Proud of Your Brand's Offbeat Spelling? Maybe You'd Better Check the Dictionary

If you were to look up the famous French perfume Chanel No. 5 on Wikipedia, you’ll come across an admonition right up at the top: “Not to be confused with Channel 5.” Hang on. Who could possibly confuse a French luxury fragrance with a TV network? Turns out, plenty of people. Consider the results of a recent study commissioned by digital wholesale platform Joor. With some technical help from online analytics tool Ahrefs, Joor determined that consumers misspell brand names all the time, even ones that are household names. Take Tommy Hilfiger, for example. Americans have been wearing this company’s casual-preppie threads since 1985, a fact that hasn’t stopped them from calling the brand “Tommy Hillfigure” and “Tommy Hillfinger.” Consumers bungle Mr. Hilfiger’s name 23,400 times every month, Joor determined. Or consider Versace, the Italian fashion brand favored by the likes of Lizzo, Anne Hathaway and Lil Nas X. Versace is consistently in the top 10 most popular fashion brands on earth—and consumers mangle its spelling 64,500 times every month—usually as “Versache” or “Versage.” A Rebrand Gone Wrong: Saying Goodbye to My eX The most misspelled brand? Adidas—which often comes out as “Addidas” or “Addias”—at the rate of 556,000 blunders per month. (Chanel does tend to become Channel, by the way, a whopping 408,700 times per month.) “People misspell brand names for a multitude of reasons, from a lack of attention to linguistic factors,” Joor’s senior vp of marketing, Amanda Bacal, explained to Adweek. Cultural and regional differences in spelling or pronunciation often throw people off, she added. So do brand names that are abbreviations or ones that are simply difficult to type. Goofed spellings and lost business But who cares? Does it really matter if Americans think Gucci is “Cuggi” and “Studsy” stands in for Stüssy? Well, yes, it frequently does. “There are downsides for a brand that is often spelled incorrectly by consumers, including instances in which search engine autocorrect functionality cannot help solve misspellings,” Bacal said. “In these cases, a brand name that’s challenging to say or spell could be harmful to the business. For example, looking for a brand in a store directory could be frustrating if the consumer has a misspelling in mind, and a search for a brand on an ecommerce site will likely come up fruitless if the searcher cannot figure out how to spell the brand name.” In some cases—notably a brand that takes the name of its founder, which roughly one in five do—there’s nothing that a brand can do about a name that’s tough to spell. Louis Vuitton might be a hurdle for some (and the name is mangled 78,700 times a month, according to Joor’s data), but Louis Vuitton was the name of the craftsman who started making trunks in Paris in 1854, so that’s the end of that. A similar dynamic exists for legacy brands with quirky names. When homemaker Ruth Fertel borrowed $22,000 to buy Chris Steakhouse in New Orleans in 1965, she renamed the place Ruth’s Chris—a clunky and confusing handle no doubt, but one that’s too late to change now. Similarly, Reebok is a phonetic spelling of “Rhebok,” a species of African antelope. But the athletic shoe’s been around since 1958 and it’s doubtful that the correct spelling would do the brand any favors at this point. But a confusing name can’t be so easily shrugged off in the case of a contemporary brand. A company founded within the last two generations not only has to stand out amid countless competitors but must also secure a domain name at a time when all the nice, big and simple names were snapped up long ago. And it’s this dynamic has pushed contemporary companies to opt for increasingly unconventional spellings. Where did all the vowels go? Make that deliberate misspellings—a practice known technically as cacography. A stroll through the garden of tech companies founded since 2000 yields a colorful bouquet of such brands: Lyft, Disqus and Blu-Ray, for example, along with their vowel-dropping brethren such as Gathr, Flickr, Pixlr, Tumblr, Readr and Grindr. On the one hand, these companies are simply upholding a tradition established decades ago by the food business with brands like Weetabix, Krispy Kreme and Froot Loops: Novelty spellings grab attention and, especially if you’re in the tech sector, enroll you in the hipster club. “There are a variety of reasons why Tumblr contains no ‘e,’ from branding considerations to environmental factors (fewer letters mean lower power consumption by our servers),” Tumblr’s editorial director Christopher Price told Wired in 2013. “At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com looks fucking stupid.” Perhaps. But Jesse Walker, who teaches marketing at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, warns that there’s a limit to what consumers will put up with. “There’s a conventional wisdom in the field of marketing that choosing an unconventional spelling is a good strategy,” Walker told Adweek. “It might attract attention and, in some circles, it’s thought of as a cool thing to do. The problem is that unless you have a really established brand, it really backfires.” Misspellings and the veto factor Walker is in a position to know. Partnering with Notre Dame marketing professor John Costello, he conducted a series of studies that demonstrated that novelty spellings tend to try consumers’ patience. The pair published their results earlier this year. In one experiment, Walker and Costello set up a stand outside of a college football game to distribute samples of fictitious seltzers, one named “Clear” and the other “Klear.” The correctly spelled name won out 62% of the time. In another scenario, consumers were asked to choose between two fictitious clothing brands—one called “Distilled” and the other “Dstld.” Here, too, the conventionally spelled brand was the clear favorite. The researchers also found that even the tiniest misspelling—say, replacing a “c” with a “k”—prompted consumers to choose the misspelled brand 14% less frequently. Avon’s Rebrand Is Only Part of Its Revitalization Strategy These results echoed a 2017 study performed by Indiana University that found that simple typographical errors prompted consumers to regard a brand as careless and, hence, erode their confidence in that brand. “We're not saying that in every situation, you shouldn't do [choose an unconventional spelling],” Walker said. “But generally speaking, all of the data that we find is that consumers don't like it.” One notable exception deserves mention here—Google, which is in fact a deliberate misspelling of googol. As for how a brand can go about coining a distinctive and memorable name without getting into orthographic trouble, Bacal acknowledged that it’s a tightrope walk. “We do advise brands to take a unique approach when choosing their name, as there is a lot of competition, especially when it comes to the fashion industry,” she said. “However, it’s important to balance uniqueness with accessibility. You don’t want to choose a name that is so overly unique as to create complications that cause someone to not be able to easily find your brand.”