The unsubscribe test
The fastest way to find out whether a brand has a real voice is to unsubscribe. The brand that survives the test wrote the unsubscribe confirmation in the same voice it wrote the homepage hero.
Every brand has a homepage hero, written by the strongest writer in the building, polished, lit, edited, and reviewed by leadership. Many brands also have an unsubscribe confirmation page, written by someone in marketing operations in fifteen minutes seven years ago and never looked at since. The gap between those two pieces of writing is the brand's actual voice.
We call this the unsubscribe test. It works on any surface that nobody is paying attention to — the empty state when a search returns no results, the four-oh-four when a page is gone, the receipt email after a purchase, the password-reset confirmation. The brand that has a real voice wrote those surfaces in the same voice it wrote the homepage. The brand that does not, did not.
The reason this matters is operational. A brand voice that only appears on the polished surfaces is a brand voice that needs a senior writer to apply it. A brand voice that survives the unsubscribe test is a brand voice that someone in customer support can apply without thinking. That second version is enormously more useful because customer support writes more sentences per week, to more customers, than the marketing team will write all year.
When we run a Brand Voice Audit, the unsubscribe surfaces are the first place we look. Not the heroes, not the campaigns, not the case studies. The unsubscribe confirmation, the error states, the receipts. They tell us the truth.