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Top 20 Global Marketing & Communications Mistakes

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:32:34 +0000

Top 20 Global Marketing & Communications Mistakes

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Home Page > Marketing > Top 20 Global Marketing & Communications Mistakes

Top 20 Global Marketing & Communications Mistakes

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Posted: Sep 15, 2009 |Comments: 0
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Although sometimes cringe-worthy, examples of global marketing bloopers are a useful means of appreciating that we are not all the same. For any company or business conducting a marketing campaign abroad they must take linguistic and cultural variations seriously.

Below we have provided a top 20 Marketing & Communications Bloopers from across the globe.

1) The Japanese company Matsushita Electric was promoting a new Japanese PC for internet users. Panasonic created the new web browser and had received license to use the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker as an interactive internet guide. The day before the huge marketing campaign, Panasonic realised its error and pulled the plug. Why? The ads for the new product featured the following slogan: “Touch Woody – The Internet Pecker.” The company only realised its cross cultural blunder when an embarrassed American explain what “touch Woody’s pecker” could be interpreted as!

2) The Swedish furniture giant IKEA somehow agreed upon the name “FARTFULL” for one of its new desks.

3) In the late 1970s, Wang, the American computer company could not understand why its British branches were refusing to use its latest motto “Wang Cares”. Of course, to British ears this sounds too close to “Wankers” which would not really give a very positive image to any company.

4) ”Traficante” and Italian mineral water found a great reception in Spain’s underworld. In Spanish it translates as “drug dealer”.

5) In 2002, Umbro the UK sports manufacturer had to withdraw its new trainers (sneakers) called the Zyklon. The firm received complaints from many organisations and individuals as it was the name of the gas used by the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps.

6) Sharwoods, a UK food manufacturer, spent £6 million on a campaign to launch its new ‘Bundh’ sauces. It received calls from numerous Punjabi speakers telling them that “bundh” sounded just like the Punjabi word for “arse”.

7) Honda introduced their new car “Fitta” into Nordic countries in 2001. If they had taken the time to undertake some cross cultural marketing research they may have discovered that “fitta” was an old word used in vulgar language to refer to a woman’s genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. In the end they renamed it “Honda Jazz”.

8) American Motors tried to market its new car, the Matador, based on the image of courage and strength. However, in Puerto Rico the name means “killer” and was not popular on the hazardous roads in the country.

9) Proctor & Gamble used a television commercial in Japan that was popular in Europe. The ad showed a woman bathing, her husband entering the bathroom and touching her. The Japanese considered this ad an invasion of privacy, inappropriate behaviour, and in very poor taste.

10) Leona Helmsley should have done her homework before she approved a promotion that compared her Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York as comparable to the Taj Mahal–a mausoleum in India.

11) A golf ball manufacturing company packaged golf balls in packs of four for convenient purchase in Japan. Unfortunately, pronunciation of the word “four” in Japanese sounds like the word “death” and items packaged in fours are unpopular.

12) Pepsodent tried to sell its toothpaste in Southeast Asia by emphasizing that it “whitens your teeth.” They found out that the local natives chew betel nuts to blacken their teeth which they find attractive.

13) A company advertised eyeglasses in Thailand by featuring a variety of cute animals wearing glasses. The ad was a poor choice since animals are considered to be a form of low life and no self respecting Thai would wear anything worn by animals.

14) The soft drink Fresca was being promoted by a saleswoman in Mexico. She was surprised that her sales pitch was greeted with laughter, and later embarrassed when she learned that fresca is slang for “lesbian.”

15) Kellogg had to rename its Bran Buds cereal in Sweden when it discovered that the name roughly translated to “burned farmer.”

16) When Pepsico advertised Pepsi in Taiwan with the ad “Come Alive With Pepsi” they had no idea that it would be translated into Chinese as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.”

17) Coors put its slogan, “Turn It Loose,” into Spanish where its translation was read as “Suffer From Diarrhea.”

18) Frank Perdue’s chicken slogan, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken” was translated into Spanish as “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”

19) Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno mag.

20) During its 1994 launch campaign, the telecom company Orange had to change its ads in Northern Ireland. “The future’s bright … the future’s Orange.” That campaign is an advertising legend. However, in the North the term Orange suggests the Orange Order. The implied message that the future is bright, the future is Protestant, loyalist… didn’t sit well with the Catholic Irish population.

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David Arnold -
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David Arnold is a writer with an interest in marketing and communications across linguistic and cultural barriers. As well as private work and research he also assists companies with their multilingual marketing campaigns and strategies.

