Logitech: Naming shaming

One director's award leads to an embarrassment for another.

The Site

Logitech, the Switzerland-based global consumer technology company, makes an embarrassing hash of a non-executive biography.

Logitech provides a link on the overview page of its About section to Executive Biographies. This is an index page which lists the names of the members of the Board of Directors and Senior Management; each leads to a profile of the individual.

Among the nine directors listed is an entry for ‘Robert Malcom’ which leads to a profile headed ‘Robert Malcom, Member of Compensation Committee’. The opening paragraph states that “Robert Malcom has been a non-executive member of Logitech’s board of directors since 2007 and serves on Logitech’s Compensation Committee”. However, the five subsequent mentions of his name in the biography all refer to “Mr. Malcolm”.

The Takeaway

In the week when Logitech’s co-founder, Daniel Borel, was announced as the inaugural winner of the ‘Entrepreneur for the World 2008’ award it’s safe to assume that the Executive Biographies section of his company’s website will attract some extra traffic. Its prominent highlighting in the About section will be helpful in pointing journalists and other interested parties to it. Embarrassment potential squared, then, when anyone checks out Robert Malcom/Malcolm’s profile and discovers Logitech apparently isn’t even sure how to spell the name of someone it pays to help direct the company. (‘Malcolm’ is the correct form, confirmed by his employer, Diageo, on its site.)

Unfortunately for Logitech, the mistake will draw attention to itself because to native English speakers the spelling in the index (‘Malcom’) differs from what they would expect. Perhaps that should be the lesson here: get your site proofread by a native speaker of the language in which it’s published. But you’d need to make sure that person had grasped the universal sub-editing skill of spotting inconsistencies in spelling. There’s no excuse in any language for getting that wrong.

First published on 20 November, 2008