Copy writing for point of sale displays
Is good English important in point-of-sale signage? Yes ... to a certain extent.
Have you ever driven past an incorrectly spelt sign day after day and cringed every time you saw it? I have ... and I know that it did influence the way I viewed the offending business. It pays to double check spellings in your permanent signage as the credibility of the business is liable to suffer.
The same applies to a lesser extent with your in-store point of sale signs or company information notices. Someone will spot the mistake and there may be a tiny shift in their perception of your business. Deciding to make a purchase is influenced by many factors and the error might just figure somewhere in the decision-to-buy equation. So why subject yourself to the risk?
Is good grammar essential in POS? Today there is much leeway in advertising copy. A sentence with no verb? That’s fine! But do you want to look professional? My guess is you do – so don’t allow elementary mistakes to creep into your POS and advertising.
Writing style should certainly be considered when planning your message. That might well involve the decision to use a bullet point style of presentation. Generally bullet points work much better than paragraph text in communicating effectively in POS copy.
Deliberate misspelling or misuse of words is an interesting topic. Clearly abbreviations and text message short-forms are an essential and vibrant element in today’s communication repertoire. But while they may be just right in a surf shop, within a store such as a garden centre (where the customer age demographics are quite different) a traditional approach would be more appropriate.
Personally I am less tolerant of words misused through ignorance. For example complement versus compliment is one of my hobby horses. How can a conservatory compliment your house? “I say house, you’re looking lovely today”. The correct term for things which ‘go together’ is of course complement. Is it me? Or does anyone else get irritated by these mistakes?
Web copy-writing needs a slightly different approach
We also support the use of good English and correct spelling on the web. If we’ve made any mistakes on our website please excuse us – we are mere mortals. (Feel free to tell me – I’ll just have to scrape the egg off my face).
But wait! Yes there are a few deliberate misspellings on this website! As computer aided search is so important in today’s world some ‘strategic spelling’ becomes a necessity.
Take the UK and US alternative spellings of aluminium and aluminum or colour and color. Obviously we want to be found by people in the UK searching for ‘aluminium sign holders’. But start typing ‘sign holders’ into Google toolbar and one of the first prompts which pops up is ‘sign holders aluminum’. It’s easy for someone in the UK to overlook the ‘incorrect’ spelling of the word aluminum and click on it – only to wonder why the links which appear are all US companies. However, by including the ‘wrongly’ spelt version somewhere in our copy we may just pick up a few extra enquiries.
Another web search issue relates to people who don’t know how to spell the word they’re searching for. So some web copy writers deliberately include these variants somewhere on the page. However Google is pretty clever at guessing the words you’ve spelt wrong so we feel this is of limited value. We think it spoils the readability of good copy and generally we have avoided this practice.
Feedback Welcome! If you have any opinions on the subjects discussed in this article feel free to email me at nigel@green-magic.co.uk. Maybe we’ll add your comments here or incorporate them into a future article.
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