CHALLENGES AND PITFALLS OF CHOOSING A FOREIGN PRODUCT NAME

CHALLENGES AND PITFALLS OF CHOOSING A FOREIGN PRODUCT NAME

If you want to choose a foreign name for your product, how do you do that? The reality is more complicated than simply finding a real foreign word in some appropriate language (e.g., French for a perfume, Spanish for a tortilla, Norwegian for skis). It has to be a word that, for example, looks French to people who don’t know any French. The clothing company Le Tigré, for instance, added the accent to the real French word for tiger (“tigre,” with no accent). In doing so, they made the word less French in fact, but made it look more French to English speakers, who know that French has accents and English doesn’t. In another example, Häagen-Dazs ice cream may be made in New York, but its foreign- looking name, complete with umlaut, suggests otherwise. Reactions to foreign product names vary a lot depending on the product and the country (Harris, Garner-Earl, Sprick, & Carroll, 1994; Hong & Wyer, 1989, 1990).

Perhaps the area of greatest danger comes in the chance that a brand name means something quite different in the language of a target market. When General Motors tried to market the Chevrolet Nova in Latin America, it didn’t sell well, since “no va” means “it doesn’t run” in Spanish. Even worse, when marketing its 1970s’ Pinto subcompact in Brazil, Ford discovered that “pinto” is a vulgar term for “small penis” in Brazilian Portuguese. For a short time, the Japanese were puzzled why their popular soft drink, Calpis (pronounced “cow-piss”) did not sell well in a U.S. test market, where it was a vulgar expression for “cattle urine.” Similarly, brand name changes for the American market might be in order for the Iranian detergent called Barf (American slang for “vomit”), the Mexican bread called Bimbo (American slang for “attractive but dim- witted woman”), or another Japanese drink, Sweat.

Sometimes names of products can be changed in the short-term in response to political whims. For example, during the anti-German frenzy of World War I Americans took to calling sauerkraut “liberty cabbage,” frankfurters and wieners “hot dogs,” and hamburgers “liberty sandwiches.” Such silliness is not purely a historical relic. In 2003, after France refused to support President George W.Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives cafeteria began serving “freedom fries” instead of “French fries” (Rawson, 2003).

Often an emotional appeal is centered around the uniqueness of the product or consumer. Interestingly enough, this type of appeal is especially

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common from the largest corporations, trying to fight an image of large, impersonal, and uncaring corporate institutions. For example, McDonald’s “we do it all for you campaign” and Wendy’s ads against “assembly-line burgers” illustrate this approach, as does General Motors ’ “Can we build one for you?” campaign. This is even more apparent in Saturn automobile advertising, which stresses the importance of the individual consumer and, in fact, never even mentions that Saturn is a General Motors product! WalMart uses such appeals very effectively, with its mini-bios of happy families shopping at Wal-Mart and contented employees who love working there. Such marketing not only makes it look like a fun place to shop but also counteracts its image of the megastore that puts all small businesses out of business. Personal attention to the individual is almost always appealing.

Different emotional appeals can work to varying degrees in different cultures. For example, in a content analysis of print ads in Korean and U.S. news and women’s magazines, Han and Shavitt (1994) found that American ads more often stressed individual benefits and pleasures, such as standing out from the crowd and being personally happy, while Korean ads more often pitched collective benefits, such as drawing closer to others or making an office work better together. Sometimes a marketing appeal developed in one culture does not translate well to another. For example, when Nissan developed magazine ads to introduce its luxury Infiniti to the U.S. market with several pages of scenes of nature with the name of the car only at the end of the sequence, the approach did not work. In more holistic, collectivist Japan, where people and nature have an inherent connectedness not appre- ciated in the West, this appeal had worked (Nisbett, 2003). Even different subcultures sometimes call for different marketing appeals (see Box 4.2)

Patriotic Appeals

Appeals to consumers’ national pride are common in ads. They were abundant during the quadrennial Olympic and World Cup events, as well as events like the U.S. Bicentennial (1976), the French Bicentennial (1989) or the Columbus Quincentennial (1992). The nationality of the manufacturer is of minor importance. Toyota is just as likely as General Motors to use an American patriotic appeal to sell cars in the United States. Volkswagen in New York salutes U.S. Olympic victories and McDonald’s in Dublin helps raise money for the Irish Olympic team. In terms of advertising themes, patriotism is where the market, not the home office, is.

Sometimes particular international events have their repercussions in advertising. Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, a strong wave of anti-Soviet sentiment swelled up in the United States. One Turkish vodka manufacturer began a campaign of “Revolutionary vodka without the revolution” (i.e., buy our vodka and still get imported quality

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the line to tasteless jingoism, it may become commercially counterproductive, as when a small-town U.S. restaurant published an “Iranian coupon—good for nothing” or when some advertisers took heavy- handed Japan-bashing approaches during times of high feeling against Japanese trade practices. After the terrorist attacks of September 2001, advertisers were extremely cautious about doing anything that might appear to be capitalizing on those events, but we still saw an increase in public symbols like the Statue of Liberty or the new “heroes” like firefighters and emergency personnel in advertising. Public outcry against excessively mean- spirited patriotic appeals backfires on the advertiser in ways that tend to discourage such campaigns, at least in their most blatant form.