Foreign branding

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Foreign branding is an advertising and marketing term describing the implied cachet or superiority of products and services with foreign or foreign-sounding names.

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[edit] Non-English brand names in English-speaking countries

In English-speaking countries, many cosmetics and fashion brands use French or Italian-styled names to imply a connection to the style-conscious, while northern European and Japanese names imply high quality and efficiency.

  • The cold potato and leek soup vichyssoise was invented at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York in the 1910s and was given a French name to make it sound more palatable.
  • The name of the French wine-growing district of Chablis is used on bottles of generic-quality American white wine.
  • Dolmio sauce has an Italian-sounding name but is not even sold in Italy.
  • In the UK, the English company Moben Kitchens trademarked "Möben" in 1977 because of the perceived higher quality of German and Scandinavian kitchens [1].
  • The electrical retailer Dixons adopted the Japanese-sounding brand Matsui for consumer electronics.
  • Ginsu knives have the faux Japanese-sounding name "Ginsu" (Kanji Japanese: 銀簾, Hiragana: ぎんす).

[edit] English brand names in non-English-speaking countries

  • In Germany it is common for television advertisements to be mainly in German, but to end with an English-language motto or slogan; recently, however, there has been a notable shift back towards German due to widespread complaints from language purists and studies showing that many target audiences with moderate English proficiency misunderstood the intended message. The most prominent example in this respect is Sat.1 Television, which abandoned its poorly understood corporate slogan "Powered by Emotion" in favor of "Sat.1 zeigt's allen", a phrase that is much more catchy to German ears and translates into "Sat.1 shows it to everybody" or, idiomatically, "Sat.1 shows everybody how it's done properly" or "Sat.1 shows everybody how (or why) it is superior". Another example was the Finnish telecommunications company Sonera, which adopted the English slogan "Make things click", as in "click into place". The problem is, that the colloquial term klikkaa "it clicks" means the exact opposite, "it malfunctions".
  • Foreign branding is often used in Mexico, mostly due to the country's proximity to the United States.
  • South Korea-based LG Electronics named its washer and dryer line Tromm. One of the reasons for selecting this foreign sounding name was to imply a connection to superior quality in the domestic market, as foreign brands of appliances were held in high regard. However, Tromm is a global product line for LG Electronics.

[edit] Products renamed to avoid offense

  • The company Bic changed its name from Bich pronounced /bik/ to prevent it from being mispronounced in English speaking countries as bitch.
  • Mitsubishi Pajero had to be renamed to Montero in Spain and Hispanic America, since pajero is a Spanish slang term for one who masturbates. Mitsubishi originally got the name Pajero from the pampas cat, Leopardus pajeros. [2].
  • The Honda Fitta was renamed in Sweden and Norway, where Fitta is a slang term for female genitalia.
  • Buick had to rename its Lacrosse to Allure in Canada, because it was a euphemism for masturbation in Quebec.
  • The SEAT Málaga was marketed in Greece as the Seat Gredos, because the word Malaga was considered very similar to Malaka, a common Greek swear word for one who masturbates.
  • The primarily-US fast food chain Taco Bell formerly sold a burrito called a chili-cheese burrito. Its name was changed when many people became aware that the original name, chilito, is used as a slang term for penis in Mexico.

[edit] Foreign branding through foreign orthography

Foreign alphabets and diacritical marks (such as the umlaut) are often used to give a foreign flavor to a brand that does not consist of foreign terms.

  • Greek characters (most commonly sigma, Σ, for E, but also sometimes delta Δ or lambda Λ for A) are similarly used as in advertising for MY BIG FAT GRΣΣK WEDDING, along with ABC Family's college set series Greek, which renders their title on-screen as GRΣΣK as the program is centered within the Greek system of a fictional Ohio college. This comes out something like grssk. The movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire spells the title "ΛTLΛNTIS", which reads ltllntis, and even used a large Λ on its posters. This particular type of foreign branding derives from the fact that these letters are easily carved in stone, evoking the culture of Ancient Greece.
  • Faux Cyrillic lifts entire Cyrillic characters to add "Яussiaи" (which would actually be pronounced Yaussiai) flavor (a notable example is the videogame TETЯIS, which is written Тетрис in actual Cyrillic))
  • The cover of Madonna's Greatest Hits Volume 2 contains the seemingly Japanese string モヂジラミミヂ, which is made up of the Japanese characters that share the same keys on a Japanese/English keyboard as the letters M-A-D-O-N-N-A. The real Japanese reading, mojijiramimiji, is meaningless.
  • The name of the French soft drink Pschitt is merely an onomatopoetic rendition of the sound made when the bottle is opened, but the -sch- and terminal -tt are German, rather than French, clusters.
  • A premium-priced ice cream made by a company based in Bronx, New York was dubbed Häagen-Dazs to imply "old world craftsmanship and tradition." Häagen-Dazs has no meaning in any European language, although it contains several conventions used in European languages, such as the umlaut. Häagen-Dazs spawned imitators, such as Frusen Glädjé (frusen glädje without the acute accent meaning "frozen joy" in Swedish), another brand of premium ice cream. Häagen Dazs sued unsuccessfully in 1980 to stop them from using a "Scandinavian marketing theme."

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_branding"
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