Replies to post #5046 on The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[haysaw]

You don't have to go back that far (and the ghost of Freud is alive and well with this one, not sure about Mondelknees though):

Reebok Exorcising Its Shoes

BY HELEN KENNEDY WITH NEWS WIRE SERVICES

Thursday, February 20, 1997

Red-faced Reebok executives were having a devil of a time yesterday explaining why they named a shoe after Incubus a medieval demon who rapes women as they sleep.

"Certainly it is very inappropriate," Reebok public relations director Dave Fogelson said of the Incubus shoe. "We apologize."

The name which also means evil dream doesn't appear on any of the 53,000 shoes shipped since last year, just on the box. But it was still a bad dream for Reebok.

"I'm horrified, and the company is horrified," said Kate Burnham, another corporate spokeswoman. "How the name got on the shoe and went forward I do not know. We are a company that has built its business on women's footwear, so to do anything that's denigrating to women is not what we're about."

Reebok plans to remove the name from thousands of shoe boxes.

"There's a possibility of maybe coming up with a new label and having people affixing them to the boxes. It could be as simple as taking a Magic Marker and blacking out the name," Fogelson said.

Reebok execs have to dream up 1,500 new product names every year, Fogelson said. Apparently, the only research they did on Incubus was to find out the name wasn't trademarked not to find out what it meant.

"Obviously, it became very apparent to us yesterday why nobody else was using the name," he said.

The other shoe dropped when ABC News aired a report about the $57.99 footwear.

Reebok's blunder isn't as bad as Chevrolet trying to market its Nova in Spanish-speaking countries where "no va" means "doesn't go." But consultants who specialize in creating corporate names were baffled. "The first thing you check is dictionary usage," said Robin Ayres, director of the Naming Center in Dallas.

[jbog]

Kraft's Name Brings New Meaning to Snacking in Russia
Mondelez International Comes Close to Local Translation for Oral Sex

By: Kate MacArthur Published: March 22, 2012


The name that Kraft Foods chose for its global snack spinoff -- Mondelez International -- has sparked plenty of comment and snark across the country.

In Russia, though, it may trigger snickers, according to Crain's Chicago Business.

Kraft says it chose the mashup to connote worldwide deliciousness. (Monde means "world" in French, and delez, with a long E in the final syllable, is a play on "delish.") But pronounced "mohn-dah-LEEZ," the name means something else to Russian speakers, say those fluent in its language and slang. Crain's was tipped off to the double entendre by a reader who communicated with the publication saying "no offense, but this is bad" before explaining that the name sounds like the Russian term for an oral-sex act.

The publication then ran the term by a few other people who speak the Slavic language, and more knew it as the insult than not. The offending term, manda, is on Wikipedia's Russian profanity page.

"What they say is perfectly true," confirmed Irwin Weil, professor of Russian language, literature and music at Northwestern University. "There is a rather vulgar word, 'manda.' [Mondelez] includes the sound of that word," he said, adding that Kraft probably "had no idea when pronounced it means a Russian vulgar word." The second half of the name roughly translates into the sex act, say Russian speakers.

It's an unfortunate slip for Kraft, considering its growing presence in Russia with products largely aimed at women. It shows the minefield of potential missteps in applying a single name across a multitude of countries. "If you miss a national or cultural translation, you end up in this precise situation," said Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys.

Kraft said it properly vetted the new name. "We did extensive due diligence in testing the name," Kraft spokesman John Simley said. "That included two rounds of focus groups in 28 languages, including Russian. We determined misinterpretations in any of the languages to be low-risk."