Originally published at: Hilarious examples of brand names gone wrong aka brand blunder | Boing Boing
…
9 Likes
I wouldn’t call these brand blunders, more like just brand amusements, and I’d like to see examples of American brands that mean something silly in other countries as well.
12 Likes
Who can forget the infamous advertising campaign by Wang Computers in the 90’s? “Wang Cares”.
12 Likes
Well the Kum-Onit No.250 is good, but what you want is the Kum-Onit No.269
5 Likes
Do they also make rubbers (erasers) for pencils?
Also the Australian PM’s department Women’s Network - yes this is real. It’s hard to tell which is the bigger dick here:
20 Likes
Who’s hungry for a Barfy burger?
It’s Barth. Barth Barf.
11 Likes
Wankenhiemer Lube (spl?) the can had a dude with a big wide smile, caption read “a real man’s lube”. High School auto shop teacher forbade us to make pithy teenager jokes.
15 Likes
It’s often just rude false friends. Like when a bus in Switzerland says “Fart”.
The story I liked was the story that the Chevy Nova failed in Mexico, because no va = “Doesn’t go”. (I’ve also heard that this is an urban myth, and Spanish speakers know perfectly well what a Nova is.)
Then there’s the Mitsubishi Pajero four wheel drive. Only pajero in Portuguese means “wanker”. They’re still selling those, so clearly they’re not worried about the Portuguese-speaking market backlash. (If my googling is correct, they didn’t even rename it in that market.)
The most insulting one, and also most subtle in its insult, that I’ve seen was for a car named the Murano, after the island of Venice famous for glass. Which … you neither need nor want a car on Murano? But what got me was that the tag line for the ad was “It’ll convert you”. And suddenly my Jewish wife and I, both students of medieval history, could only hear it as marrano.
22 Likes
Oh there’s tons of awesome Japanese products that do not go that well in english.
My favorite:
or…
There are others (strawberry, matcha, etc…)
21 Likes
19 Likes
I always chuckle at this US chain of gas stations.
22 Likes
There’s an office furniture supply place near me called “Kancho.”
In Japanese, “kancho” means enema.
I haven’t checked, but I sure hope they don’t sell chairs.
14 Likes
12 Likes
I don’t know if it’s still true, but I think it use to be when a Japanese company wanted to write something in English, some one with a basic English education would volunteer and no one else would want to shame them by correcting them.
True story: 25 years ago, I was walking through a suburb of Tokyo and came across a gift shop with a sign that proudly proclaimed in English “We serve people with tasty things!”
9 Likes
When I lived in Kazakhstan, this Paxan brand laundry detergent was very popular;
When I lived in Japan, I was told an apocryphal story about the tagline there for Coca Cola: “I feel coke.” I was told that the tagline was changed from “Coke is it” because in Japanese the pronunciation would be too close to “Coke is $#!+” and needed to be changed.
13 Likes
Supposedly the first year of Walmart’s international foray into Canada had a complete failure of their “4th of July” sale.
No idea if it’s true or not.
7 Likes
