As advocates of good copywriting, we couldn’t believe our ears when we heard that book chain Waterstone’s is denouncing the apostrophe in their company name. Giving the reason that ‘in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling was required’; Waterstone’s will now be known as Waterstones.
We’re up on our high horses here! For a company that sells books and encourages reading, surely they can’t spell their own organisation name incorrectly. If McDonald’s and Sainsbury’s can cope, there is no problem.
We can understand that Waterstone’s is a brand name now, rather than traditionally known after its founder, Tim Waterstone. So we can see that for their website address, having an apostrophe isn’t essential, but nor have they ever been in urls. And apostrophes can create broken links on website headings as they are not picked up by the website’s coding system. But to alter the company name and spell it incorrectly within the copy on their website is just not on!
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I’ve been writing for The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s London blog. My latest thought piece takes a look at John Lewis, who has just launched a ‘Made in UK’ label as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility programme.
What do we associated ‘Made in UK’ with? Quality, traditionalism and design perhaps. Many products associated with various countries give customers a certain perspective. For example, Switzerland is synonymous with fine timepieces, Germany comes top for precision machinery, and Italy is known for elegant jewellery. So potentially the John Lewis range will see customers making purchases due to the fine heritage of British clothing.
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As creatives, we’re always keen to see innovation and the latest What? Gravity Mobile Phone Holder from ideasbynet.com really hits the mark. Its silicone panel holds in place any modern mobile, and there’s room to feature your brand or website for a sleek looking promotional gift. With Christmas coming up, this could be a good way to get your business recognised.
Promotional merchandise can be an effective way to promote your message, and choosing a novelty or useful gadget that a customer will keep, may encourage your brand to be remembered when they require your service in the future.
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At Marketing Zone, we understand how important it is to build strong brands that support your business goals. From a strategic brand review and brand development to corporate identity and logo design, we will bring your brand to life. One of the critical decisions our designers will take is the type of font to use for your company’s identity, because it sets the tone for your product and needs to be easily readable on print and in digital.
Serif or sans serif?
There are many font choices available. A fundamental choice is between a serif or sans serif font, depending on what you want your brand to represent. What’s the difference? Take a look.
- Serif – each letter in a serif font has ‘little feet’ on each character, such as in Times New Roman and Georgia. Serif fonts can help when reading long blocks of text, as the feet guide your eye from one character to the next. This type of font is classic, timeless and makes your business look established. Dove uses a serif font.
Sans serif – is a font without these extra feet, such as Arial or Helvetica. Sans serif fonts are contemporary and make your business look modern. Sans serif typefaces are best for shorter pieces, such as headlines on websites and exhibition signs. Brands such as BMW, Caterpillar and Panasonic use sans serif font Helvetica.
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There’s a new political party in Switzerland whose sole intention is to get PowerPoint outlawed. What madness! PowerPoint software, when used correctly is an aide to making presentations with real impact. A good PowerPoint presentation is an important part of the corporate identity of your business, so it needs to be compelling and engaging.
This is quite an art form which Marketing Zone can tailor for you, but here are a few simple steps to get you started.
- Create a theme according to your corporate identity – use the templates available and adapt these using your brand colours and typeface
- Learn about navigation and slide timings – avoid the pitfalls of long, non-interactive presentations and add a navigation so you can move the presentation in a different direction to grab people’s attention
- Use visuals to emphasise key points – an image says a thousand words so be selective
- Bullet points – these work better than long paragraphs of prose, but keep to just a few per slide and don’t over do the amount of slides with lists of bullet points
- Be careful with the animation – yes it’s a nice feature to have, but save it until it’s necessary to avoid distracting your audience
- Consider your off-screen audience – presentations are designed for the screen and might not work as well when they are printed as handouts. It’d be useful to write some notes for your audience to follow
- Keep file sizes manageable – there’s nothing worse than standing at the front of an audience waiting for your file to load. Compress and resize your images before adding them to your presentation, or use the built in PowerPoint tools for charts and graphics.
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