At wieden + kennedy london we often talk about the need to find ‘the voice of the brand’. By this we mean the way the brand looks, feels, behaves, thinks; the way it expresses its character. Because how you say something can be as important as what you say. And because everything you do communicates. This kind of thinking is by no means exclusive to us. Innocent is a great and oft-cited example of a brand with a strong and consistently-expressed voice. Something charming to read on the side of a carton seemed like a real break-through at first, and they’ve developed the Innocent voice in loads of interesting ways since. Some marketing person has clearly been persuaded that a similar ‘Brand Voice Touchpoints TM’ (or other bollocks) approach is a good idea for Malmaison hotels. Now, I like Malmaison. They provide quite nice hotel rooms and facilities at a fair price. I would actively choose to stay there and pay with my own money, even. But on a recent stay in Leeds, after a long day, when I got to my room I became irritated by the voice of the Malmaison brand. It was a persistently annoying voice (I imagined it as sounding a bit like Graham Norton) and it wouldn’t shut up. Every inanimate object in my room – from the pillow to the light switch, it seemed like – apparently wanted to engage me in a bit of jokey, vaguely risque banter. The toiletries were chatty…

The ‘do not disturb’ signs were garrulous…

And the mouthwash was on the verge of being a sex-pest:

I know what they’re trying to do. And at least they’re trying. But there comes a point when you just want to say, ‘Enough! Can’t a bath mat just be a (silent) bath mat? Does EVERYTHING have to bloody talk to me? I just want to go to sleep!’ It’s possible to take this Brand Voice thing too far, to the point where it feels like you’re in some dodgy sci-fi movie (The Fifth Element? Total Recall?) where, to establish that we’re in the future, when the hero wakes up in the morning in his futurepad, everything from his alarm clock to his coffee machine talks to him in a Star Trek computer voice.

Or is that just me?