Cross-cultural Marketing Blunders

If you’re thinking of expanding your business and tapping into International markets, it is important that you hire the services of a translation agency. There have been numerous instances of renowned brands investing huge sums of money globally, without realizing that the message being conveyed could be interpreted incorrectly or may be perceived wrongly in another country. Let’s take a look at the top 5 biggest cross-cultural marketing blunders by world famous brands:

Pepsi: The literal translation of Pepsi’s slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” got interpreted as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors from the dead” in Taiwan.

Chevrolet: When the Chevy Nova car was launched in Latin America, Chevrolet experienced a massive drop in sales in that market. The word “no va” means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish, when clearly Chevrolet wanted Chevy Nova to “go” always.

Coors: When Coors entered the Spanish-language market with its “Turn it loose” slogan, little did they know that it would be translated as “Suffer from diarrhea”. A lesson well learnt.

KFC: Would you be put off if you found out KFC wanted you to eat your own fingers? Indeed, the KFC slogan “finger-lickin good” got interpreted as “eat your fingers off” in China.

Coca-Cola: When the Coke company launched Coca-Cola in China, the name was first rendered as Ke-Kou-Ke-La which meant “bite the wax tadpole”. It was after printing thousands of signs with the same name, that they realized their mistake. Coke had to research 40000 chinese characters and found the closest phonetic equivalent “Ke-Kou-ko-le” which translated as “happiness in the mouth”.

Hence, cracking an international market is the goal of many growing organisations. The objective is to get it right the first time and that can be easily achieved if a professional translation agency is taken on board. After all, who would want to waste money translating marketing material, websites or business documents poorly in such difficult times?