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Global Knives: Redefining Cutlery

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:27:13 +0000

Global Knives: Redefining Cutlery

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Global Knives: Redefining Cutlery

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Posted: Dec 03, 2009 |Comments: 0

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Global Knives: Redefining Cutlery

By: Daisy Wilson

About the Author

If you’re interested in giving your culinary skills the upgrade you desire, check out garnersfoodserviceequipment.co.uk and get on the road to completing your cutlery set and giving you the fabulous culinary tools and Commercial Catering Equipment you need to become a five star chef in your own kitchen. Your family will be incredibly appreciative.

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For all the Iron Chefs who want a shot at becoming a star cook, it’s imperative that you invest in a proper cutlery set. The geniuses at Garners Food Service Equipment have produced some of the most incredible kitchen equipment in the world, and their select knife collection is no exception. Global Knives are a state of the art set of knives that ensure that those who have even a fleeting desire to produce gourmet alternatives to beans on toast have the opportunity in their own kitchens.

The Global Knives set comes in four distinct series, all complete with the cutlery necessary in any kitchen. Beginning with the Global Knives G Series, these long-bladed knives are fitted with hollow handles. They are completely resistant to rust, stains, and metal corrosion, making these knives the perfect set for a lifelong of culinary excellence in your home. The visionary artists at Garners Food Service have crafted these knives to ensure that there are no traps in which food can become caked. The series includes an 18-cm Meat and Fish Slicer, a 21-cm Swedish Fillet Knife, a 16-cm Boning Knife, and 22-cm Roast Slicer, to name a few.

The Global Knives GS Series consist of smaller bladed knives, also equipped with weighted hollow handles. As with the G Series, these knives are completely rust, stain, and corrosion-resistant. Also, one can expect the same care to have been taken in their construction as the previous set of knives –again, ensuring that no food is able to become trapped in any hitches in your cutlery over time. Included in the GS series are a 20-cm Flexible Palette Knife, a 10-cm Paring Knife, a 14-cm Cheese Knife, and an 8-cm Tomato Knife.

Continuing to the Global Knives GSF Series, you can expect the same incredible quality and construction as with the previous two series. Again, completely rust, stain, and corrosion-resistant; again, equipped with a seamless construction ensuring no food and bacterial surprises in the serration. The only difference is these knives are built with solid handles. Included in the GSF Series, you will receive a 6-cm Curved Peeling Knife, an 8-cm Spearpoint Peeling Knife, a 15-cm Utility Knife, and an 11-cm Utility Knife.

Rounding out the group of incredible cutlery, Garners offers the Global Knives Carving Fork and Steels. No cutlery set would be complete without a carving fork for any Christmas feast and a steel to keep your knives as sharp as the day they were purchased. Again, you should expect nothing short of miraculous with these pieces. This set includes a 24-cm Carving Fork, 26- and 30-cm Diamond Steels, and a 24-cm Ceramic Sharpener.

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A Closer Look at Global Domains

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 05:33:00 +0000

This is a case of ‘let the seller beware’ …

The tiny Polynesian island nation of Niue is beginning to think it’s been had.

Frankly, it’s clear they didn’t do their homework before they did their deal.

Ironically, it seems the buyer hadn’t really done his, either.

Anyone who has been inundated by advertisements for ‘global domains’ can easily understand that it’s a burgeoning business. The specter of purchasing a domain at a much better price than the more common ‘dot com’ or ‘dot net’ or ‘dot org’ is most attractive to most aspiring entrepeneurs on limited budgets. This niche’s market leader is most likely Global Domains International (GDI), which has no doubt put Western Samoa on the mental map of many a cybernaut. The key element in that deal is that the Western Samoan government granted the rights to GDI in return for a royalty for every domain sold.

Niue’s name is derived from the local language’s phrase for, “Look, a coconut!” It seems they should have used theirs more thoroughly before signing a domain deal with Bill Semich in 1998.

An American businessman whose former station was editor for a computer magazine, Semich recognized the potential value in the marketability of unique domains. Apparently finding the ‘nu’ extension an attractive letter combination, he signed a contract with the Niue government that gave him the exclusive rights to it.

It wasn’t a one-way deal. Semich guaranteed free wireless access for all 2000 of Niue’s citizens and he delivered, completing the installation of an island-wide network of translator towers in 2003. The country’s leaders surely felt they had provided their citizenry with a service for the new century which would favorably ensconce their place in island history.

Semich, meanwhile, intended to hawk his bargain domains to Americans. He had no idea that his ideal customers were in Sweden, where ‘nu’ is the local word for ‘now.’

Obviously,’now’ is a hot marketing action term in any language, so Semich was pleasantly surprised to find the Swedes flocking to his cyber-property. As a translated example of why this works for them, ‘drive.now’ (which would be ‘köra.nu’) is a very compelling sales slogan which becomes an ideal URL for a Swedish driving school. To date, Semich has had 110,000 sales of ‘dot nu’ domains at $30 a year, which has considerably swollen the coffers of his ‘.NU Domain Ltd’ to the extent that its website’s home page default language is now — or nu — in Swedish.

