An e-mail conversation I will probably have some time soon

THEM: “Hi David. I represent bumflask and I just wanted to say thanks for including our hotel in the piece you wrote for Outlet X. Unfortunately, there is one problem – bumflask is spelt with a lower case ‘b’. Is there any chance of correcting this?”

ME: “I corrected it by changing it to a capital B.”

THEM: “But the name is bumflask, not Bumflask. It is deliberately written with a lower case b.”

ME: “You might write it with a lower case b. I don’t. What you’re doing there is confusing a name and a preferred brand identity – or perhaps a logo. Names are proper nouns, and thus have capital letters. I was writing the name for the benefit of the readers, not an affected piece of supposedly cool grammar crime for the benefit of your marketing department”

THEM: “The name is bumflask. Why have you deliberately misspelled the name?”

ME: “You could insist the ‘u’ is in italics, the ‘m’ has to be in 72 point Comic Sans, the ‘f’ has to be hummed to the tune of It Keeps Raining by Bitty McLean, the ‘l’ is in Cyrillic script, the ‘a’ is pronounced in a camp Irish accent, the ‘s’ is purple and the ‘k’ is replaced by a giant swastika. I wouldn’t go along with any of that either. If you really don’t want your carefully constructed brand identity to be messed around with by people who are just trying to make something readable, don’t make that brand identity something that’s so massively, pretentiously up its own arse and demonstrably foolish in the first place. Then go and research what a proper noun is.

Tags: hotels, marketing, PR, writing