4. The Results begin to Show
In this instalment, the "grammar lady" is named and encounters an extremely grateful marketing professional who has used Grammar to Go as part of an education process for his team.
Phil had just introduced me to Geoff, one of the senior members of his marketing team.
“Ah, so you’re the grammar lady!”, Geoff shook me warmly by the hand. “We’ve got a lot to thank you for. “
“Glad to hear you’re finding it useful. What’s been the biggest benefit for you, then?”
“Speed” Geoff replied, without hesitation. “Our team used to complain that everything was done ‘on the fly’. Our merchandisers would sometimes ring us up at 9am, and ask us to produce some new signage or a new flyer by noon. That meant coming up with the creative, checking the pricing or the special offer with our commercial guys, writing the actual words – then getting it off to the printers at the double. There was no time for checking or double-checking – more’s the pity!”
“Let me guess – errors were not uncommon, right?”
“Right!” laughed Geoff. “I can joke about it now, but the number of people I’ve bawled out for producing a really shoddy piece of writing. Take a look at this...”
Geoff handed me a large lever-arch folder. Opening it revealed a catalogue of their marketing over the last twelve months. Starting in January, I could see what Geoff meant about errors: a good 70% of the materials in the file contained mis-placed apostrophes, incorrect use of capital letters, or wrongly-spelt words. One particular example – a billboard that had apparently sat outside one of their stores for a fortnight – contained no less than four glaring mistakes.
“I really took our team to task over this one. Can you imagine how humiliating it was for me, trying to explain how this happened? Not to mention the number of customer complaints we had...”
“I can imagine. People just love finding fault with things, don’t they?”, I nodded in sympathy.
“After my lecture, the team took their writing much more seriously. But it meant they took longer to produce our marketing materials. Which, as you can imagine, didn’t go down well with our merchandisers.”
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