The Way to Say Mc|K:

We say our name as though it were spelled McKay. Simple, direct and easy. You should hear the “McKay” pronunciation any time we answer the phone or introduce the company in public.

There are still times, though, when you’ll hear the company described by the three letters, MCK. The most common may be when providing an email address or Web URL, both of which include the mckhealthcare.com domain name. We’ll sometimes spell out the MCK when leaving a phone message to avoid confusion, and to help send the recipient in the right direction in the event he or she wants to look up our web site or listing in the phone book.

Typing Mc|K on your keyboard:

In published materials and correspondence, the company name uses a character called “the pipe.” It is a straight vertical line that runs from the bottom of a descending lower-case letter to the top of an upper case letter thus: |. You can find it on most U.S. keyboards on the far right side of the QWERTY rank, just under the “backspace” key. It is the upper case version of the back slash.

Our computer people tell us it was originally created to form vertical lines in typed tables but now it just sits there longing for a role in the world of automatic spreadsheets. We were happy to comply.

Since not all keyboards include the pipe character, the Mc|K name shows up differently in different documents. Some of our official government filings, for instance, use the forward slash that is found beneath the question mark on the lower rank of your keyboard. This Mc/K spelling is easier and faster for most people and is available on virtually all keyboards. Thanks to the internet, most people understand the term “forward slash,” so the Mc/K form is easier to describe when spelling our name over the phone.

If you routinely use word processing, spreadsheet or presentation programs from a certain company in Redmond, Washington, you’ll find that you can use neither the pipe nor the forward slash when naming documents. Freedom of expression issues aside, we simply use McK in document and file names.

To paraphrase Mae West, we are less concerned with how you spell our name than that you use it frequently to write, call or email. For pharmaceutical and healthcare marketers, we’re convinced that however you spell it the right answer will always be Mc|K Healthcare for advertising, branding and strategy.

84 State Street, Suite 660 | Boston, MA 02109 | (617) 482-8228