Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Beetle Beadle Days....

Biking through town yesterday on a fruitless mission to find some new painting sandals, I rode down Main Street and noticed a banner on one of the Four Corners bars. The banner announced the specials and activities the bar is offering in conjunction with Crazy Days -- oh, but wait, someone involved in community marketing decided that Madison's version of the usual small-town summer festival of sales and other merriment needed a different, more distinguishing name. "Crazy" perhaps has fallen out of favor due to its politically incorrect undertones. It also is the name used by a hundred other towns for their weekends of sidewalk sales and kiddie tractor pulls, so it's not terribly useful in helping Madison build its brand (and if this town can just build a brand, then all our dreams will come true, the Lake Area Improvement Corporation tells us). Thus, Crazy Days has been renamed Beadle Days, in honor of local historic figure General William Henry Harrison Beadle.

But back to the banner: Evidently the bar owner isn't pulling together as a team player with the rest of the community. The banner reads "Beetle Days." The community marketing folks dedicated to creating these cool marketing campaigns must groan when they see that banner. And I'll admit -- even I as an English teacher groan at such apparent miscommunication and misspelling. At a bare minimum, good marketing demands understanding exactly which words we are supposed to use. Obviously that's not happening with this latest bright idea. Besides this amusing misspelling, shop windows and newspaper ads show the general confusion as to whether the weekend event is still Crazy Days. Where "Beadle" was supposed to be a unifying term, it appears to have ended up just thrown in the mix with the other labels used for the event.

Whoever screwed up -- the bar owner in not double-checking the order and recognizing the possible misunderstanding of the ambiguous word "Beadle", local businesses for not paying attention to updates from the Chamber of Commerce, maybe the Chamber itself for picking a term so easily misunderstood -- we need to make sure all the local merchants get the memo and get their advertising materials right.