International Marketing - Cracking an international market is a goal of most growing corporations. It shouldn't be that hard, yet even the big multi-nationals run into trouble because of language and cultural differences. For example...
The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."
In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."
Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger-lickin' good" came out as "eat your fingers off."
The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, "Salem - Feeling Free," got translated in the Japanese market into "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty."
Marcel Rigadin reports that Toyota makes the MR2, which in France is pronounced "merdé" or spelled 'merdeux', means "crappy".
When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in South America, it was apparently unaware that "no va" means "it won't go." After the company figured out why it wasn't selling any cars, it renamed the car in its Spanish markets to the Caribe.
Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for "tiny male genitals". Ford pried all the nameplates off and substituted Corcel, which means horse.
When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." However, the company's mistakenly thought the spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass. Instead the ads said that "It wont leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
An American t-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired "I Saw the Pope" in Spanish, the shirts proclaimed "I Saw the Potato."
Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," got terribly mangled in another Spanish translation. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that explained "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused."
Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in French Canada as Gros Jos before finding out that the phrase, in slang, means "big breasts." In this case, however, the name problem did not have a noticeable effect on sales.
In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.
Japan's second-largest tourist agency was mystified when it entered English-speaking markets and began receiving requests for unusual sex tours. Upon finding out why, the owners of Kinki Nippon Tourist Company changed its name.
In an effort to boost orange juice sales in predominantly continental breakfast eating England, a campaign was devised to extoll the drink's eye-opening, pick-me-up qualities. Hence, the slogan, "Orange juice. It gets your pecker up."
In Germany, the introduction of the "Mist Stick" was met with slow sales, until advertisers discovered that "mist" is slang for "crap."
The european hardware store chain "Götzen" opened a mall in Istanbul. "Göt" means "ass" in Turkish. They changed the name to "Tekzen".
Waterpik uses another name in Denmark. "Pik" is the common Danish word for male genitals. Most Danes can easily translate "water" to the danish word "vand". And "vandpik" is a term for the morning erection.
Traficante is an Italian brand of mineral water. In Spanish, it means drug dealer.
Pizza Hut is advertising their new dish, a calzone they named the P'Zone. It is pronounced like "pezón", the Spanish word for "nipple".
Car maker Honda introduced their new car "Fitta" in the Nordic countries during 2001, only to find out that "fitta" is an old word, currently used in vulgar language to refer to a woman's genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. It was renamed to "Honda Jazz" for the Nordic market.
In Italy "sega" is the unofficial but most popular name for the act of male masturbation. So, the popular videogame makers SEGA Enterprises, attempting to disassociate SEGA from sega, changed the pronunciation to "see-ga" in their ads, as if to educate Italians about proper English (or Japanese?) pronunciation.
When American Airlines wanted to advertise its new leather first class seats in the Mexican market, it translated its "Fly In Leather" campaign literally, which meant "Fly Naked" ("vuela en cuero") in Spanish!
Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose" into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea".
The Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux tried to sell its goods in America but didn't help itself with this slogan, "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux."
When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the beautiful Caucasian baby on the label. Sales were very poor. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside, since most people can't read.
Stevadores in an unnamed African port, seeing the international --but evidently not universal!-- symbol for 'fragile' (a wine glass with snapped stem) presumed it meant that some idiot had sent a cargo of broken glass. So they obligingly pitched all the cases overboard into the harbour!
The band Garbage, on tour in Russia found they had to replace most of their equipment when airport baggage handlers, seeing "Garbage" on the equipment cases, proceeded to throw them away.
The Dairy Association's huge success with the campaign "Got Milk?" prompted them to expand advertising to Mexico. It was soon brought to their attention the Spanish translation read "Are you lactating?"
Mitsubishi had to rename its Pajero automobile because the word is a vulgar spanish term for a masturbating man.
Nike offended Muslims in June, 1997 when the "flaming air" logo for its Nike Air sneakers looked too similar to the Arabic form of God's name, "Allah". Nike pulled more than 38,000 pairs of sneakers from the market.
For their series of landcruisers, Nissan Company invented an apparently meaningless word borrowed from the Spanish "pajaro" (bird). They named it "Pachero". This means ****er in South America.
Puffs tissues allegedly had trouble in Germany due to their name being a colloquial term for a house of ill-repute (prostitution).
Nissan's minivan Moco doesn't do so well in Spanish-speaking markets. Especially green ones. Distributors in Santiago, Chile asked that the vehicle be renamed since Moco is the Spanish word for mucous.
Locum is a Swedish company. In 1991, they sent Christmas cards to all of their customers. They thought they would give their logo a little holiday spirit, by substituting a little heart for the letter "o". For some reason, they also used all lowercase letters. The lowercase "L" can therefore be easily misunderstood to be an "i", and the locum logo looked like one of those "I love ..." bumper stickers, with an unfortunate pornographic sentiment to it.
Matsushita Electric was promoting a new Japanese PC targeted at the Internet. Panasonic had developed a complete Japanese Web browser, and to make the system user-friendly, licensed the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker as the Internet guide. Panasonic eventually planned on a world version of the product. A huge marketing campaign was to have introduced the product in Japan. The day before the ads were to be released, Panasonic suddenly pulled back and delayed the product launch indefinitely. The reason: the ads featured the slogan "Touch Woody - The Internet Pecker." An American staff member at the internal product launch explained to the stunned and embarrassed Japanese what touch woody and pecker meant in American slang.
