Get your timing right. If any piece of marketing activity is time sensitive, make sure all the elements can work together or your spend will be wasted. For instance a major computer company invited me by mail to visit my local stockist after a given date to try their new product. When I went there, they hadn't yet got it and didn't know when it was due. There was another famous instance which achieved comments by politicians.

A retail group advertised their back-to-school range nationally; unfortunately, that included Scotland, where the school year began earlier and the kids were already in class when the campaign started. Then there was the bank advertising car-loans "be first with the new registration on August 1st". But by the time the ads broke, very few dealers could supply a new car for delivery on said date.

Similar, but subtly different is stock availability. As far as I am concerned, this one beggars belief. Spending one penny on publicising a product which you then can't supply is madness, but it happens. In the run-up to this Christmas stores ran out of a product from a major international toy manufacturer - in November. Said product was being heavily advertised on TV. Moreover, because of licensing agreements, it was not going to be produced again. So what was the TV spend for? Likewise you will have seen (and probably experienced) the shortage of many kids' must-have game system. The business press have said that lack of stock of said product will cost the manufacturer as much as $1.3 billion in lost sales. How do you fancy explaining that to a shareholders meeting? Judging the right amount of stock to hold is of course something of an artform, but the above examples look like guesswork rather than professional marketing.

Typography is a potential minefield. A big cereal brand offered an on-pack kids' toy like a mini-frisbee which you flicked and hence was called the little flicker. When the pack flash was artworked in upper case, the marketing manager wasn't happy to offer his sub-teen customers LITTLE FLICKERS. That, of course, was changed but it highlights an issue: what looks fine as draft copy can go badly wrong when turned into artwork. In fact, it should never have been an issue because you shouldn't use solid upper case - people find it harder to read than upper and lower. The exceptions are few - new, win, free, save - all short words. Be conscious too of people's eyesight. Small copy is unreadable to many, and white reversed out of black is the worst of all. A 25 year-old Mac designer might be able to read it perfectly but if your customers are over fifty they probably can't. Be wary about some colour combinations because a lot of people are colour blind. Oddly, these sins turn up most often on websites, where space constraints are hardly an issue and colour options infinite.

Do you suffer from being over-stressed? The facilities on our computers enable all manner of stress - bold, capitals, italics, underlining, colour. Unfortunately some people think that means you have to use them all and, worse, all together. Stress should take the eye to individual key words or phrases and should, therefore, be used sparingly. Never use inverted commas for stress. "Free", rather than highlighting the benefit, implies that it is, in some unstated way, not free.

As witnessed by this magazine and lots of catalogues, the printwear industry largely avoids one classic error, using poor photography. Professional photography is expensive because the photographer is trained, understands lighting, shot composition and exposure and has thousands of pounds worth of kit to show the product off to its best advantage. Your amateur version is just not good enough and it will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. Use of amateur models is likely to suffer the same problem. Your neice or nephew may be drop-dead gorgeous in the flesh, but strangely the camera will find out any flaws in 1/200th of a second. Do not be tempted to use amateur photography in any circumstance and be very wary of amateur models.

A general point on photographs is that what makes them interesting is people. A shot of a factory or warehouse or the machinery in them is essentially dull. However proud you may be of your premises and technology, most of your readers couldn't care less and they certainly couldn't distinguish between one factory shot and another. Show people working in them and it's a different story. This also helps give a sense of scale - important if you are making a point about the size of your warehouse. These comments are especially relevant to photographs for PR. An editor with a choice between a factory shot showing just bricks and mortar and another including people wearing the product will pick the latter every time.

Spelling is a problem child. With Spellchecker being on every computer, you'd think this would be a thing of the past but  mistakes get a public airing every day. Does it matter? Quite simply, yes. How can a client trust you to get his product right if you can't spell your own marketing materials correctly? Incidentally, Spellchecker won't solve incorrect use of homophones (words that sound alike but have different meanings). You might get away with mixing up 'practise' and 'practice', but, for instance, confusing 'flair' with 'flare' is going to leave you with egg on your face, especially if related to trousers.

If you advertise on the radio, do not be tempted to force the proverbial quart into a pint pot. Three words per second is not the target, it's the maximum. Listeners just do not get your message if it's an incoherent gabble. You would be better served having a longer slot repeated less often. However, in most cases, editing out secondary information will enable the ad to be comprehensible, effective and short. Take care, also, not to commit the audio version of "little flickers". A script may look fine in black and white, but get someone to read it to you, just in case there's a problem lurking. One major record company planning to launch a country and western blockbuster decided against radio advertising for this reason and that's why you don't hear Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits advertised on the radio.

Sell benefits, not features. This should be tattooed on every marketer's arm, but it's remarkable how often this golden rule is broken. I suspect it's because the billions spent on such as car advertising have made consumers aware that features such as 60mpg means economical and 0-60 in 6 seconds means fast. Printwear doesn't have the budgets to achieve that awareness level and many of your customers won't have a high level of product knowledge. 300 gram cotton means nothing to most corporate buyers; "heavyweight" or "super-warm" they understand.

Special offers come first. Whether by advertising, direct mail or website any special offers should be up front, at the top. Obvious? Not to everybody. I've seen great offers relegated to a corner flash and buried in body copy. One high street bank offered a free RAC check on used-car loans (what is it about banks and car loans?) but instead of being a 48 point headline the offer was para 3 of the body copy, after they'd finished blithering about the wonders of their personal loans - a deeply dull subject.

Check, cheque and czech again. We are all human and therefore make mistakes. More than that, we can get too close to the subject and miss the obvious. One agency I worked at gave a piece of client-approved artwork to a printer who, happily, noticed the 'deliberate' error in the headline: "2 for the price of 3". Get someone less involved to read your materials before they're produced.

All the examples I've quoted above come from major, high-profile businesses, the sort which have wall-to-wall brand managers on one floor of their office and a variety of highly paid agencies. If they can make such errors, P&P readers are not immune. Most of the errors come from poor planning and giving yourself too little time to create the best result. Remember haste is the sister of regret.

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