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Never underestimate the power of a grammatical mistake. It can completely change the massage. From boasting about the cute little dick pattern on your range of children’s bathers on Instagram, to advertising your extensive range of handwoven floor drugs, a single character can put your brand in a pickle faster than you can type, “DUCK i meant little DUCK!!?!&”.
Here a handful of typos that have landed brands in the dog house in recent years.
1. ampm — imagine a better highway rest stop brand than you can imagine.
Image credit: 11 Points
2. Including Reebok’s external advertising, which didn’t have time for a proofread.
Image credit: Engrish and Funny Typos
3. Houston, we have a typo.
At approximately 9:20pm on 22 July 1962, NASA’s Mariner I launched into outer space and promptly exploded five minutes later, costing the American government a tight eighty mil. The cause? A single omitted hyphen that should have been nestled deep in the hand-transcribed mathematical code.
Image credit: Wikipedia
4. Not to mention the unemployment rat.
The Sydney Morning Herald posted this absolute pearler on the front cover of their 5 May 2017 edition. Conspiracy theorists have since reared their all-knowing heads (from the Madelaine McCann Netflix special no doubt) suggesting that the ‘intentional’ typo was a not-so-subtle nod to the 150 journalists who were in the process of being laid off at the paper.
Image credit: AdWeek
5. [Headline about Financial Review typo to come here.]
2014 can’t have been a good year at the Financial Review either…
Image credit: Buzzfeed
6. Forgive me, Lord, for I have done a real doozy.
The Bible isn’t a brand per se, but it has earned a spot in this list simply for the sheer scope of its historic blunders. In 1631, a version of The Bible was published with the word ‘not’ omitted from ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Later, in a 1795 edition of the King James Bible, ‘Let the children first be filled’ (Mark 7:27) was mistranscribed to ‘Let the children first be killed’. Previously, in 1716, the same Bible had been printed with ‘Sin on more’ instead of ‘Sin no more’. In fact, a whopping 8,000 copies were printed before anyone picked up the typo.
7. It’s murder on the sea floor, you’d better not kill the scub[a].
This typo didn’t bring any brands down, but holy heck did the laughs rain down once this one saw air time.
Image credit: Pleated Jeans
Do you know what brand doesn’t make massive grammatical blunders? Hedgehog. Our team of capable creatives have the combined brain power of a full shelf of Oxford Dictionaries and can spot a misused ‘their’ faster than a huntsman on a windscreen.