In fact, Semich has cleverly taken advantage of this windfall to become the first domain provider to incorporate a complete Unicode character set into its scripts, allowing users whose alphabets have unique characters — in Swedish, that would be the letters ‘å,’ ‘ä’ and ‘ö’ — to remain true to their language instead of settling for Anglicized versions, which often destroy their original meaning. His company has already announced the rollout of this service in Sweden. Given that Unicode enables linguistic propriety to Japanese, Cyrillic, Spanish, French, German, Arabic and any other script with unique characters, Semich has truly become a pioneer in his craft.

All this commercial success has wrought concerns in Niue. Not only is the disparity in financial benefit an issue, but the island’s strongly Christian residents are upset that ‘dot nu’ has become a popular extension for pornographic sites. Semich disavows any responsibility for this segment of his clientele, but the fact remains that they are there.

The issue became such a political hot potato that ‘neo-colonialism’ was a trendy charge in Niue’s recent elections. Semich seems shrewd enough to realize that he’s got the high ground in any bargaining that must be done to assuage his Pacific partners, so a reasonable solution will surely be attained.

This scenario underscores the all-encompassing scope of cyberspatial commerce and the depth of considerations that both buyer and seller must assess before entering into far-reaching agreements. Not even the world’s tiniest nation — and that’s remote little blip-in-the-Pacific Niue — is immune from the effects.

The moral of the story, then, is to count your cyber-coconuts before they’re cracked open. They may be worth more than you think.

Visit the Types Of Goldfish website to learn about goldfish plant and goldfish reproduction.

Is There Any Scenario Where Translation or Localization Wasn?t Needed for Global Marketing?

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:32:52 +0000

There doesn’t seem to be very many scenarios where a business has become successful without implementing a marketing and localization strategy first.

Where certain companies seem to speak every language, they didn’t get successful overnight. The Swedish company, IKEA for example is known throughout America and Europe and now slowly through Asia by using several marketing schemes. Even though the company is still advertising the same types of products, even IKEA, where it’s products are fundamentally simple- pieces of furniture, the catalogs it advertises localized to each country specifically depending on the country. Depending on how people are raised and what they are accustomed to will depend on how they will approach furniture. Furniture is very personal. It must be presented in a way that is welcoming to people with their political, cultural and ethical in mind. Or it needs to grab attention- like what IKEA does.

One thing IKEA has done to blur boundaries is advertising through public transportation, create a “complete” shopping experience and keep costs low. IKEA could not have sent out more than 190 million catalogues to the global households without 56 editions and in 27 languages without the help of a translation and localization company working full time for them.

Blurring The Lines Using Transportation Methods

Since transportation to some of the large IKEA stores involves a trek way outside of people’s normal 20 mile radius close to home, IKEA has developed some ingenious ways to get people to there store for free, optional incentive to buy “of course.” In Brooklyn, New York IKEA provided a free ferry that runs from Wall Street to Brooklyn everyday from June 9 th to June 30 th as well as constructing models of New York City landmarks of the Empire States Building and the Brooklyn Bridge out of IKEA boxes. In Japan, IKEA’s guerilla marketing team took over a Kobe Portliner Monorail train, that made one of it’s stops near an IKEA and coated the seats and walls in decorative IKEA fabric, similar to a room design in one of their catalogs.

The Complete Shopping Experience

Assuming that you will be shopping awhile at IKEA, they have provided a Swedish style restaurant inside each IKEA store that has created one reason to go to an IKEA store for some where there perhaps wasn’t a reason before. Smelling Swedish meatballs while shopping would make anyone want to stop into the restaurant, conveniently located at the checkout counter. Food will always be a universal selling point.

Keeping Costs Low Speak to Everyone

Of course if it’s a good product and it’s affordable or down right cheap, people will buy it. When it comes to similar designs, Japanese designs and Swedish designs are fairly similar, clean lines and simplicity. So IKEA wasn’t worried about that aspect of selling the products to Japan. If the products were made from high quality designs or would last, that is where IKEA could have trouble selling their brand.

When thinking about launching your product into the global market, think about ways you can appeal to people as individuals and their basic needs. Then, hire a localization and translation company to get the details across. When you speak the basics, you speak their language.

About the author:Melissa Peterman is a Web Content Specialist for www.innuity.com for more information about localization services, go to MultiLing .

A world of movies: Festival brings global cinema to our front door

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:39:46 +0000

A world of movies: Festival brings global cinema to our front door
“So what’s good?” That’s a question movie critics are asked year round but never more so than when a film festival rolls into town. And the 27th Miami International Film Festival, which kicks off Friday , offers enough options to make even the most level-headed film buff a little dazed — the good kind of dazed.

