Must Have PR
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The grammar police have been up in arms this week about Waterstone’s (Or should I say Waterstones’) removal of the apostrophe from their name as part of their re-branding. The announcement has made national news headlines and was hotly debated on this morning’s BBC Breakfast, offering some much needed publicity for the troubled retailer lagging behind the online giants and suffering in the age of the kindle where e-book downloads are eclipsing printed book sales. So, was this a clever publicity stunt or an intended shuffle towards integrating into the digital world as MD James Daunt claims: “the amendment was a more versatile and practical spelling of the name for the digital world.” – but will it really make that much difference to web filtering? Sounds like a weak excuse to me.
If the move was a tactical one, then it has certainly had the desired effect; riling pedants up and down the country. Twitter has been awash with outraged grammar purists and concerned lobbyists against the country’s ‘dumbing down’, while others have seen it as comedy fodder: the Publishing Director at Scholastic tweeted: “Waterstone’s are dropping their apostrophe?! Great - the UK’s biggest book retailer decides to be editorially incorrect. Nice move” while Queen UK joked: “Dear Waterstone’s, please find attached an apostrophe. One understands you’ve misplaced one. Your ever loving Queen, EIIR”, and my personal favourite from CherylKerl: “Hei, itz a reet bad dee faw aall uz grammah pedant’s oot thor. Waterstone’s aw hoyin oot the apostrophe in thor lurgeur man!”. Even Waterstone’s themselves have been fuelling the Twitter fire with @WstonesOxfordSt’s ingenious personification of the humble, outcast apostrophe, tracking its demise; after finding the apostrophe on the street, cold and hungry, the store takes it in: “After a hot meal and some time to calm down it finally spoke. ‘Why?’ it said. ‘I’m one of the longest serving employees. Why fire me now?”.
If there’s one thing that gets us going as a nation, it’s the misuse of our language – you only need to look at Lynne Truss’s mega number one bestselling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves as testament; a book on punctuation one of the top 100 books of the DECADE?! Remarkable…and get this, we have an Apostrophe Society! I kid you not, and The Queen’s English Society is a registered charity …I wonder if they’ll see a rise in donations following this punctuation storm.
The pedants of the nation may view Waterstone’s actions as a failure for English grammar, but it is a magnificent PR victory. PR professionals take note – if your client is considering re-branding, propose tampering with their punctuation, it might just get you blanket national coverage.
