outer world. This is the purpose of integrity, to balance the outer forces of existence with the inner forces of spirit,” Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk. One of the most useful definitions of integrity comes from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man: Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn’t change, even though the life that carries it may change.

So living from integrity is when our actions, our outer life are in sync with our inner life; our heart, our soul, the essence of our being. Businesses too must live from integrity. When the actions of a business are incongruent with their beliefs and values and essence, crises will inevitably arise. The conscious of a company is the collective conscience of all who work for that company. The actions of all employees must be in sync with the inner beliefs and values of the company. When organizational integrity happens there is a wholeness and richness of connectedness between employees and customers alike. We will always have integrity issues but the more aware we are of our actions being in tune with our center, with the quintessence of our being, the more joyful and meaningful our life experience.