NZ printers alert to desert mail campaign

A marketing mail-out set tongues wagging and printers consulting their dictionaries all around New Zealand over its intriguing slogan: “Good Print Gets Its Gold Deserts”.

Those who pride themselves on being grammatically correct were quick to point the finger at the misspelling of ‘dessert’. According to a statement, the mail-out (pictured) attracted a number of responses to awards manager Sue Archibald and her team from people thinking it was a typo.
 
One creative director wrote: “Nice spelling mistake on the call for entries invitation I received this morning … Good print deserves good spelling! Made us laugh on a Monday morning though.”
 
Another queried: “I have a copy of your DLE mailout in front of me, and was wondering if desert was some kinda pun on the word dessert? Or was it just a big spelling fail?”

According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘desert’ means “deserving, being worthy of reward or punishment … acts or qualities deserving good or bad recompense, such recompense.”

Archibald was hesitant at using such a slogan. “A number of people thought that we had sent out a marketing communication with a shocker of a spello splashed across the front. I even had an argument with the designers, Switch Graphic Foundry, as to whether this would cause people to do a double-take at the spelling of the word. But I swallowed hard and decided to let it rock,” said Archibald.

“What this has shown is that many people think that the word should be ‘dessert’ and that is what they imagine when they think of that common saying. It might be a sweet thought, but in fact it’s the wrong usage of the word.”
 
She believes that the mail-out achieved its goals in alerting the industry to the need to get entries into Pride In Print.
 
“It has got everyone's attention so that is what counts,” she said. “That is the principal role of any marketing communication, and this little fun debate about the spelling has helped draw attention to the awards. We couldn’t have asked for more.”