Hollywood remake eyes global hit for ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:52:25 +0000

Hollywood remake eyes global hit for ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’
A Hollywood remake is in the works for Stieg Larsson’s international best-selling book “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Dangers of a Global Language

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:56:00 +0000

Negative aspects of English as a Global Language

Even though there are many positive aspects of having a global language, there are negative aspects as well. How would it be possible to carry through a global language? Are there any dangers with having a global language?

A global language might cultivate an elite class with native speakers, who take advantage of the possibility to think and work quickly in their mother-tongue. If this was the case they might manipulate it to their advantage at the expense of those who has another language as their mother-tongue and in this way create a linguistic gap between people.

English has a history, sometimes cruel and violent with colonialism and war, and introducing English as the global language might be seen as a threat of future dominance. Perhaps a global language will make people unwilling or unable to learn other languages and make other languages unnecessary.

One of the “risks” having only one language is that the chosen language may become very technical and “impoverished” for non-native speakers, e.g. the Eskimos, who have several words for snow, because they need it. They would probably not be able to express themselves properly if they only had one word for snow. And Swedish people would not be able to use the word “lagom”, a word which says a lot about the Swedish society and people.

Many of the people who answered my question about “English as a Global Language”, expressed a worry that if we only had one language, they would feel “poor” when it comes to expressing feelings and emotions in a language that is not their mother-tongue, that they would not know enough words to be able to really express how and what they feel.

Standards – which standard should be used? Strict or loose standards?

English is the mother-tongue of millions of people in different parts of the world.

If English were to become a global language, which standard of the language would be the global standard? Perhaps the standards would become looser.

Standard English is the English that is usually used in print. It is also the English

which is normally taught in school and to non-native speakers learning English.

This is also the standard that is spoken among educated people and used for news broadcasts.

Historically, the British Standard developed from the south-east part of England (the area around London). These dialects were spoken in court, used in law and by the government.

Standard English has a widely accepted grammar, and an accent that comes with this standard, the British English accent, also known as the “Oxford English”, is the accent that is taught is schools. Furthermore this English has a major cultural influence, especially on the languages in the former Commonwealth countries, e.g. South Africa, Australia, and India as well as the European Union.

We often hear about “American-English”, “South African-English” or other

“Englishes”, but no such terms really exist. The different types of English are based on the British English but have developed grammatical and vocabulary differences because of influence and “loanwords” from other languages.

Minor Languages and cultures

What will happen to minor cultures and languages if we introduce a global language?

An introduction of a global language might lead to discrimination of other languages. Losing a language equals losing identity. The language is much more than just a tool for communication. According to Trudgill there is an intimate relation between language and culture and a large homogenisation of culture might lead to a shift in language where native people adopt another language and eventually the old language may die out. There is a difference between “language death” and “language murder”. Language death is when a language disappears naturally; its speakers are leaving it voluntarily, but “language murder” means that the killer language actively discourages use of other languages. Minority languages may be removed from the media and educational systems.

English is referred to as a “killer language”, which means that it is a dominant language learned subtractive, at the cost of the mother tongues, rather than additively.

In the United States there have been a few “English Only” movements, the first one in 1803, when they banned the speaking of French among the population in Louisiana. After that, several attempts to remove Spanish and French have taken place. English is declared as the official language in several states in the US. The English-Only movements have been rejected by linguistics; they mean that a language does not create political unity, it takes more than that.

The use of one single language in a community is no guarantee for social harmony or mutual understanding. This has been proven several times during the history, e.g. American Civil War, Spanish Civil War and former Yugoslavia.

Conclusion

This essay has shown that the creation of a global language has numerous advantages and disadvantages. Mutual intelligibility, great career opportunities and reduced administrative costs are some of the advantages a global language would give. The disadvantages are that English is closely linked to the British and the American cultures and history and is therefore not a “neutral” language. Perhaps a language with less historical and cultural connections would be a better option? We are in need of an international language for communication, politics, trade and security, but at the same time we are worried about language death, the advantages native speakers will have and all the disadvantages non-native speakers will face. English is growing, it is a strong language, and its future seems bright. My opinion is that if there will ever be an international language, English is the best option. It is a strong, well developed language with millions of speakers.

Even if a global language might be important, different languages are of importance for their culture and for the development of their native speakers. Languages make the world more interesting and more alive.

A lingua franca can be any language which is used for communication among people who have no native language in common. In many of the former European colonies in Africa, French or English are used as the language of communication in trade and business. In some parts of Africa, other African lingua francas, such as Swahili and Hausa, are used. These languages are indigenous in some countries and have become used because of political reasons.

When a language is used as a lingua franca, it undergoes a certain amount of reduction and simplification. The simplification often refers to getting rid of irregularities and grammatical gender in the lingua franca. This happens because adults are, unlike children, generally not good language learners, and therefore need a simplified version of the language.