Foreign branding

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

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 advanced technology.

• Pret A Manger
• Grey Poupon
• Häagen-Dazs
• 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, made by Masterfoods Australia, has an Italian-sounding name but is not even sold in Italy.
  • Kan-Tong, the Asian-style sauce division of MasterFoods, is sold almost entirely in Australia and New Zealand.
• In the UK, the English company Moben Kitchens trademarked "Möben" in 1977 because of the perceived higher quality of German and Scandinavian kitchens.
• The electrical retailer Dixons adopted the Japanese-sounding brand Matsui for consumer electronics.
• Ginsu knives (Netski Knives in Australia and NZ) have the faux Japanese-sounding name "Ginsu" (Kanji Japanese: 銀簾, Hiragana: ぎんす).
• Rykä shoes are given a Scandinavian-looking name to convey high quality, despite being an American company
• Berghaus, a British Outdoor Equipment company that converted the name of its first premises (LD Mountain Centre) roughly into German to market its own products, as European Outdoor brands were widely regarded as being of high quality.

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 favour of "Sat.1 zeigt's allen", a phrase that is much more catchy to German ears and translates into "Sat.1 shows it to everyone". 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.
• In Japanese markets, products often have foreign (or foreign-sounding) names, which are often Engrishy and ungrammatical in real English. For example, Pocari Sweat, a popular sports drink marketed in Japan by the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., has a name that to many English speakers would imply that the product actually contains sweat, rather than the intended meaning of a beverage intended to replace the electrolytes lost in sweating.
• 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.

Products renamed to avoid offence

See also: Brand blunder

• The company Bic changed its name from Bich (French pronunciation: [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 (with similar connotations as the British slang term wanker). Mitsubishi originally got the name Pajero from the pampas cat, Leopardus pajeros.
• The Honda Fit was originally intended to be named the "Fitta", but the name was shortened and in some markets renamed completely upon discovering that in several Nordic languages, "fitta" is a vulgar word for the 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 a small penis.
• The Ford Maverick was intended to be marketed in Brazil as the Ford Pinto, but no one in Brazil would identify Pinto as a horse breed, since Pinto is a Brazilian informal term for “penis”.
• In Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, Nestlé couldn't sell instant coffee called Kenjara because the name resembles Serbo-Croatian vulgar words related to defecation.
• The Toyota MR2 sportscar is named MR in France, because a way of pronouncing it, "merdeux", sounds like the word for shitty in French.
• The popular Vicks brand of over-the-counter cough medication was renamed Wick in Germany, to avoid too much a similarity with the German word "wichsen" meaning to wank.
• In Israel, Korean car company Kia Motors adjusted their original pronunciation (IPA: [ki.a]) to sound like "Kaya" in promotional material, since a Hebrew slang pronunciation for "vomit" (קיא) sounds like the original brand name. This decision was later reversed, and now the company uses the normal pronunciation.

Foreign orthography

Foreign letters 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 or theta Θ for O) are similarly used as in advertising for MY BIG FAT GRΣΣK WEDDING, which reads 'My Big Fat Grssk 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. Greek letters, lowercase or uppercase, can also be used to invoke a scientific mood, such as the use of a lowercase lambda (λ) for A in the video game Hλlf Life.
• 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). Faux Cyrillic characters are also used to name the movie Borat. In the advert, the Cyrillic word Д (de) appears as an A to name the main characters BORДT (which might be read as 'Bordt' or 'Vordt' depending on whether the 'B' is read as a Roman or Cyrillic character).
• 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, but do not match pronunciation at all. The real Japanese reading, modzijiramimidzi, is meaningless. The one-key/one-character input method that results in モヂジラミミヂ is no longer popular. Under a more typical present-day configuration, entry of "madonna" might result in まどんあ (madon'a); the correct keystrokes would be "madonnna" (with the triple "n") followed by katakana shift, to produce マドンナ.
• The Japanese inspired sushi restaurant YO! Sushi uses the brand's typeface that makes the Y look like the katakana letter リ (romaji: ri). This is despite the company being based in London.
• 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."
• Le Tigre Clothing, an American brand which adopted a French name, at times went so far as to use an accent over the final "e" in tigre (French for tiger), although the French word itself contains no accent.
• The fashion for the heavy metal umlaut (use of umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands) can also be seen as a form of foreign branding.

External links

• Template:PDFlink by graphic designer Bruce Campbell
• English-language page for Pocari Sweat, from the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company (Wayback Machine archive)
• A report by Ernst & Young on the declining status of American "chablis"
• The Modish Macron, a Language Log post about use of the macron in branding