How not to upset your clients

Quick, without looking online: Which of the following brand names is correct?

1. Budwieser

2. Dolce Gabbana

3. Gilette

4. Haagen-Dasz

5. Heineken

6. Hennesy

7. Lamborgini

8. MacDonald’s

9. Mercedez Benz

10. Siracha

Exactly one of them is correct (see the end of this article for the answers). And all of them are regularly misspelled. If you see one of them misspelled, you still know what’s intended, of course, but if the company happens to be a client – or prospective client – they won’t be happy if you get their name wrong even once.

It’s not just a matter of politeness, either. It’s defending their branding and making sure that legal documents are enforceable and defensible. And if you can’t get their name right, what else can’t you be trusted with? Misspelling a client’s brand name just once is like a moving company breaking just one Ming vase. It has, shall we say, reputational effects.

Let comma heads prevail

There’s more than misplacing letters that can make you look bad. Companies – and especially their lawyers – can be very fussy about little punctuation marks that ordinary people on the street couldn’t care less about.

Here’s a tougher quiz: Which of the following company names have a comma before “Inc.” and which don’t?

1. Airbnb(,) Inc.

2. Alphabet(,) Inc.

3. Amazon.com(,) Inc.

4. Apple(,) Inc.

5. eBay(,) Inc.

6. Meta Platforms(,) Inc.

7. Whole Foods Market(,) Inc.

8. Uber Technologies(,) Inc.

Even if you look them all up, will you remember them five minutes from now? (The answers are at the end – and half have the comma, half don’t.)

And there’s still more. If you’re doing work for the law firm of Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe, is it really Dewey, Cheetham & Howe? If you’re putting together an RFP for CamelCase ClearingHouse, is it Camelcase Clearinghouse, or CamelCase Clearinghouse, or Camelcase ClearingHouse? You know you need to get it right every time.

Getting personal

But it doesn’t stop there! People care very much about their own names, too. Is the president of the company Steven McNeil, Steven McNeill, Steven MacNeil, Steven MacNeill, Steven Macneil, or one of those but with Stephen in place of Steven, or something else? And should the vice president’s name be written as José Argüello Gómez, or José Arguello Gómez, or Jose Arguello Gomez, or…? And is your product manager contact Kayley d’Angelo, or Caylee D’Angelo, or Kheighleigh Di Angelo, or…?

This isn’t always just a matter of personal pride and legal accuracy, either. It can be a question of cultural sensitivity. When you have team members from different cultural backgrounds, it will be noticed if you get Käthe Büchner right but mess up Özgür Yılmaz.

Sure, some of those may be easier to remember than others, and you should always be able to look them up. But when you’re under time pressure, can you be sure that you’ll catch every stray letter, accent, and punctuation mark? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a plug-in that will check every one of these things – apostrophes, commas, periods, accents, ampersands, dashes, other punctuation, capitals, and misplaced letters?

Well, guess what

Of course, that plug-in already exists. It’s PerfectIt, an editorial style check extension for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. Thousands of professional editors around the world know PerfectIt as their secret embarrassment avoider. You can create a customized style sheet in PerfectIt with your client’s company name and the name of every important person in the company, and when you run a check it will look for errors and let you know if it finds one.

In fact, there are two ways to do this in PerfectIt:

• You can enter every common misspelled or mispunctuated version in the “Common Typos” check, and it will look specifically for those and let you know every time it finds one. This is efficient and reliable, especially when there’s just one variable you’re checking (such as the comma before “Inc.”), but it won’t catch unusually inventive errors (e.g., “Stephen Mcniell” or “Josie Gomèz”).

• You can enter the correct version in the “Similar Words” check, and it will look for anything resembling that. This may catch more false positives, so it’s not as efficient, and it will only find versions that start and end with the same letters as the correct version (so it won’t find “Caylee” for “Keighleigh”), but it can be a useful adjunct to the “Common Typos” check.

The even better part is that PerfectIt can help ensure consistency across your whole team. When you create a style sheet for a client, you can share it with everyone else on your team who has PerfectIt installed. No more errors slipping in during rounds of revision, no more “differences of opinion” that have names being changed and reverted in multiple back-and-forths. It’s like having your style chief personally check everything – and not miss anything.

But wait, there’s more

There are many more things that PerfectIt can check, too, while you’re at it. You can choose what PerfectIt checks for, but why wouldn’t you want to take another minute or two while you’re at it to help ensure the following are correct throughout the document:

• Consistency in hyphenation

• Consistency in capitalization

• Consistency in use of accents (e.g., résumé vs. resumé)

• Consistency in use of italics

• Preferred spellings (e.g., American vs. British)

• Oxford commas

• No brackets and quotes left open

• No comments left in the text

• And quite a few more

If you don’t have PerfectIt yet, there’s a free trial so you can see how much embarrassment (and worse) it can help you avoid.

• Answers: brand name spellings

  • Budweiser

  • Dolce & Gabbana

  • Gillette

  • Häagen-Dazs

  • Heineken (this is the correct one!)

  • Hennessy

  • Lamborghini

  • McDonald’s

  • Mercedes-Benz

  • Sriracha

• Answers: business name commas

  1. Airbnb, Inc.

  2. Alphabet Inc.

  3. Amazon.com, Inc.

  4. Apple Inc.

  5. eBay Inc.

  6. Meta Platforms, Inc.

  7. Whole Foods Market, Inc.

  8. Uber Technologies, Inc.